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SKIPPY HOP SHOW NOTES
Welcome to the Healing Our Politics Podcast!
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Guest: David is the creator of the GTD (Getting Things Done) Methodology. David has sold over 3 million GTD books worldwide, is hailed by Forbes as one of the top five executive coaches globally, and calls amongst his followers high-preforming humans like Howard Stern, Will Smith, Robert Dr. Junior, and Groupon founder Brad Keywell. GTD has revolutionized organizations and the lives of their leaders by cultivating a “mind like water,” emptying the mental RAM, eliminating stress, and creating space for creativity and relaxation while staying productive. His new book, GTD TEAM, with co-author Edward Lamont, empowers leaders to cultivate aligned, harmonious, and successful teams using his renowned structure.
About the Episode: In this episode, we debunk the myth of overwork as a prerequisite for success. We review the GTD methodology, how it works, and how to implement it in your workplace, complete with real-world public service examples. We explore who GTD is for and why you should bust through resistance. We discuss techniques and tools for tasks, reminders, and email management to alleviate stress and quell anxiety. We delve into David’s orientation as "Mr. Approval" and how effective systems facilitate boundary setting and create space for self and others to shine, complete with how to give “concious nos” that will be well received. GTD, David emphasizes, cultivates space for creativity, freedom, and peace, fostering a "mind like water" – learn how to find better productivity, peace, and connection in this episode.
Key Topics Discussed:
· [00:01:48] “HOP” introduction
· [00:03:40] David Allen guest introduction
· [00:05:58] How David changed my elected life
· [00:08:24] GTD reduced my stress by 93%
· [00:11:10] Growing up, David
· [00:13.24] “Mr. Lazy”
· [00:16:25] David’s parents + influences
· [00:18:21] “pre-crastination”
· [00:19:45] The gift of living abroad
· [00:23:07] American Vs. European upbringing
· [00:26:43] What is GTD?
· [00:28:24] GTD “Eeiphenets”
· [00:29:47] Clearing your mind
· [00:31:47] Managing Agreement
· [00:33:19] What stress is
· [00:35:18] Control AND freedom?
· [00:37:04] Externalizing your commitments
· [00:38:03] Your head is a crappy office
· [00:40:23] The steps of GTD
· [00:40:56] Step 1: Capture
· [00:43:54] Step 2: Clarify
· [00:41:11] Famous GTDers (links below)
· [00:44:58] Step 3: Organize
· [00:48:52] Step 4: Review
· [00:50:00] Step 5: Engage
· [00:50:26] ELC Foundation donor
· [00:51:05] Implementing GTD in office
· [00:57:50] Tool options for your GTD system
· [01:03:56] David’s review process
· [01:07:02] GTD Team; GTD w/other
· [01:11:21] “New frameworks” (links below)
· [01:13:43] The art of tidying up for your brain
· [01:15:06] When is change for you?
· [01:17:18] Is GTD for you?
· [01:19:28] Busting through resistance
· [01:22:40] Overcoming “Mr. Approval”
· [01:23:42] Conscious Nos
· [01:25:23] Strengthening teams with the power of “no.”
· [01:26:40] iPhone Zombie -> Email manager
· [01:28:18] Avoid channel creep
· [01:31:44] The natural planning process
· [01:34:30] Applying GTD in your city
· [01:40:01] Uplevel management: command -> free
· [01:41:16 Taking burnout seriously
· [01:48:26] How I got the name Skippy (world premiere)
· [01:45:26] “Your head is a crappy office”
· [01:46:54] GTD Resources
· [01:57:36] Final takeaway: Relax
Key References and Resources Mentioned:
· [00:41:16] Famous GTDers:
Howard Stern, Robert Downey, Jr, Will Smith, Charles Duhigg (Power of Habit), Brad Kelly (Groupon + Uptake)
· [00:60:10] Tools to implement GTD with:
Moleskin journal, Minimalist Art XL journal, Uniball pen, Evernote, Todoist, Task (Microsoft), Palm Pilot, Microsoft One Note, Lotus (IBM) Notes
· [01:11:33] New Frameworks:
· [01:27:02] Tools to implement GTD with: Inbox when ready
Where to Find David Allen:
· Getting Things Done Website
· GTD YouTube Channel
· NEW BOOK: GTD Team
· LinkedIn
· Twitter
· Facebook
Where to Find Host Skippy Mesirow:
· Receive Support at the Elected Leaders Collective ElectedLeadersCollective.com
· Follow on Instagram
· Book a free Clarity Call to see if coaching is right for you
Episode Sponsor:
Helping You Heal Our Politics
The Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) organization is the leading US-based provider of mental well-being training for public servants, conducted by public servants and the world's best mental health and human optimization professionals. With ELC Training, you will learn to rise above and become the political healer you were meant to be, improving your well-being in the process.
Contact the HOP Team:
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Creators & Guests
Host
Skippy Mesirow
Skippy Mesirow is a prominent leader, certified Master Coach, and founder of the Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) and ELC Foundation. ELC leads the US in mental health and well-being training for public servants, recognized in The Apolitical Foundation's Mere Mortals report, and named as one of 26 worldwide political well-being "Trailblazer Organizations." A transformational leader in political innovation and wellness, Skippy serves on Gov. Polis’s Natural Medicine Advisory. Skippy’s work has been featured in numerous podcasts and publications, as well as main-stage speaking engagements for organizations NLC, YEO, CML, MT2030, Bridging Divides, and Fulcrum, highlighting his significant contributions to mental health, community, and policy reform. Alongside his professional achievements, Skippy lives in Aspen, CO. with his partner Jamie where he enjoys running ultra-marathons, road biking, motorcycling, international travel, culinary arts, Burning Man, and lifelong learning.
Producer
Aaron Calafato
Aaron’s stories are currently heard by millions around the globe on his award-winning Podcast 7 Minute Stories and on YouTube. Aaron is a co-host of Glassdoor's new podcast (The Lonely Office) and serves as a podcast consultant for some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.
Editor
Jesse Link
Jesse is a strategy, research and partnership consultant and podcast enthusiast. A 2x founder, former Goldman Sachs Vice President and advisor to 25+ businesses, Jesse brings a unique and diverse background to HoP, helping to elevate the range, depth and perspective of HoP's conversations and strategy.
What is Healing Our Politics?
Hello,
I’m Skippy Mesirow, host of “Healing Our Politics,” the show that shows you, the heart-centered public servants and political leaders, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror.
Healing Our Politics, “HOP,” is a first-of-its-kind show that provides tools and practices for mental well-being, health, and balance, specifically for public servants so we can do good by feeling good and safe in our jobs.
HOP brings together experts, scientists, doctors, thought leaders, healers, and coaches to share their insights in practical, tactical, actionable ways specifically tailored to the public service experience for you to test and implement with yourself and your teams. Episodes feature intimate conversations with global leaders about their self-care practices and personal challenges, providing insights for a more holistic, connected approach to leadership. Whether you're a Mayor, teacher, police officer, or staffer, this podcast will guide you to be the best version of yourself in service to yourself and the world!
