Yes! I fell off the wagon this summer—I just had too much going on in my head. The summer holidays swept me away—not just the flooding we had in the cellar or even the rain and spectacular heights of the Swiss Alps—I simply had a lot of things going on. A lot to get done with more than the usual interruptions.

The kids at home

Why and how did I get into GTD? “Getting Things Done” was such an interesting book title, that it was the title alone that grabbed my attention. And that in combination with a huge period of changes—just moved, settling into a new country and then separation and divorce. Alone and at home with the kids.

There was more, but I needed to focus on the essentials.I have a lot to do and GTD gives me the peace of mind just to get on with it. That is why I think falling off the wagon is such fun–I mean when else do you get to roll in the grass? Or take a hike up the mountains. To really experience what it is like at high altitude. Breath taking!

Forgetting and remembering

Summer holidays are a time to reflect and to forget. By falling off the wagon—by forgetting everything—I get the chance to review everything anew. The kids get to do this too. They fall off all the time. And climb back on. And sometimes just run allongside the wagon. In fact it is part of the expected rhythm of a the year. Intensive periods of learning and of rest. The summer holidays are a time to forget everything and do something altogether different.

Wow! what a time in your life! The school day and week is fully organized and structured and then there are 6 weeks of chaos. Nothing. Actually the weekend can be a bit like that too.We have been back at school for 3 weeks now. And what a refreshing way to take stock and a new look at everything.For example our weekly review takes on a new perspective. Also new importance as commitments and structure take hold again. New projects are appearing everyday! Class trips to London, plays, music lessons and choir and then of course The Circus! The twins joined the Circus last year…

In growing up we acquire responsibilities and independence. Charlotte is taking on a review all by herself. Organizing her week, homework and practicing her violin. With some help new steps can be taken to independence.That is why we need time to play! Next summer I will jump off the wagon and roll in the grass. I remember now how much fun it is to play and just forget about things for a while.Where are you making time for fun?

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Have you ever found yourself in the situation where you’re completely overwhelmed with all the work that surrounds you? At those times do you then you catch yourself complaining about the outside world “I wish my job wasn’t so demanding”, “I wish there wasn’t so much competition”, “I wish my team would just listen to me” etc. What can you do to get out of this mental trap?

Here’s the secret:  getting things working for you doesn’t start by changing the outside world at all, but by changing ourselves and how we perceive our work from within. To change the world or the people around us, we must change ourselves first and then the world around us will change too. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  Nevertheless, if you have some faith you might be pleasantly surprised.

The next time you find yourself paralyzed by the amount of work on your plate and you catch yourself complaining about it, try out the GTD Mind Sweep exercise, followed by processing each item

Step 1: The Mind Sweep

The first step in the GTD Mastering Workflow cycle is Collect. Take 5 mins out, and capture everything that has your attention. Here are some guidelines:

* Go for quantity not quality

* Don’t analyze or organize

* Write everything

* Write fast

Step 2: Processing

Once you’ve an objective look of all the items in front of you. Process each item by asking:

1. What is the successful outcome?

2. What is the next physical action?

This is what the result might look like:

Taking these two steps will give you an immediate sense of relief & a feeling of lightness.

What changed?

Nothing from the outside changed, neither the boss, the competition or the clients. All that changed was the way we are now looking at our work and defining what we want and the next steps to take.

Before performing the 2 steps each item that had our attention was an agreement to complete something that  we made with ourselves. Since these agreements were not being managed it was a cause of stress to us.

By collecting what has our attention and defining what needs to be done with it, we begin the process of managing these agreements.  By identifying and clarifying each of the agreements that had our attention, we’ve taken them from being overwhelming and distracting  agreements in our head, and instead we’ve taken an objective look at them & decided  what  next action each required.

Change from within

One of the beautiful aspects of GTD is that it doesn’t look to solve the problem from the outside, but rather focuses on change from within and how we perceive our work.

We agree that there is just one world in which we live and die. Yet this one world is different for each one of us because of how we perceive it. Internally our pictures of the world are different even though externally it is just one world.  Thus if we change the way we perceive our work, the world outside changes for us.

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Question: When you identify important projects, do you clearly define the successful outcome?
Do you clearly describe, either in the project title or description what success, even “wild success” will look like?

If you are not doing this, you are missing out on perhaps the most powerful productivity tool available to help you accomplish your goals and dreams: your brain.  In fact, if you don’t regularly do this, you’re leaving your brain in park when it could be driving you to accomplish wild success.

