Greg Stevenson, an avid GTD’er recently wrote DavidCo to let them know about a new Meetup Group he’s started in Orange County, CA.  In the process of getting the word out about his meetup, Greg discovered Meetup.com and found out that there were actually 25 different GTD meetups taking place all over the country.  I think this is awesome.  People all over are getting excited about the profound benefits that GTD can have on a person’s life and they’re so thrilled by the positive impact that they want to share this with others as well as associate with like minded people.

Anyway, Greg wrote to let us know about this and to ask us to help get the word out too (which of course it is our pleasure to do, hence this post).  To see if there’s a GTD meetup near you, go to Meetup.com, and search “Getting Things Done”.  If there’s not a meetup near you, why not consider starting one of your own?  You can find Greg’s Orange County meetup here..

Another thought; if you’re attending one of these meetups, write up a report of what you did there and how you felt it helped you in your personal implmentation of GTD - we’ll gladly post accounts of the various meetups so that people considering attending one can get an idea of the value inherent in getting together with fellow GTD’ers to share ideas, help one another solve problems and generally just chill with like minded folks.

Finally, if the meetups prove useful and interesting, just imagine what the GTD Global Summit - which is essentially going to be a mega–meetup on a triple dose of steroids - is going to be like?!?

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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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Don’t forget that tomorrow and Friday we’ve got the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.  David Allen, the creator of GTD will be opening the conference in a joint keynote interview with conference founder and staunch GTD proponent Ismael Ghalimi.  In case you missed this, it is already available online via event sponsor Veodia.  Just check out the links below for resources that will allow you to see all the action at the Office 2.0 conference in real time.

The next GTD related event will be the GTD Applications Panel Discussion at 1:30 This afternoon.  I (Oliver) will be moderating the discussion.  Panelists include David Allen, Doreen Hartzell of Enleiten, Neil Mendelson of Mindjet and Kevin Merrit of blist .

To view David Allen and Ismael Ghalimi during the keynote please click here.  For the GTD Applications Panel this link will get you to the page with the Veodia video.

Online Attendees

Anyone can participate in the Office 2.0 Conference 2008 online using the following resources:

• Tag: o208
• Google Apps Account:  http://www.google.com/a/office20.com/

• Office 2.0 Blog Feed:  feeds.feedburner.com/office20
• Clearspace Feed: feeds.feedburner.com/o208
• Twitter Feed: twitter.com/o208
• Video Broadcast: Veodia

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At ‘that’ moment, you understand the power of getting it out of your head.

Some might think that means merely writing it down, but it actually requires one to implement Peter Drucker’s thinking from the Effective Executive treatise (1969) that one must:

1. decide a desired outcome
2. frame a next action and, if possible,
3. execute that next action as quickly as is  possible (in an attempt to achieve the desire of your  outcome).

When you are concerned about:

1. your soon-to-be-newborn’s heart  rate
2. the speed with which they are intending to  induce your wife and
3. the fact that you are still 45 minutes away  from the hospital,

you realize the power of being able to focus past your desired outcome toward next action execution.  At times like these, with as little unproductive stress as possible, you hope to conduct yourself such that you can eliminate all drag associated with achieving the desire of your outcome(s).

And thanks to Providence and the mechanics of GTD, I was able to arrive just in time to see them starting the inducement process and to be the support my wife needed (I still need personal growth in this area) to get through the initial steps in the process.

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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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OmniFocus is a GTD inspired productivity application for Mac. When I visit the OmniFocus discussion boards, at fairly regular intervals someone will ask, “But why can’t you Omni guys incorporate a way to assign priority to action items?” and an argument promptly ensues. GTD folks try to explain why that just doesn’t make sense. Others work to advance the idea that rating the priority of action items is essential.

From the Getting Things Done perspective you don’t want to assign “priority” to action items on the front end for a couple of reasons. The first is that priority always depends on the constellation of situations at hand. From a GTD view you just can’t decide priority in a vacuum. To the question, “What is the priority?” the question that needs to be asked to answer it is “…the  priority in what context?” When you know more about the the given situation in the moment, the priority becomes clear.