Sign up for our once-per-month Leader’s Handbook newsletter to receive an actionable toolkit of how-to guides on topics discussed on the podcast that month to test and implement in your life and with your team: https://leadershandbook.substack.com/
Hello. My name is Skippy Meserew, coach, former elected official, and lifetime public servant. Welcome to Healing Our Politics, The show that shows you, the heart centered public servant and political leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror. It is my job to sit down or stand up with the best experts in all areas of human development, thought leaders, coaches, therapists, authors, scientists, and more, to take the best of what they have learned and translate it specifically for the public service experience, providing you actionable, practical, tactical tools that you can test out today in your life and with your teams. I will also talk to leaders across the globe with a self care practice, getting to know them at a deeply human and personal level, so that you can learn from their challenges and journey.
Skippy Mesirow:Warning, this is a post partisan space. Yes, I have a bias. You have a bias. We all have a bias. Everybody gets a bias.
Skippy Mesirow:And I will be stripping out all of the unconscious cues of bias from this space. No politics, partisanship, or policy here because well-being belongs to all of us. And we will all be better served if every human in leadership, regardless of party, ideology, race, or geography, are happier, healthier, and more connected. This show is about resourcing you, the human doing leadership, and trusting you to make up your own damn mind about what to do with it and what's best for your community. So as always, with love, here we go.
Skippy Mesirow:In this episode, I sit down with expert in time management and productivity, mister David Allen. If you have ever experienced overwhelm or stress in your work, you have, then this is an episode you simply must listen to. David is the creator of GTD, getting things done methodology. He has sold over 3,000,000 with an m, 1,000,000 books worldwide, is regarded by Forbes as one of the top 5 executive coaches in the world and has been crowned one of the world's top ten business leaders by American Management Organization. GTD is taught in over 60 countries.
Skippy Mesirow:It has inspired myriad spin off products, apps, programs, and calls amongst its acolytes, CEOs of $1,000,000,000 companies, and ultra achievers like Howard Stern, Will Smith, Robert Downey junior, people you have definitely heard of and it's working for, and it's even helped elected officials like little old me using the GTD methodology. I took my days of experience of stress from over 320 per year to under 20. And if you think I didn't measure, you need to listen to the show more. I did. Spoiler alert.
Skippy Mesirow:Now it's time for you to get in on this magic. David is releasing a new book, GTD Team, t e a m, May 21st, to help you as a leader use this structure to create a more aligned, harmonious, peaceful, collaborative, successful workplace for yourself and your team and not a minute too soon. In this episode, we discuss the myth, yeah, myth, that we must be overworked to be successful and how to break the chains of this belief to liberate ourselves and those around us. We break GTD down step by step, walking you through what implementation looks like. We discuss who GTD is for, not for, and who is resistant at their own peril.
Skippy Mesirow:Is that you? We get into the nitty gritty discussing systems to manage tasks, reminders, emails, and other incoming. We talk about tech adoption. When is more just too much? We talk about growing up in East Texas and Louisiana, his journey through and to Europe, and what he learned along the way.
Skippy Mesirow:How obscure influences like martial arts have contributed to the creation of GTD. We also discuss David's hardwiring as, quote, mister approval, end quote, something that you might relate to, and how good systems provide a rational basis for boundary setting and techniques for delivering compassionate nose that will be well received. You, like I, may have expected David to be a rule following anal retentive man with a pocket protector having developed a system like GTD. But, ultimately, as David says, GTD is about creating space for creativity, freedom, and inner peace, creating what he calls a, quote, mind like water, end quote. And you will find his demeanor and presentation very much matches that laid back episode.
Skippy Mesirow:You'll find this and so much more today on this episode. So with deep admiration and excitement, I am honored to share with you this deep, specific penetrating conversation with David Allen. Yay. David, it is truly an honor to have you on the Healing Our Politics podcast. We chatted a couple days ago in preparation, and I mentioned that you changed my life.
Skippy Mesirow:And I wanted to start by putting a little bit more color to that. I've been involved in public service really since middle school in some way or another, but I found myself a handful of years ago shifting roles from a volunteer, an activist, an organizer into a role of elected official. And I was about 6 months into my first term in office, and I was completely overwhelmed. I've been doing a lot previously. I was running a company in my full time job in vacation rental space.
Skippy Mesirow:I was chairing our planning and zoning commission here in Aspen. I was chairing our next gen commission. I was running a ballot initiative. I was not unfamiliar to doing a lot, but once I found myself in that new role, I had most of those responsibilities. And then, all of a sudden, I had an extra 2 to 300 emails a day.
Skippy Mesirow:And I viewed each of those as exceptionally important that I had to respond with care to each of them. All of a sudden, when I went to the grocery store, I wasn't just going to the grocery store, I was also having 15 conversations in the aisle with anyone who'd approached me. I had 2 council meetings a week, which didn't sound like a lot, but when you think about the prep is somewhere between 300 a 1000 pages per meeting, and those meetings sometimes run 5 to 6 or 7 hours. And then committee assignments, serving on other commissions and boards throughout the community, in my case, the housing authority, which was the 2nd biggest in the state, the Nordic board, a few regional cohorts, and I just found myself completely buried and didn't know what to do. And I decided that when off season hit, which here is kind of October, November, I was going to take my weekends and make them sacred and focus on figuring out how the hell I was going to build new structures, new sets of priorities, new alignments, such that I could handle this workload.
Skippy Mesirow:And for the next 2 months, 2 days a week, I put myself into my into my den and just started researching. And I can't remember who tapped me into GTD or getting things done, but it was something I found pretty early and I got right into the book and it was one of the first things that I implemented. And the implementation of the GTC system gave me the space and the framework to then consider and lay out and understand everything else in my life. And from that place, begin to prioritize those things. And from that, to work my way back into a life's mission, a life's purpose, a vision, and to create a framework of what I prioritize when, and then to have a system to make sure I'm doing what I set out to do and to review it appropriately.
Skippy Mesirow:And the end result of that in the immediate, and I know because I'm crazy and I track everything, is I went from over 320 days of stress per year to under 20, which is insane. And greater than that, and I would have never predicted it, but years down the line, because I could remove stress from my day to day experience, I began to be able to understand the distinction between stress and other things. So stress and anxiety, for instance, I always thought those were the same thing, and they're not. And it really began what has been, I would now call a spiritual journey for me. I would have never have used those words at that time.
Skippy Mesirow:And my life today, although certainly not perfect and not without those things, is so meaningfully different. And I really credit and honor you for creating something that opened the door for me for that. And I just really wanna start with a genuine thank you. It's such an honor to have you here.
David Allen:Well, you're quite welcome. That's a that's a great testimonial. I just sort of recognize the game. I'm not a motivational speaker. I'm not you know, my game is not to get people to do it.
David Allen:My game is to give them what the doing looks like, and then they can choose to do it. So I never really know what sticks out there. And it's always nice to hear lovely to hear something like your story where you actually did it. But I didn't do it. You did it.
David Allen:You have to engage with as you know, you have to actually engage in this game before you can play it. You can understand it. Like, you could read the book getting things done and understand the logical concept. It makes sense. It's advanced common sense, but you don't really get it until you actually start to do it.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah.