This fantastic image is from Joan M. Mas and

 her collection of amazing GTD Drawings

Visualizing the Successful Outcome
Many years ago, David Allen shared with me that one of the first things he did when planning his first book, the best-selling, Getting Things Done, was to write the Wall Street Journal review of his book, first. He wrote the book review as he would like it to appear in print, even before writing the first chapters of his book. For many years I’ve written my projects in the past tense — as if they were “done” and I found that helped me to “see” done as the objective.  I thought that David’s example of writing a formal review of his book project was very clever and a powerful visualization tool, so I made note of it.
My Personal Application
When I set out to develop my eProductivity software, I followed David’s recommendation and wrote my own review. I determined to summarize the product in two sentences, one from the perspective of the Notes community since eProductivity is built on Lotus Notes; the other from the GTD community because eProductivity embodies many of the principles that I learned from David’s book.

For the Lotus Notes community, the most concise review I could come up with (after many iterations and variations) was this:  “eProductivity: The Ultimate Personal Productivity Tool for Lotus Notes.” This eventually became the marketing tag line and company mission. It is my hope that I have accomplished this and that people in the Notes community who evaluate eProductivity will tell us that we have accomplished this objective.

For the GTD community I came up with a slight variation: “eProductivity: The Ultimate GTD Implementation Tool for Lotus Notes.” For those aspects of the product that were specifically designed with the GTD methodology in mind this was my driving measure. As I worked on eProductivity I would regularly refer back to my “review”.  Not only did this help keep me motivated but it also helped me fix in my mind the final product and how it would work, how people would use, and how it would improve their ability to get things done.  For me, like for David, creating the review helped me to visualize exactly what done looked like.

Do you know what “done” looks like?
If you don’t know how “done’ looks for a particular task, not only will you be incapable of  knowing when you are done, you will also miss out on the ready help available to you from your most valuable and trusted resource — your brain.

How does this work?
In my experience, writing my project definitions in terms of their outcome creates a cognitive dissonance between what I have defined as done and the present reality. As a result, whenever I read that project statement (or in my case, look at the product logo and tag line) my brain has to subconsciously decide if it agrees with the statement. If it does, great. I’m done. If not, it usually identifies one or more things that I need to do to make the statement true.

A Built-in Personal Success Coach
It’s quite easy to enlist your brain to define the next actions you must take toward success: all you have to do is craft a clearly defined outcome statement and read it. Immediately, your brain will decide if it is true or not. It may say, “Self, well done.” Or, it may say, “Self, that statement’s not entirely true because this is not done yet.” If so, simply capture what has your attention on to an appropriate list and act on it. Shortly, you will be completing actions that are in alignment with your successful outcome and you will be accomplishing your goals.

This exercise of beginning with the end result in mind has been a powerful tool for me — a productivity tool, even — to help me in the decision making process. Whenever I had a decision to make about this project — whether it was in design, architecture, features, programming, or budget — I would ask myself “what decision can I make that will bring me closer to the two outcome statements I defined? There were times in prior years when I simply wanted to wrap up the current feature set and put the product out there, however, it did not meet my criteria for my successful outcome. So, we waited, and persisted, and continued working, learning, and refining until we are where we are at today.

I encourage you to think about creating one or more successful outcome statements for each of your major projects.

If you decide to try this, post a comment and let me know how your brain worked out as your personal success coach.

I think you will be amazed at the result.

Update: If you would like to see the result of my project, eProductivity, I invite you to watch the overview video

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When you start climbing up the GTD implementation ladder you begin collecting, processing and organizing every cool idea that you come across.   Pretty soon you have a huge list of projects together with an even more colossal list of next actions. It’s tempting to try and accomplish all of them; but what if you are @computer, @office and @call all at the same time?  Do you feel like you should be doing many of the tasks in each of your multiple lists simultaneously?   Suddenly you realize that you’re overwhelmed. Instead of eliminating this feeling from your life which is what GTD is supposed to do, it seems to have multiplied it instead!

So what do you do about it?
In one of the Teleseminars hosted on GTD Connect, a caller asked David this  same question, i.e. “David my lists just keep getting longer and longer, what do I do about it?” David, admitted that, this is a difficult issue to handle.

David Says:  “the trick is to keep getting better at being Okay when Not Doing something.”

Here are some tips that can help you do that:

- Learn the Limiting Criteria, and implement it ruthlessly. Be clear on which context you are in and how much time and energy you have and make decisions accordingly. If you have only 30 minutes and are feeling like burnt toast, you’re not likely to be in the mood to do some highly engaging task and would probably be okay with doing some fun, relaxing item from your Next Action list.

- Identify your goals and passions in life. Revisit the higher horizons frequently and see which of your projects and next actions are more aligned to it.

- We all have the same amount of time in a day, it’s maturing to the fact that there will always be some things that you can handle and some things that you can’t.

Here’s a lovely passage from Page after Page by Heather Sellers, that also beautifully addresses how to feel okay not being so busy.