When you do try to assign priority to action items on the front end, you’re apt to run into the following problem. As soon as a couple of variables shift, as they are guaranteed to do, it will alter the array of possibilities. So lots of the action items you have rated at given priority levels are going to change. And when they do, then you’re busy re-prioritizing all those items. You finish and brush the dust off your hands, breathing a sigh of relief. Then another change pops up and your priority labels are inaccurate all over again. I lived through doing this re-prioritizing hamster wheel in the early 90’s and ended up dropping the practice. Looking at the on the ground practice, GTD suggests that priority makes a lot more sense to assess when you know the complete context of the given moment.

What You Need to Know

So what details do you need to know? First, what is the context? Where are you, and what tools you have at your disposal? Examples are at the computer, @computer; at the computer and hooked up to internet service, @computer: online; talking with my spouse, @Erin in my case; at the hardware store, @cavernous box store, etc. Unlike priority, context is something that makes sense to decide on the front end. If you know you want an avocado, you likely know where you’re going to want to buy it. If you have an email to send, you know where you’re likely to send it from. So deciding the context of each item on the front end and writing them down makes sense. Here’s another reason.

As I’ll discuss further in an upcoming post, our brains just aren’t good at carrying around that kind information, or more accurately, they aren’t good at retrieving it when we want it. It either will clog up our psychic RAM and take up valuable processing space, or it will be relegated to long term memory. Unfortunately the way our cranial long term storage works depends on cues that may or may not come to mind at the moment we need them. So writing down next actions and the contexts we know we’ll do them in, or digitally recording them, will make the best use of how our brains work. This in turn will ensure that when we leave the grocery store, for instance, we’ll have all the things we need, not just the ones that happened to be triggered by internal and external (grocery store visual input) cues that happen onto our mental scene.

The other two variables you’ll want to take into account before deciding on priority are the time available, and energy available. One of the strengths of Getting Things Done is the way that it seizes all sorts of strange little windows of time, and distills those into moments of productivity. They’re usually moments that we wouldn’t get much out of in any case. Sitting waiting for Super Lube to finish up their signature service on my wagon doesn’t usually leave me with any rewarding sense of satisfaction. On the other hand if I have the gut sense that just sitting and being present in the moment as I wait for them to pronounce me ready for checkout is a priority, then I could go for that option. If I do go with getting something done, that is work that won’t need to be done later, leaving you that much closer to the GTD goal of “having nothing on your mind”.

Sift Out Context

So let’s put it all together. Rather than making our decisions about what to do based on predetermined priorities that are likely to change like specks in a kaleidoscope anyway, GTD suggests that we use four criteria to decide:

1. Context
2. Time available
3. Energy Available
4. Priority
Using all four requires looking at context in the moment—where we are and what tools we have—and assessing time and energy available on the fly. Only then are we able to use our brain’s strength, intuition, or gut if you prefer, to assess what the priority might be given the circumstances consisting of the prior three criteria in our list. I use context, time available, and energy available as a sieve to sift out what can be done in this weird little window of a few minutes. Only after I’ve looked at these three can I determine what is the priority for right now, the present moment.

Say I’m sitting in the shoe store waiting for the shoe salesman at 6:17. I’ve got my phone and my notepad with me with some notes from this afternoon’s meeting. I’m not going to listen voicemails because the salesman might come striding up and interrupt me in the middle of a message, and I’d just have to listen to it again later—time wasted. I open my email program on my phone and take a gander, and there’s that email I still need to respond to. I’m too fried to think about the details clearly now. The meeting this afternoon didn’t have anything urgent in it. Plus it will be more efficient to pull next actions out of my notes when I have a legal pad in front of me. Not very convenient to do here. I also could look over my calendar to review upcoming meetings and deadlines. I could do some minor deck clearing by deleting any emails that don’t contain any info I need to access or file. Based on intuition and the relatively similar priority. I decide to go with reviewing my calendar.

Going with Your Gut

Now these little windows are often easier to decide what to do with than larger swaths of time. But the small window of time serves as a nice example, keeping the process front and center. For some this post was review, which is often good in any case. For others this will clarify the nature of how GTD triangulates priority by using your brain’s crowning skill, on the ground intuition. So letting your gut lead you doesn’t have to mean that it’s been too long since you’ve been to the gym. Instead it can mean using your brain in a manner that enhances its strengths and shores up those areas it just does better with support, keeping you moving on the path toward effortless productivity.