David Allen:So nice to hear. Yay.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. Yay. And I like that that's your exclamation. I think if you were like a a SoundCloud rapper, that'd be your little noise. I'm so curious about how you did come to that because while you're downplaying the creation of this thing, as someone who has now built a framework for myself sort of on top of GTD that I sort of think of as how to create spiritual compound interest.
Skippy Mesirow:And I've had some interest in sharing it with others, but it's really, for me, nerve wracking to think about sharing it with others. Is this put together in the right way? Is it gonna work for others? Is this universalizable? Is this silly?
Skippy Mesirow:It's not an insignificant thing to put something out into the world. And so I really am curious about that process. I know it was an iterative one, but what was the first element of what has become the GTD method that you started implementing in your own life? And when did you start teaching it to others?
David Allen:I have to go back a long ways because this is let's talk about my early days dropping out of graduate school. Again, I was in graduate school in Berkeley in 1968 and was studying American intellectual history, history of thought, history of culture or whatever in America, which I loved. I loved the the subject matter. But at some point, I don't know why why I got struck by that. But instead of studying people who were enlightened, I decided I want my own.
David Allen:Mhmm. So, you know, that was heady time to be in California and in Berkeley, particularly in terms of personal growth and self exploration. So I dropped out of graduate school and said, okay, now what? And then did a lot of exploration about spiritual things, meditative kinds of things, martial arts. I got a black belt in karate.
David Allen:That was all self exploration stuff. But again, they don't pay people to do that, so I had to pay the rent. So I looked around and said, okay. Well, what kind of job can I do? I have no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up.
David Allen:I had no I had no particular I had no particular drive economically or or entrepreneurially or any other way. But I looked around and I I knew some people in my network and who had small businesses. And so I became a really good number 2 guy. I went in and said, okay. Can I help you do whatever you're doing?
David Allen:And, you know, I just go ahead and look at what they were doing and say, okay. How much easier can we do this? Because I'm mister lazy.
Skippy Mesirow:Was that out of, like, you just needed to have a job an income and that was the easy thing to do, or was there something that attracted you about that role? It was that.
David Allen:No. Nothing attracted about the role. I just said, do they have a role for me and why they wanted to pay me? And so I'm going to look around and see what they were doing, and I'd noticed there were some pretty inefficient things that they were doing. And, again, as mister Lazy, I said, well, how much easier can we do this?
David Allen:How much earlier can we leave work today? You know, if
Skippy Mesirow:Can I challenge that story a little bit?
David Allen:Sure. You
Skippy Mesirow:know, you mentioned being lazy, but in my mind's eye, just from kind of background knowledge and research, you have a very explorer orientation. You're actually doing quite a bit. I mean, growing up in Louisiana, but ending up in Switzerland, for instance, like that to me says someone who doesn't wanna sit home on the couch, but is actually very curious about the world. You think that's true?
David Allen:Yeah. That's true. Quite true. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah.
David Allen:I sort of had this, combination of crazy visionary. Here's a cool thing to do. How do I make that happen? And how much easier can I do that so it's not hard work? And, you know, it's one of those things called jump off the end of the pier and hope the water is not too deep or too shallow.
David Allen:You know? And hope you know how to swim. There have been many times in my life where I sort of jumped off the end of the pier. For whatever reason, just the internal pull or push or somehow the spiritual part of me just said, David, there's more for you to do. And so follow your instincts or your intuition here.
David Allen:I couldn't have told you that, you know, back then for a lot of those decisions. Like, in retrospect, I can now. It was just my intuitive sense that that was the thing to do, and that's what I wanted to do. So I had that the kind of double edged sword of being a bit crazy and a bit efficient.
Skippy Mesirow:So I'm I I I love that. I mean, it's the DNA is so clearly in the model, and I'm curious what your parents or primary caregivers were like. And the reason I'm asking that is even today, when I'm working as a coach, very often, and this is something that I I got the programming of too, is you have to work harder, harder, harder, harder, that if you're not working really hard, you're not doing anything. My understanding is that comes from an industrial revolution mindset where a unit of time yielded a unit of output, and so the way that you scaled your impact, as maybe we'd say it today, was to do more. And, you know, frankly, that's how many of our parents and grandparents ascended out of poverty and were able to send us to colleges to think about things like this, which is amazing.
Skippy Mesirow:But you didn't seem to get that programming. How did you avoid that? What were your parents like, or what what did they teach you about work, or did they?
David Allen:Well, my dad died when I was 9. So
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm.
David Allen:And my mom didn't remarry until many, many years later after I was almost grown. So I was pretty much raised by my mother. And she was, a wonderful mother, and I got had a wonderful childhood because she'd been a teacher. She had taken some risks. You know, she'd grown up in somewhat rural Louisiana and had been one of the first graduate students to graduate from Louisiana Tech and went to graduate school in Wisconsin.
David Allen:And when she was, like, 16 or 17 years old.
Skippy Mesirow:Wow.
David Allen:And this is in the early 19 thirties. And so she took some risks then, and then she came back and she thought she was gonna work in medicine and work in research or whatever. And then she met my dad, fell in love, decided that they had a family. And then she had had 2 kids and she so she became a mom. But then after my dad died, then she figured she had to support me and my brother.
David Allen:So she started out just being a kindergarten school teacher, so that she could be home half a day while I was, you know, very, very young. And then at a certain point, she decided to get a better, bigger job. But back then, she said the only place that a woman could get a fair shake would be work for the government. So she applied and got accepted in the Social Security Administration. So she became a Social Security worker and then supervisor and kind of graduated in that in that area.
David Allen:So she raised me as a working social worker, really, in terms of, Social Security Administration. So I didn't really have any models about go blast. Go work harder, harder, harder. And she was highly supportive of the things that I wanted to do because she'd been a school teacher, and I had aunts and uncles that were teachers. I discovered making good grades was actually pretty easy as long as you work very hard the 1st 6 weeks, and the teacher thought you were smart.
David Allen:So you'd have to work hard the rest of the year.
Skippy Mesirow:Okay. I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you something that I that's just very relatable to me. So I don't know how I got that memo as well, but in college, I was an athlete. So I'd go to school in summer, fall, and then take the winter off to be an athlete, and I would do exactly that. So I would find courses summer semester, which is shorter, where the syllabus prescribed all of the assignments up ahead.
Skippy Mesirow:And so I would only sign up for those classes. I'd take the class on the 1st day. I'd lock myself in a room for, like, 2 weeks. I'd do all the assignments. I'd put them on the shelf, and then I would just do nothing the rest of the time.
David Allen:Yeah. Well, that's pretty much how I was raised. I didn't have a lot of models or role models around me. I just had teachers. Didn't know many people who were either successful business wise or or otherwise entrepreneurial in that way.
David Allen:Yeah. So, you know, I grew up in my first 6 years were in East Texas, in Palestine, Texas. Then at age 6, we moved to Shreveport. So I could then spent the rest of my teens years up until I was 18 or 19 in in Shreveport, taking a year off to be an exchange student in Switzerland. So, again, it was one of those things I'd somebody in my high school who was an exchange student from Germany, and I thought, well, that's a cool thing to do.
David Allen:So that was one of those, okay, let me just go see how cool that
Skippy Mesirow:go do this. And what did that experience give you? What did you come back with that you didn't have going there?