“Are you swamped?” My colleague Nat likes to ask me.
I always force myself to say no. No, I’m Not Busy, I’m Not Swamped. Why would I get Swamped? That is not my life.

For me, its too passive, too fake, too braggy to be always saying how busy I am. “I wish I had two more weeks before the semester starts, ” my boss says every summer in late August. I feel like we’re feeling really insecure and unimportant when we talk like this. “I’m so important. I have been entrusted with so much work that there aren’t enough hours in the day for me. Look at me! So much work!”

Get real, I want to say to my “busy” friends. Be accurate and tell the truth. You do have two weeks before school starts. You do have time . Get a grip. Time is not all that surprising. If you can’t do a whole lot more stuff, it’s okay to just know that, and to stop orienting yourself in kinky ways to time.

Notice time.
Notice your passion.
Follow where these two intersect.

I am used to people saying to me they want to “write” (edit-insert your passion here) if only they had time. I always look up to the sky, and check in with the gods when I hear this. “We all get the same amount of time, right? “Yup,” say the gods. “You mortals all get the same allotment. It’s the single fair thing in life.” “Thanks, “ I say. “Just checking.”

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As many of you know, I was not a GTD’er prior to accepting the position of Executive Editor here at GTDtimes.  I had read David’s book and my best friend was widely known in our technology community as a long time practitioner and unquestioned authority on GTD but I had remained unconvinced that I myself needed to employ such a rigorous methodology to my own day to day life.  As I’ve mentioned, the event that caused me to decide to open up to GTD was attending one of David Allen’s RoadMap Seminars and seeing the connections between his “Horizons of Focus” and the periodized approach towards training a world class athlete with which I was familiar.

As you might imagine, in order to take on editing GTDtimes with any degree of credibility it was essential that I practice GTD and moreover that I also become a student of the practice so that I could effectively edit this online publication in a way that other GTD practitioners could see was genuine and not merely giving lip-service to the principles and techniques that David has developed.  Over the past five months I have learned a great deal about GTD and even a few things about myself. However one thing that I didn’t learn from GTD was how important coaching is when trying to quickly acquire a new skill or when one is attempting to perfect a skill that is complicated or difficult to master.  I already knew this from my career as an athlete.

Thus, when I got the opportunity to have some coaching to help me apply GTD to my life I jumped at the chance.  I’ve been fortunate in my life to have worked with some truly excellent coaches and as a result I know a few things about being coached that are very important if you wish to derive the maximum benefit from the coaching you receive.  Before I talk about my GTD coaching experience let me briefly share what it is that I’ve learned is essential if you want your coaching experience to really make a difference:

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This is the final post from my e-mail that answers the question: “How to ramp up quickly with GTD and Lotus Notes?“  We’ve touched on the productivity equation and we’ve looked at how methodology is the first component of the equation. We also explored the technology or tools that can be used to implement GTD in Lotus Notes.  Last week, I discussed Mobility: how to get things done on the run, and two days ago, I blogged about the value I’ve found in getting coached and coaching others.

As I wrap up this series, I want to share some of the resources I’ve used to get connected  to the information and people who help me sharpen my skills.

Here’s what I shared in my e-mail about some of my current favorite ways to stay connected to all things GTD:

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As you know, in implementing GTD a fair number of people are going to fall off the wagon before they experience the sustained payoffs of effortless productivity. What separates those who fizzle out from those who go the distance? From a cognitive science perspective, the answer is pretty straight forward. The people who succeed, whether or not they are aware they’re doing it, tap into the power of honoring how the mind actually functions.

I’ve heard David Allen use an insightful phrase about a specific GTD technique. I’m not sure if he’s used it to reference GTD as a whole (let me know in the comments if you know). But I certainly think it applies: “…it is both easier, and more difficult than you would expect.” A combination of ancient wisdom and modern experimental psychology gives us a fascinating view into why GTD is paradoxically both easier and more difficult than you’d expect. And it involves elephants and their riders. It can be challenging to entertain at first, but once you get the hang of it, it can help you implement GTD. It can also do the same with any other worthwhile set of skills that takes sustained effort to learn.

The Elephant and Rider

If you’ve ever resolved to do something, and really meant it, and then found yourself not following through despite your best intentions, you’re already familiar with how this works. We have a tendency to think of our mind as if it is a unified whole. But as Jonathan Haidt points out in his extraordinary book “The Happiness Hypothesis” , the ancients were ahead of their time in realizing that the mind is not unitary at all. And cognitive and social psychology have experimentally confirmed this early wisdom. Rather than unitary our minds are much more like a rider on an elephant. The rider is the conscious part of our mind, and he is quite small compared to the huge animal he rides; just as the conscious part of our mind is dwarfed the the majority of our mind that operates outside of conscious awareness.