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Having a trusted reminder system is a critical success factor for GTD.   Given GTD is really an approach that is tool agnostic, nearly any tool will work as long as you have the right ingredients.

I laughed when I read a blog recently where someone tried swiping at GTD saying that “GTD is for techies only.”  David Allen’s roots in working this methodology, as well as my own, come from the paper planner world.  You can’t get much more low-tech than that.  In fact, some of the most elegant and accessible lists I’ve seen are paper ones.  Sure, there’s the rewrite factor of paper, but electronic list managers have the “over-featured” trap to watch out for. There are pros and cons to both.  I say, go with what works best for you.

Some of the most technically savvy people I know manage their lists on paper to shift their consciousness away from all of their electronic input.  It’s a fantastic pattern interrupt to switch over to a paper list when you stand in front of a fire hose of email and the Internet all day long. There’s also almost a zero learning curve with a paper system.  And, if you’re building it yourself from blank paper, you have a ton of flexibility on what it looks like.

So for any of you looking for a hard copy GTD system, with ingredients you can likely find around in your house or office, here’s what to do:

1.  Go to your graveyard of old 3-ring binders  (every company has one!) and find one you like.
2.  Find some divider tabs   (if you can’t find some, Post-it notes or flags will work to delineate each section.)
3.  Grab a stack of blank paper from your copier or supply closet and hole punch it into the binder.
4.  Download this free article on Setting up a Paper Organizer  from the GTD store and assemble the sections.
5.  Populate the lists with your complete inventory.

If you can’t find all those supplies at hand, even buying them from your local stationary supply store would only run about $6.  Could you spend more than $6?  Sure.  You could really trick it out with a leather binder and high-quality paper.  If you’re choosing one of the many web-based electronic systems out there, you’ll want to make it accessible from anywhere–especially when you’re offline.  This kind of paper system would work well if you’re doing a hybrid of digital and paper.  For example, electronic lists could be your home-base, but you print key lists to a binder for easy access and portability.

Next time you walk into a meeting, notice how many people have a paper lists or printed calendar with them. It’s more common than you think. If it’s your style to do things on paper, do yourself a favor and create a great hard copy system.

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“Is it even possible to implement GTD across the Company?” That was the question that was plaguing me and Ali.  Even if we get tools for everyone and teach them all the basics, it’s still very likely that most employees will stick to their old ways. Change is hard from within an organization.  In spite of our efforts it is possible and maybe even likely that our people won’t crank widgets as we expect them to.

Considering these facts the question “should we then go ahead and invest so much time and energy into the training?” is one to consider seriously.  On the other hand if we don’t pursue a company wide GTD implementation what are our alternatives?  Not to teach GTD and accept the current standard of performance & accountability hardly seemed like a viable choice so we decided that we might as well give it our best shot and keep our expectations low.

Here’s what we did:

First we got  everybody their GTD Gear (covered in earlier posts of Rolling out GTD @ Vakil Housing series).  Then we kick started the Training.  The key to our methodology  has been the regularity and persistence with which we’ve gone about “the Vakil Housing Weekly GTD Training Meet”.  This is  the secret-sauce we found for implementing GTD at our office.

Logistics:
Day: We had set upon a Day for our weekly meeting, say every Friday
Time: 9:00 Am. We wanted to get started first thing every morning.
Duration: 1 hr. Many times it would stretch to an Hour and a Half.
We’ve been dong this for almost two years so to date we have conducted more than 100 hours of Weekly GTD Training at our office.

The General structure of the meeting is:
- Recap of what was learned last week.
- Take Any David Allen Podcast Interview, Article or Audio session from GTD Connect.
- Watch, Listen to or Read out loud the material while I would simultaneously draw a mind map of what is being read on the whiteboard, while explaining further what David covered.
- Pausing the presentation occasionally and going over any heavy concept that David touched upon.
- Once the interview/podcast is over, we would run through the mind map recapping what was covered. Typically I’d share my personal implementation examples, with my “aha” moments during the presentation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                -Asking if anybody had “aha” moments of their own to share.
- Possibly give everybody an exercise to work upon and get back with feedback next week.