David Allen:A lot of much more global awareness for sure. It was American Field Service, AFS, which is primarily a cultural exchange. It wasn't academic. So basically, they they had to find a family that's willing to take an American kid for a year and support them, whatever. But you would then go to the schools that the kids and their family went to.
David Allen:You'd have to apply to the school or whatever. You just went where they were. And it turned out that, you know, that that my older Swiss brother, if you could call him that
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm.
David Allen:Was at the Realgendazium Tuticberg, which is one of the top sort of prep schools for university in Europe. And so that's where I met. Although they gave classes in German, I couldn't speak German. I had no German experience, so I had to quickly learn as much as I could to try to grasp as much as I could. And even then, the issue the class, they would speak in high German.
David Allen:But as soon as the bell rang, they would speak Swiss German. They're almost 2 different languages, especially if you don't know either form.
Skippy Mesirow:Good luck with that decoder ring.
David Allen:And so it was like, oh, wow. This is crazy. But the cool thing about it was the school was about 2 blocks from the Kunsthaus in Zurich, where they had, like, a whole room of Monet bottled water deliveries.
Skippy Mesirow:Wow.
David Allen:And it was about 3 blocks from Cafe Odeo where data ism started, where where Jung, you know, spent a lot of time. And one of those great old European cafes where waiters had bow ties and, you know, and people were reading magazines and and newspapers. So it was a great introduction to sort of old and rich European culture. So I came back. And also, again, you know, growing up in Louisiana, as soon you know, when I came back, I had a bunch of slides that I've taken pictures that I've taken that made into slides.
David Allen:And I can't tell you how many people I put to sleep with all the slides of mountains that I had. It's like, wow. There's a mountain snow cap. Wow.
Skippy Mesirow:Look at that. Look at that.
David Allen:And Because, you know, that was that was such a new thing. Anyway, it was
Skippy Mesirow:I mean, it's amazing also. If anyone's been to Switzerland, if you haven't, go look it up. Like, those mountains are worth the slideshow. It's remarkable.
David Allen:Really? Really? Wow. So that I came back with a a lot of expanded awareness. And even though I thought maybe well, I went over when I was, 17, turned 18 while I was there.
David Allen:By the way, Kennedy was shot while I was there. Mhmm. So that was fascinating to sort of see that event and see how emotionally impactful that event was for my Swiss family and for people around me that, you know, he was so loved in Europe that it was really a traumatic event. Anyway, you know, when I came back, I came back to rah rah, spoom bah, go get them, you know, whatever. And that wasn't exactly my taste in terms of culture.
David Allen:So that gave me an impetus to essentially see how soon I could get out of the South. And I was in a segregated high school.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah.
David Allen:This is this is 60, 63, 64, 65.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. The difference between the school in Switzerland and the school you came from must have been jarring.
David Allen:Well, in a way, the school I came from was all boys. So they were segregated between boys and girls. Essentially, the the European kids were in a way much more emotionally immature than the Americans were. The Americans were much more used to social interaction and whatever and essentially being cool, whatever that meant back then.
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm.
David Allen:And in Europe, they these kids were my age. They were throwing spitballs at each other in class. It's like, come on. So it was strange to see the sort of difference in cultural differences in kids, certainly at my age.
Skippy Mesirow:Is it fair to say that the kids in Europe were more childlike? Did you view that as a positive or negative or both?
David Allen:The positive part of it was well, they spent a lot of time with their families. So on vacations, they would go hiking in the mountains with their family. They would do all kinds of things with their family. So the family was really more the center of focus
Skippy Mesirow:for
David Allen:the kids, not their social environment.
Skippy Mesirow:I see.
David Allen:Whereas you come back to Freeport, the social environment was the key thing.
Skippy Mesirow:Interesting.
David Allen:Who's going to the dance? Where's the dance? Who's my girlfriend? Who are they doing? What are they doing?
David Allen:And there was a whole lot more of the social complexity or interactions than there was in Europe.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. So the kids are growing up faster is kind of what I'm hearing. So what I hear in all of this is mom's really a trailblazer. Right? To be a woman in college at all in the thirties, and then to provide for her children.
Skippy Mesirow:Like, she provided that example of you can do things that other people haven't done, and it's gonna be okay. And I've also got your back, so you can go do these, and you'll be okay. And I wonder about the other side of the brain, right, the more structured side of your brain. It's not uncommon when one loses a parent young. You have to grow up fast, and I wonder if that was kind of part of the forming of that other side of your brain kind of taking care of the household or anything like that.
David Allen:I don't know. And I guess it's a good question, Skippy, but I don't remember doing any of that. I just remember Mhmm. You know, I wanted to be a good student. My brother had been a state straight a student.
David Allen:He was one of the top of his class and so forth. And I I sort of followed in his footsteps. And again, because I had so many teachers as parents and aunts and uncles, I said, okay. If I can do that. So I was a straight a student.
David Allen:So just making sure that I could do that and do that well. And so I liked making sure that I did my homework when I needed to do it. I didn't leave things on the ground or whatever. And my mom actually brought in a little carpenter who built me a little cabinet in my room so that I could have room to get my books and to study and whatever. So I've always had a sense of I like order and I don't like extraneous things lying around.
David Allen:They get in the way. So I guess that's been true, sort of.
Skippy Mesirow:This predisposition was there, and then the system maybe found it later in life. Interesting. That's very cool. I I really appreciate that. Okay.
Skippy Mesirow:So I don't wanna bury the lead too much. I do wanna hear about how you kind of go through and start to build the constituent parts of GTD and then when you put it together. But could you describe for us what exactly GTD is in your own words? And we'll run the steps, I think, later, but it can't hurt to tease them. So can you just kinda give us the framework?
David Allen:Well, basically, it's the set of best practices that an individual can implement that'll gives them more clarity, more control, more space in their head to be able to think about the stuff they wanna be thinking about. I just figured out piece by piece things that helped me do that for myself. Again, I was a good number 2 guy, so I help these folks with their own businesses. And then I as soon as we kinda get their processes fixed or upgraded, I got bored. Then I leave and go find another job and do the same thing.
David Allen:And then I discovered they pay people to do that. They call them something Consultant.
Skippy Mesirow:Oh my god.
David Allen:Couldn't spell it now. I r one. Right? So 1982 hung up my shingle, Allen Associates. I said, well, let me see let me see how long I can exist just doing project by project for people in different companies in different situations, and I haven't stopped.
David Allen:So I'm 79 this year, so that's 40 plus years. So I've kept doing that. And essentially, I needed to find things for myself as my life got busier and more complex. And again, because I've had experience spiritually meditation wise, martial arts wise, the value of clear space in your head. And I found my space was getting less clear.
David Allen:Like you mentioned before, it's like, well, I suddenly got a new job and I don't know. It's like that went buried in my head. And how do I manage that? How do we get on top of that? How do we get in the saddle about that as opposed to feel the victim of
Skippy Mesirow:that? Mhmm.
David Allen:And so I found piece by piece, a little string of epiphanettes. There was no big epiphany. I woke up one morning with this whole methodology. They were just piece by piece. And I had a couple of mentors that taught me various pieces of this that I was able to kinda cobble together.