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Even if I had everyone in my organization trained in GTD I couldn’t picture people at my office implementing it. Mainly because they didn’t have the tools ready and handy in front of them to actually collect and crank their personal widgets. So before I began the training process I went on a several months search to find the perfect set of tools to distribute to all the Senior Management of Vakil Housing.

What tools did everybody need?
Intray/In Basket: We needed An intray/in basket for collection. This was pretty simple to get.

A Personal Collection Pocket Collection tool:We designed a pretty neat one for ourselves. More details here.

Filing Cabinet: I was quite particular that the Filing Cabinet we purchase for everybody would be swivel distance away. We used the Mercury filing cabinet with regular Hanging Folders.

A Calendar or Diary:  Some used their mobile phones to store appointments but for most we got them a regular 2007 or 2008 Diary.

List-Management Tool: Finally we needed a system/tool for everybody to manage their Project & Action Lists. This is where I got stuck.

The List Management Tool we needed had to fit the following criteria:
- It had to be portable. Since most of the attendees would be from our Engineering Division or Marketing, they are required to go out of office for work. Hence a Desktop based system (such as Outlook) or Web Based system (such as Remember The Milk) would not work.

- Cost-effective. Yes, it had to be cheap. We were rolling this out throughout the organization. So that knocked out most Digital systems such as Blackberrys, Palms and Windows Based PDAs. (However, subsequently we did hand over Blackberry devices to certain Senior staff members).

- Flexible enough to add/remove Categories: Unlike a Digital System (Blackberrys, Outlook etc.) there’s no really neat & tidy way to adjust categories/sections/contexts in paper based systems. Most notebooks with dividers like so many of these don’t have tabs. If they do, like this one, they are fixed. So, the problem is that if for a particular Context Say @Calls you may not have too many entries, but you are stuck with the 50 or 100 pages that are below that particular Divider because you can’t adjust it.

Finally once again after months of hunting, one of our own employees presented me what seemed like the perfect GTD Tool for us. The Solo 5 subject Notebook:

What made this perfect is:
It’s quite portable, Not as big as a Box File

The Dividers are removable! This is such a boon because if you run out of space in one section, you can replace the divider in another place of the notebook and start another section. Or if you know you won’t make too much use of a particular section, you can adjust it so that there are not too many pages beneath it.

They’re very well microperforated, so the pages tear out quite neatly.

The 5 Dividers Cover most of the Categories required by GTD:

We can add additional sections/categories for additional lists with the help of these 3M Post-it Flags

After discovering this Brilliant GTD Tool, we bought one for all those undergoing GTD Training at our office and we could finally begin our GTD training sessions. How did we go about the training so that almost all Senior Managers at Vakil Housing understand Project & Next Action thoroughly as well as Bring their Inboxes to zero almost everyday?  Stay Tuned for the next post in this Series.

This is the third post in our series of Rolling Out GTD at Vakil Housing.
Earlier posts have been:
First Post: How we Successfully Implemented GTD across our Company thereby Increasing Productivity & Making Work Fun.

Second Post:A Cool GTD Gear to Motivate Everyone in your Organization to Collect & Have a Mind Like Water.

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Chris Bowler over at The Weekly Review has written a very useful post on using pen and paper to manage your lists. If you’re looking for some good tips, tricks and resources to help you implement GTD using a notebook or a Moleskine you owe it to yourself to click on over and check out his post on this topic.

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Have you ever had the feeling of being lost & left wondering “Why am I doing what I’m doing?”, “Why am I in this Job?”, “What does all this mean?”, “Who am I, and what is my purpose?”.  In spite of all the achievements there is a feeling of emptiness.  This feeling usually comes when our actions are not aligned with our Life’s purpose.

Using the Horizons of Focus model, GTD helped me align my day to day actions to my life’s purpose, and in this post I’d like to talk about how you can do the same.

What is GTD at 50,000 ft?

The Horizons of Focus Model is basically the agreements that one has with his or herself at different Horizons. Each Horizon represents a different time-level & impact.  It’s a tool to know what your work is so that your priorities are clear. Take a look at Michael Dolan’s post for a more detailed description on the Horizons of Focus.

In David’s book 50,000 ft is defined as “This is the ‘big picture’ view. Why does your company exist? Why do you exist? The primary purpose for anything provides the core definition of what its ‘word’ really is. It is the ultimate job description.”

In other words, your agreements at 50,000 ft. are the description of your life’s purpose.

How to Find Your Life’s Purpose?

Sometimes I wish we were born with an instruction manual outlining our purpose, life would be so much easier, but then again life wouldn’t be so interesting if we had all the answers!  I like to define Life’s purpose in a two-fold manner. The first is one’s Inner Purpose, and the second is one’s Outer-Purpose.

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