The topics that we covered:
- Obviously, the first course was an intro to GTD. We covered the concept that we are most effective when we are relaxed, but that we can’t be relaxed when we have a million other things pulling and pushing us. In this session we played the David Allen Video on the home page of the David Allen Company.

- In the second session we distributed the various tools (covered in earlier posts) and assisted everybody in setting those up.

- We did sessions where we told everybody to grab whatever papers are lying at their desks or in their drawers and get them all to the conference room where we proceeded to do a live joint processing session with the actual stuff that they have to deal with.

- We had a session on clearing emails from people’s inboxes. The session included sitting with one volunteer and taking 30 minutes or so to clear his email inbox while others watched to see how it was done.

- We had sessions on the Three Fold Nature of Work and the Limiting Criteria, for which we used the relevant articles on the website.

- We once did a GTD-Quiz. Where we made teams to whom I asked questions on the podcast that was just played and we distributed sleek leather bound little pocket calendar diaries as prizes.

- After we felt our employees had truly ingrained the core concepts we did individual sessions on the Natural Planning Model and Horizons of Focus.

- In addition to the very specific GTD sessions we had many other sessions that were just general, just as many of David Allen’s interviews are. We just listen to them and we each pick out the nuggets that mean the most to us.

If you are a senior Manager within your organization and you’ve strictly implemented GTD for yourself but are having difficulty convincing others to adopt it, I would highly recommend trying out the weekly meeting the way we’ve done it as explained above. Keep your expectations low. Having your whole organization/department implement GTD is a big change and as every experienced manager knows most change only happens in small doses.

After more than 100 hours of GTD Training are we all following GTD 100% today? No, we’re not. But we’re certainly more GTD-compliant than before.  We are still working on it too. That alone made the whole process worth it. Persistence always pays. Remember, A big shot was once a little shot, who kept shooting.

This is the fourth 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: Cool GTD Gear to motivate all in your Organization to Collect & have a mind like water.
Third Post: The remaining GTD Tools I used to build my Corporate army of GTD Champions.

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Editor’s Note: Maurice Gavin is a new contributor to GTDtimes.  He’s one of David Allen’s certifed GTD Facilitators - a great GTD Coach and a prolific writer.  He’s already submitted a number of great articles that I’ll be posting over the next week or two.  Please join me in giving Maurice a warm welcome.  I’m sure you’ll appreciate his intelligent and practical advice as much as I do.  If you’d like to schedule a coaching session with Maurice, please contact the David Allen Company directly.

During a recent seminar I delivered,  a  senior company leader asked the following question: How do you recommend I delegate?

I have been asked this question before but lately it seems that this question, or one like it is being asked more and more frequently.

Usually this question is being asked by individuals who manage others and/or who describe themselves as those who ‘get their work done’ through educating, inspiring, leading and supporting others–sound familiar?

It seems to be a more and more common concern for people who are senior in their roles and responsibilities: “How do I delegate such that I hedge my bet to improve the odds that what I delegate will be done  on time, within budget and to my standard of quality”.

The person who asked the question then proceeded to tell a near horror story: what they had delegated to trusted staff turned out terribly.  The end product was

• Far afield from  what they thought they had asked for,
• The quality was  poor
• The available  time to make adjustments was lost
• And a last minute  decision had to be made to either go with what they had or scrub it  altogether–neither of which was acceptable.

As a result the person who had delegated the task found themselves staying up late that night (the presentation was the next morning) correcting and finalizing the previously delegated task (a critical component of the impending presentation) and doing what they could have done themselves (had they just hung on to the item in question).  Fortunately, after burning the midnight oil, the deliverable was turned in and the day was saved.