David Allen:So as I was using them for myself and sort of creating my own personal system and application of these principles and these practices, I turned around and consulted clients. We didn't call it coaching back then, but that's kind of what it was. It was consulting with people with their own businesses. And I started to share with them these techniques and have them apply these techniques, and it produced the same results for them. More control, more focus, more clarity, more space, you know, to think about strategic things.
Skippy Mesirow:What are some of the epiphanettes? What what would be like a couple of those?
David Allen:Well, one was a mentor that I had, because I as I started my consulting practice, I said, how do you consult? I don't have any traditional formal education in business psychology or time management. So I said, okay. Who's doing stuff out there that I can learn from? And I met a guy, and we became very good friends, still are, who he was had been a executive coach or or consultant in organizational change for many years.
David Allen:And he'd come up with techniques about how to assist an organization in terms of making forward motion. And so one of the things he discovered out of frustration with him of trying to deal with the CEO or the head of a company who couldn't think past their nose because they had so much old business sort of clogging up their psychic space. Mhmm. One day, he just said, okay. Let's just get everything that's on your mind that's clogging up your head right now and write them all down.
David Allen:Mhmm. Everything. Little big personal professional. We'll do a data dump. Have these folks do that.
David Allen:And then he had to make next action decisions about each one of them. Mhmm. Okay. What do you need to do about that? What is it?
David Allen:So the capture and clarify steps that became a key part of the essential part of the getting things done methodology I learned from Dean. Mhmm. So he shared that with me, and then he he said, David, I think you probably do more with what I'm gonna teach you than I ever will. He was interested in climbing rocks in Colorado more than, you know, being particularly entrepreneurial or otherwise. So he let me work with him to implement this process with 2 or 3 companies.
David Allen:And so I got to see what it was like to actually do that. And first of all, he had me do it. So the first time I sat down and and said, okay. Well, let me write down everything that's on my mind. Little, big, personal, professional, separate pieces of paper.
David Allen:And went, wow. That's cool. Yeah. It wasn't like I was in super stress or anything. I just wrote them all down.
David Allen:I was like, wow. And suddenly I felt a lot different. And then going through each one of those pieces of paper and deciding what the next action was. And I went, wow. So that was a pretty phenomenal epiphanette.
David Allen:It was it was a big epiphanette.
Skippy Mesirow:What was Dean's last name?
David Allen:Atchison.
Skippy Mesirow:Atchison. Not
David Allen:the famous one, not the secretary's name.
Skippy Mesirow:If you Google it. Yeah.
David Allen:No. A different dean. Uh-huh. So that was that started it. Also, you know, I've been doing personal growth trainings in the seventies and early eighties.
David Allen:A key component, a lot of those self development trainings was about agreements. How do you manage agreements? You know, agreements with yourself, agreements with other people. And what happens when you break them? Trust goes down.
David Allen:So if I broke broke an agreement with you, you wouldn't trust me to necessarily show up and do what we'd agreed to do. Next time, you might love me, but you wouldn't trust me. So trust diminishes as an automatic price of broken agreements. What I didn't realize at that time, because they were just sort of shortening spins in these personal growth trainings about keeping agreements. The good news of those bills of confidence bills, whatever, breaking agreements disintegrates trust.
David Allen:What turned into a whole lot of what getting things done is about is clarifying, codifying, objectifying what your agreements are Yes. With yourself and everybody else.
Skippy Mesirow:Yes.
David Allen:So if you don't want to then pay the price of broken agreements, you either don't make the agreement called. No. I ain't gonna do that. Keep the agreement. Okay.
David Allen:Let me finish that or renegotiate the agreement. Well, okay. I'm gonna do that, but not right now. Let me park some reminder of that somewhere that I might do that. And a whole lot of what getting things done is about is just objectifying what are all your agreements.
David Allen:And most people have no clue how many they've made with themselves and other people.
Skippy Mesirow:I love this trust diminishes as an automatic price of broken agreements. That's so clear. That's so accurate in my experience. And it's interesting because one of the things that the implementation of GTD in my life helped me clarify. So that's the external relationship to broken agreements.
Skippy Mesirow:It helped me clarify the internal relationship to broken agreements, which is and this is for me, I realized that stress is the physical sensation of breaking agreements to self or others. I can have a ton on my plate, but if I'm doing what I said I do, if I'm in integrity to self and others, I won't be stressed. But it's when I'm breaking those agreements that I have that internal sensation. And so it's interesting to think of that as a feedback loop. Right?
Skippy Mesirow:If I'm internally stressed, I'm more likely to break external agreements. If I break external agreements, then I'm going to diminish trust, so that's going to further reinforce stress, and then we wonder why we burn out. But there's an upstream solution for that. I that's so good. I love that.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. Thank you for that.
David Allen:Yeah. And and, you know, I have a famous saying in mind. You can only feel good about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing.
Skippy Mesirow:You can only feel good about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing. Yeah. When it's choice. Right? When it's an empowered decision.
David Allen:Yeah? Okay. When you can't you're never gonna be done till you're dead. Maybe not even then. Right?
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah.
David Allen:So you always have to figure out, okay, which thing as to your point, which thing shall I do? I mean, how many things are you and I not doing right now, Skippy?
Skippy Mesirow:Correct. Yeah. Correct.
David Allen:So in order to be present here with you in this conversation and not be distracted, I have to know what I'm not doing. And it's a big habit for people to change, to track those, and to clarify what those are. Yes. But it's not hard. It's not hard.
David Allen:It's not rocket science unless you're a rocket scientist.
Skippy Mesirow:Okay. I wanna ask you one kind of big question, and then I want to get into the framework and kind of outlining and working the steps so that people understand what it is. But what I hear is 2 points intention. You may disagree and I'm hoping you do, and you have an explanation. You may not.
Skippy Mesirow:But on one hand, you're talking about having these systems to know what we're doing, to know what we're not doing, to make determinant choice, putting a lot of intention and structure into one's life. On the other hand, I've heard you regularly say that control is the ultimate addiction and our real job is to let go and that GTD is to provide space. So for someone who sees those two perspectives as in contrast, can you help me understand why they're not? Or or are they? And that's okay.
David Allen:Well, ask any artist. They have to create limits to create an art.
Skippy Mesirow:You need a canvas to make a painting.
David Allen:Yeah. You need canvas, and you need tools. Right? And you need some level of structure. I mean, freedom comes from appropriate structure.
David Allen:Come on. People say, I like to be free and do it. And so what do you think about the center line in the road when you're in the highway?
Skippy Mesirow:I think it's such a bother. You know?
David Allen:It's a limitation. Right? It's a constraint. But if you didn't have that, oh my god. Are they gonna hit me?
David Allen:Am I gonna hit them? So you only have the freedom to think about other things when you're driving because of the structure on the highway.
Skippy Mesirow:The idealized version of freedom is a myth. It's a mirage. It's a story. If you were to actually experience complete freedom, what you would have in a result is chaos. And in chaos, there's no freedom.
David Allen:What about you and an athlete? Didn't you have to have some level of structure to feel then free when you got on the field or got on the Mars or whatever you were doing as an athlete?
Skippy Mesirow:Certainly, if I wasn't showing up to train, I would have performed very poorly, and I would have had less fun doing it.
David Allen:And if you're a soccer player or a football player, if you didn't have lines on the field, you didn't have a goal that's gonna keep you focused. See, the 2 things in a soccer player's mind when they're on the field are the most important two things. Well, three things. First of all, where am I? What's going on right now?
David Allen:The second thing is where's the goal? And the third thing is what's the next play? So outcome and action as well as current reality awareness is the essence of stress free productivity.
Skippy Mesirow:Yes. And as a coach, what I'm hearing, if I have the story, I'm using I to make it personal, but it may be you listening as well, have a story of, I can't have all of these rules or constraints. They will constrain my freedom, my creativity, etcetera. That's actually the ego telling you a story, playing a trick on you so that you have an excuse not to take personal responsibility.
David Allen:Yeah. And if you think externalizing your commitments and keeping some structure about it is a bad thing or an overwhelming or too much to do. Throw away your calendar. Don't be intellectually dishonest. Why does anybody listening or watching this have a even have a calendar?
David Allen:Do it in your head.
Skippy Mesirow:Right. Go all in and try it.
David Allen:Yeah. One of the reasons you got overwhelmed, Skippy, is because you were trying to use your head as your office, and your head is a crappy office. Your brain did not evolve to remember, remind, prioritize, and manage relationships between more than 4 things. That's it. That's cognitive science now, by the way.
David Allen:Don't shoot the messenger. I came up with that experientially years ago, but now they know.
Skippy Mesirow:Ain't it nice when the science catches up to your work? That's a yang. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
David Allen:For sure. You bet.
Skippy Mesirow:Okay. So you're precisely right, and I want to walk people through the steps of how this works. Just basic. They'll get the book and do it themselves if they wanna do it. But I will affirm what you said, which is even if I was in a moment of break prior to this work and I was out on a hike when I'm supposed to be enjoying myself and in nature, what was actually happening is I was rehearsing a speech.
Skippy Mesirow:I was thinking about what I didn't say to this other person. I was wondering if I had gotten that stuff for groceries for the house. I wondered if I had turned in like, there was 70 open loops going on that were impinging on my hike. Now with a trusted system in place, all of that chatter is gone for the most part. The RAM in my computer is fully available for processing the hike or whatever I'm doing.
Skippy Mesirow:It's not running background programs.
David Allen:It's also available for new creative ideas you never had before.
Skippy Mesirow:Absolutely true. When one of those thoughts does come up, it's such an aberration that it's become a warning light on the dash of my car of something that I need to do to improve myself. So I a 100% right. Okay. GTD framework.
Skippy Mesirow:Take us through the steps, and I may interject, I may not with just, like, what this could look like in a experience like mine of, say, a new elected official.
David Allen:If you wanted to get control of any situation and on top of it, the 5 steps are I'll say them real quick, and then I'll I'll unpack each one. You need to capture what has your attention. You need to clarify the specific nature of it. You then need to organize anything that you need to be reminded of or do something about that you can't do in the moment. You then need to build some sort of reflection review process of the inventory.
David Allen:So then step 5, engage, put your attention, your activity in an appropriate trusted place based upon all of that. So it's capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage. So capture just means what has your attention? My first epiphany was writing down everything that was on my mind, little, big, personal, professional, whatever. By the way, for most mid to senior level professionals and by the way, I have spent literally thousands of hours with some of the best and brightest people on the planet walking them through this process.
Skippy Mesirow:Can we give a little shout out to some of those shinier names? I know you're not a big braggadocious guy. Can I give you the floor to just share some of the people you've worked with?
David Allen:You know, probably the one of the more famous one who's been quite public. A lot of them I can't say because it's just confidential stuff. Howard Stern is one of my biggest champions. It changed his life, changed his company. I didn't coach him personally, but one of my coaches did.
David Allen:And she's now his COO. He hired her.
Skippy Mesirow:Wow.
David Allen:There have been big champions who've got names, Will Smith, Robert Downey Junior. They're all they give my book to their friends, and there are some day you know, Arianna Huffington's been a long time friend and a great champion of my stuff. So quite a number. Rick Berg, by the way. I don't know if you know Rick.
David Allen:He was a congressman. He's one of the congressmen that we actually coached and worked with. So we haven't worked with a lot of politicians. We've worked with a lot of support staff
Skippy Mesirow:Yes.
David Allen:You know, in that world. Jim Fallows, James Fallows, reporter or writer for The Atlantic, big champion Charles Dewey, who wrote The Power of Habit, huge champion. And what's fascinating, Skippy, and to all of you listening to this is the people most attracted to what I'm talking about are the people who need it the least. They're already the most successful, aspirational, positively focused people who already know the value of system. They already know that they can produce value if they had more space.
David Allen:So it's the lack of room that these people are after. Somebody who's just unconscious about what they're doing in life, they're they're not gonna be attracted to this.
Skippy Mesirow:Right. Well and all the people you mentioned are extremely creative and extremely productive. So I see that nexus. That's cool. Thank you for sharing that.
Skippy Mesirow:Okay. So we capture we capture all the things, and then we clarify.
David Allen:As I sat down with people to capture, the typical amount of time it takes for somebody truly to empty their head of the everything they have their attention. I need cat food. I need a vice president. We need to restructure our thing. I need to research a new write all the down.
David Allen:That usually takes from 3 to 6 hours. So it's not a small process for most people to do that, to catch up, to get that stuff out of their head. I guess they had it for people to just file stuff in their head without writing it down. So that's step 1 is get all that stuff out of your head in some sort of objective place. Step 2, that by the way, if that's all you did, then you become a compulsive list maker.
David Allen:I got list and posted stuck all over God and creation, which is not gonna get rid of the anxiety or the stress.
Skippy Mesirow:Imagining that scene in that movie with Jim Carrey where he comes out with the pen all over his face because he's run out of space.
David Allen:Yeah. And so step 2 is then to take any of those things that you wrote down, objectified, and decide what exactly does that mean. What is it? Is it something that I need to move on or not? If not, then it could be either trash, reference material, or incubate.
David Allen:I need to store this and later be later reminded about it. If it is something you need to act on, you need to decide what's the very next action I need to take. If I have had nothing to do but move on that right now to close that loop, is that an email to send? Is that a website to serve? Is that a conversation to have with my assistant or my partner?
David Allen:What's the next step? And if that one step won't finish it, what's the project? What's the outcome that that step is moving toward to complete? And so outcome and action become the 2 key components of clarify, especially for things that have your attention. If it's not trash or reference material, that a lot of times a lot of people listening to this have a lot of stuff in their email they could just file or dump.
David Allen:So that's the Clarify process speed. Okay. Take all that input that you've got. Now let's distribute it in the appropriate places and make the decisions about it that we need to make outcome and action about actionable stuff. Step 3 is then organize.
David Allen:Okay. What are you gonna do if you can't finish that action right now? By the way, if you can finish that action in 2 minutes, you should just do it right then. It'll take you longer to organize it than to do it. And most people have an incredible amount of 2 minute actions they could take on emails that are sitting in their inbox right now.