The bad news… this manager has the emotional scars from this experience burned into his subconscious.  Now every time they consider delegating to that same individual or anyone else they second guess themselves and more often than not hold onto the item and do it themselves to ensure “it gets done right”

My response to her question and my response to others  who have this question is always the same (I paraphrase for our purposes) .  “ The failure “  was not necessarily in delegating in the first place, or to that particular individual (usually one intuitively knows who is right for the task or is offering that person an opportunity to ’step up’), but in the failing to clarify whether the item in question was fully quantified and communicated at the point of the hand-off in the minds and systems of all parties concerned (in this case the senior leader and her direct report)

I frequently will then say, “Did you delegate the desired outcome regarding this item?” in an attempt to get the person raising the question to see for themselves what contributed to the target being missed .

At this point, there is usually a pause as they think about my words and the syntax I have within I have framed them .  Sometimes, they immediately get the play on words, and shorty thereafter they realize the power of ‘Desired Outcome’ as it relates to delegation.

I often will follow-up with questions similar to the following, just to ensure that they have a chance to visualize the steps during the delegation process where they could have inserted the elements of GTD to their mutual benefit:

• Was the image of  the deliverable you desired to receive in completed form clearly  illustrated?  Often times,  merely understanding the manner in which the deliverable will be utilized  will keep the task on vector toward its desired  outcome
• Did you reference  earlier times when something similar was done that could serve as a comparable  to this task you were asking them to undertake?  “Remember last  quarter when we delivered the XYZ Report to corporate and the 3rd  section graphs and corresponding analysis”?  Using commonly understood  completed examples will also save time and  frustration.  Did you indicate  the varied audiences that would be consumers of their work and any  sensitivities therein that could serve as landmines en route to their  successful completion of the task delegated?  One example:  “The CEO will  be reviewing this  so the  tone will be a critical element in getting  this to pass muster.  Be sure to make it sound like her quarterly report  letters to the shareholders as she thinks that this is how all correspondence should  sound”
• Was the  ‘preferred by’ deadline clear?

Everyone is  usually clear on the actual deadline, but often people have unstated comfort  zones that represent how far ahead or behind schedule they are comfortable  being.  This can be a major point of stress for both the person doing the delegating  as  well as the person to whom the work was delegated  (often at a less than conscious level—‘when do they  really want this back’)

Did you identify  the ‘Next Action’ you see as being ‘next’ as the start point you preferred  they undertake first to get them headed in the right  direction?
I am now seeing  leaders train their followers to ask:

• What do you see as the ‘Next  Action’ for this item you are about to delegate to  me”
• Did you ask them  for feedback prior to concluding the hand-off such that they could ask for  clarification before finalizing their acceptance of the delegated  task?  Sadly, most managers  (this senior leader included) realize that they hand tasks off at  ‘light speed’ (really fast for you non-Star Wars fans) and never follow up  to determine whether the hand-off was complete.
• Did you identify  a check-in point where they could identify any ’sticking points’ while there  is still time for course correction during the term allocated to complete the  delegated task?

Frequently when I ask these questions, senior managers that delegate many tasks will nod in agreement as they realize that the only direction they have given was the stated  deadline.  In many instances their direct reports are  intimidated and as a result they do not come back and ask for  clarity for fear of being seen as less than  ‘up-to-the-task’.

The Desired Outcome Must Be Delegated

If we are going to be effective when it comes to delegating tasks, we must take steps to be certain that what we are delegating is absolutely clear to the person to whom we are delegating the work. This means that:

1. We must define  ‘what done means’ regarding the thing we are trying to hand off
2. We must identify the start point so it is clear to the person receiving the task:  ‘what they should be doing first’.
3. We should give  the the person to whom we have delegated the task an opportunity to provide  immediate feedback as to where or how they  see themselves undertaking this task.  The intent here  should be to ensure that their trajectory is well aligned thereby enhancing  their probability of arriving at the desired outcome ahead of schedule, on  time and under budget.
4. We must allow for  periodic feedback so that we can monitor the progress of those people to whom we delegate tasks.  This will allow us to see if there are  problems, questions or concerns  and if or when these crop up we will have the time to quickly address them or provide corrective feedback.

As we are more and more dependent on others to support us in the realization of our desired outcomes at work and in life, it is critical to become as effective as possible at task delegation.

I recommend becoming so by “Delegating The Desired Outcome”.

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