David Allen:Instead of reviewing and renewing and rethinking, just do it. Just get it down there. Anybody listening to this right now walk around your apartment or your house and see all the things that it would only take you 2 minutes to fix or finish. Replace that light bulb. Move that thing over there.
Skippy Mesirow:You had to say the light bulb thing. Now I'm feeling guilty looking up over the screen.
David Allen:Anyway, if it will take longer than 2 minutes and you can't do it, then then you need to put some reminder somewhere, and that's where organized comes in. Okay. How are you gonna put a reminder about the the cap food you need to buy? Because you can't go buy it right now. We're gonna organize that.
David Allen:And this is basically list creation. What are the lists that you need to make and create? Here are the errands I need to run. Here's the stuff I need to surf the web about. Here are the things I need to talk to my wife or my husband about or here are the things that I need to bring up at the next staff meeting.
David Allen:Here are the things I need to whatever. And so once you decide those actions, where do you park reminders of those that you see in the right place? Now when somebody actually fully implements this methodology, they're gonna have between a 122100 next actions right now. Not making them up, just identifying them. What are all those things?
David Allen:So that would be a little overwhelming when you go to the store to buy cat food and see 200 things on the list. So it'd be nice to then sort them based upon when you could do them, where they happen, and so forth. So I've got about 6 or 7 of those. Here's my errands I need to run. Here's the things that I need to talk to my wife, Catherine, about.
David Allen:Here's the things that I need to to do on the computer. Then the things I'm waiting for is another great category on the car. What are all the things that you've ordered hasn't come yet? Are the things you've tasked people to do or delegated that haven't come back yet? A lot of executives, by the way, keeping an agenda list and keeping a waiting for list are transformative for them because they haven't done either one.
David Allen:Here are all the things I need to talk to my staff person about next time he or she is in front of me. That's an agenda list. The next action of things to talk to this person about when I have them on the phone or the Zoom or face to face. And then if you hand them off and they say, yeah, I'll do that. And you care that then you track that on a waiting for this.
David Allen:Those are huge. And very few executives do that. They'll do it last minute stuff. Oh, yeah. I need to talk to them.
David Allen:Then they go interrupt people as opposed to save it for an agenda when you have face to face. And then when things blow up, they blow up because they haven't tracked what the status of it was or checked with people who they've tasked it to.
Skippy Mesirow:And the organize is different person to person. People will use different tools, different processes.
David Allen:I know a lot of high-tech people that are back to paper now because especially if they're sort of ADD or ADHD prone, computer just takes too many clicks to get all that in and out, Whereas paper is like right in your face. Right right there. I mean, they both have their downside and upside. And the list managers out there, there are 100 100 of list and basically a lot of the stuff that people that have sort of copied the GPD idea with their software basically just created list managers. Different bells and whistles, but they're all pretty much ways to keep lists.
David Allen:We migrated to Office 365 last year or whatever. So I just use the task inside of the Outlook. That's fine.
Skippy Mesirow:Yes. I actually wanna know I'm gonna as soon as we get through review and engage, I'm gonna come back to that. I wanna know what tools you use, and then I'll share what I do. And the idea behind that is just to give people the perspective of you can make this fit, what works for you, because I imagine we use different things, maybe we don't. But tell us about review and engage.
David Allen:Well, review means you could put things on the list. But if you don't look at the list when you go to the store, you're gonna forget stuff that's on the list. If you're not looking at your camera, girl, on some regular basis and say where you need to be, when, tomorrow or the next week, are you gonna then run into, oh my god. I should have. I forgot.
David Allen:So review simply means reviewing and reflecting on all the commitments that you've got that are not complete yet. Mhmm. And that could also be all the way up to every 2 or 3 years, you and your life partner need to figure out where you're going in your life or your life purpose. What are you about? All the way down to what's our vision of success 12 months from now or your strategic plan 12 months from now or it could be quarterly.
David Allen:We need to look at where we are with x, y, and z. And review could be anything from a stand up meeting daily in software companies or manufacturing companies all the way to any of those longer term kind of review where are we. It's like lifting yourself up, getting up into the fire towers and see the smoke. If you don't get up in the fire tower, the fire is gonna land in your tree and you go, oh my god. Get up in the fire tower and look and see where it's coming.
David Allen:That's the review piece. So and then the 5th stage is engaged. There's nothing to say about that. If you've done the first four, you've captured, clarified, organized, and reviewed all of your stuff, then you're making trusted choices about what you do. It may not be the right choice, but you'll live and learn.
David Allen:And it'll you'll be making that out of some level of confidence as opposed to I hope this is true and and driven by latest and loudness, which most people are.
Skippy Mesirow:And now a quick break from our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This show is supported by Elected Leaders Collective Foundation silver level donor, Stephen Wicks, local legend here, and good buddy Sean McCallister at the gold level. Thank you for your contribution. We could not do this without you. If you want to hear more of this type of content, you can support our work by going to elected leaders collective.com and clicking the donate button.
Skippy Mesirow:Okay. Love it. So, capture, clarify, organize, review, and engage. I'm gonna just give, like, a very brief thumbnail for each one of how this might have worked for me as a council member, maybe making it a little bit more relatable to the audience. And then I want to come back and talk about the flexibility within the system because I think that's actually important and might diffuse some fears people have about the overrigidity of a structure.
Skippy Mesirow:So CAPTURE literally looked like I went down on my dining room table and wrote down every possible thing I could think of to do. That would include, I need to read my packet for my next council meeting. It would include, I need to buy flowers for Valentine's Day for my girlfriend. It would include, I want to get out on a run today. It would include, I need to do laundry.
Skippy Mesirow:So, everything personal, professional, and otherwise. And as a means of making sure I'm not missing anything, at least for the first go around, I was taking out all of my documents, all of my files, all of my emails, and reviewing them because I'm not going to actively remember everything. So, I'm bringing everything into my consciousness, then I'm putting it down on paper so it's comprehensive. Clarify, then I'm basically, making sure that I know what to do with those things. And correct me if I'm wrong here, David, but I have a couple options, right?
Skippy Mesirow:I can take action on them, I can throw them away, or I can delegate them. And so, some of these things are things that I want to do. Some of these things might be I need actually my city attorney to do this. My action becomes sending them an email, making an ask, but then I'm delegating and taking it off my plate. Something else I may have determined wasn't that important.
Skippy Mesirow:I don't actually need to replace the ceramic bowl on my countertop. That's not important right now. I'm gonna get that off. Right? So I'm going through and clarifying what all these things are, and then I'm organizing them.
Skippy Mesirow:So I'm putting them into buckets if there are more than one action. So, I might have a project that is city council. I might have a project that is, Sky Run Vacation Rentals. I might have a project that is relationship with my life partner. I might have a project that is physical fitness and health.
David Allen:Skippy, I'll stop you right there. K. You're actually up to a higher horizon than projects. What you just mentioned are areas of interest that you just need to maintain at a at a certain level of standard, but you may have a project about each one of those or something to do about each one of those. And that's a good thing.
David Allen:That's a good exercise to do. Because, like, okay. What are all the areas of focus and responsibility? Health, family, relationships, this business, that business, whatever. But you don't finish those.
David Allen:Mhmm. You just need to look at those and go, how am I doing about those? And then there are probably some things to do, either action to take and probably projects that you need to do about any of those.
Skippy Mesirow:So to make it specific then, if we were looking into the council bucket, council never ends. I mean, we hope. But I may have a affordable housing strategic plan that is a 2 year project, but will get completed. That would be an example of a project. Is that correct?
David Allen:It would. 2 years is kind of a long range for a project, but I'd say within the next 12 months, what do you need to do? Now within the 12 months, what needs to occur so that that's gonna happen? And 2 years is okay as long as that's on a project list that you look at weekly. Say, how am I doing?
David Allen:2 years, you could you could look it out and say long range. Therefore, I don't need to do anything. Wrong answer.
Skippy Mesirow:Got it. Okay. So the project are the finite engagements underneath an interest area that would be completed within a year. And so then you would be bucketing those out and placing the various things that you've put out in the capture step under those projects.
David Allen:Well, if there is a project, if it's a if you can't finish whatever your attention is with one action, you might have captured the action. But if that one action won't complete whatever this thing is, then you have a project. So you get a project called celebrate Valentine's Day. Right? That's a project.
David Allen:Next action, order flowers or buy flowers or whatever. And by the way, that is one of the most missing horizons for almost anybody we work with is projects. They don't get it. I think, well, here's the next thing I need to do is next thing I need to do. Here's the big thing that I'm doing, but they haven't defined wait a minute.
David Allen:What's the end game right now of that next step? You get to kind of mark that off or that thing finished is gonna move me toward whatever my vision is or whatever the bigger game is.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. So the benefit is both organization of tasks, but it's also alignment of task towards purpose.
David Allen:Yeah. And the outcome. I'd say outcome more than purpose. Yeah. Purpose interchange those words.
David Allen:But, you know, if you wanna hey. I should be healthy. Great. What do you need to do about that? I guess I need to maybe join the health club.
David Allen:Great. What's your project? Research health clubs. What's your next step? Oh, I need to surf the web and see about whatever.
Skippy Mesirow:Finite time, end game, outcome, goal. Check. Okay. So, we organize into those projectsor non projects, if it's a single taskand then we have some form of review. So, in my case, that looks like a very brief morning review of all the things that I know are my next actions for that day and then a weekly review.
Skippy Mesirow:So, I'm looking at not just my next actions, but I'm looking at everything I'm not doing immediately. I'm looking at my someday maybes, and I'm making sure that things are where they should be, or, to your point, I'm renegotiating. I'm moving those timeframes, those expectations. That happens on a weekly basis. That takes me probably 20 to 30 minutes, something like that.
Skippy Mesirow:I'm also looking at my calendar, front and back, a week. I'm doing a a few other things during that review that are not necessarily, I don't think, GTD spec, but they fall into that framework. And then for myself, and I know this is different for everyone, I have a quarterly and an annual review. So the quarterly review takes a couple hours, and then I have an annual review where I'm looking at really 3 5 year goals. And then, of course, the engage.
Skippy Mesirow:So now we get out, and we do those things. Okay. We've got the framework. It can sound at least it has sounded to me at times to be rigid, but what I think I really like about it or one of the things one of the characteristics I really like about it is it's not. It actually allows you to make those things work for you.
Skippy Mesirow:And so I thought, as an example of that, we could talk, we could kind of trade tools that we use for different things, you and I. You started this process decades before me, so there's new tech out there. Like you said, some people are going back. So I thought it might be fun to just kind of share some different ways this could work. So what are some of the tools that you use in your steps, and how do you use them?
David Allen:Well, CAPTURE. When I'm at my desk, no better tool.
Skippy Mesirow:Podcast listeners holding writing pad and pen. Little mini journal, foldable, leather, pen inserted, also serves as wallet. If you find his journal, make sure you return that. He's gonna need it.
David Allen:Capture for the most part for me is low tech. It's faster. It's easier. There's no clicks you have to do. There's nothing you have to do to get it.
David Allen:I do have a capture tool on my iPhone, but I barely use it because it's just easier to write on these things because capture is not organized. Yes. CAPTCHA just says, here's an idea I need to decide later on. So I did take whatever I've written in the low tech side, throw them into my physical entry when I get back to my workspace, and then I'll deal with those in terms of clarifying and organizing if there's anything to do about them. So that's basically my capture system.
Skippy Mesirow:That's great. So my capture system depends on where I am like yours. There's a mobile and a non mobile version effectively. The non mobile is just to use an Excel paper leather backed journal. That's where I take notes for meetings or Zooms or I journal.
Skippy Mesirow:It's what I have in front of me because I don't want to have a digital device of distraction when I should be focused on a person. And, I don't necessarily treat all of that as capture. I might just be taking extemporaneous notes, but anything that needs to be captured for a future action, I circle on the page. And so that is my primary form of capture. At the end of the day, in my daily review, I go back through that journal and that's when I convert it into electronic in one of 2 ways.
Skippy Mesirow:So, I capture every page into Evernote with a photo, which then allows me to tag that in a simple way, and it becomes automatically text searchable. So, anything that I wrote in that meeting, if I want to find it later, I can just search in there and it will pull up. So it gives me the benefit of something written with the benefit of searchability and the electronic. And then I will organize all of the circled things into an app called Todoist, which is just a to do list app, but it's pre built out with all of my projects. So things go in immediately there if they don't get acted on at that time.
Skippy Mesirow:Sometimes I do them immediately. Right. Email Johnny. Okay. That's my 2 minute action.
Skippy Mesirow:I'll do that at night. But they go directly into the Todoist under the correct project with a timestamp and then with a flag that is either must do, should do, or could do. Must do is, like, has to be done that day. Should do is should be done that day, and I'll normally put a parenthetical like buy x. And then the should do is, like, this is something that I'd like to get done, but it's not mission critical.
Skippy Mesirow:So if it happens, that's great. Sometimes, if I'm out, say I'm on a run, and something pops into my head, it will go straight to Todoist because I'm just carrying the digital device on me. But most of the time, it goes to paper. What do you use, if anything, for your organize and review steps?
David Allen:Well, organize, as I mentioned before, I just use task in Microsoft.
Skippy Mesirow:And for someone, I'm raising my hand, who doesn't use that, what is that is that just a to do app, or what does that mean?
David Allen:It's just a list. It's just like like to do list or anything else. It's just a list manager. We can create a list, and you can then categorize them, which I do in my Outlook tasks. I have computer stuff to do, errands to run, agendas to go over with people, whatever.
David Allen:So it's very easy. Most of those to do list apps have some way to to contextualize the things you put on the list. Yeah. So that's what I do. It's very simple.
David Allen:By the way, I was an early user of the Palm Pilot before you were born, probably.
Skippy Mesirow:No. I remember the Palm Pilots. Get out of here.
David Allen:There was no better list manager on the Earth. And even now, they had such a simple little PC app you put on your computer that would then sync to your device, and it was so easy. And you could use the script thing that was brilliant that they came up with. Unfortunately, it kinda died. There are things that are still not as easy as that these days, because a lot of them are a lot more work than they should be to try to figure them out.
Skippy Mesirow:Overcomplicated.
David Allen:Even Evernote. It took me 6 months when I got when I installed Evernote to even figure out the the how to organize it and what way and where do I put stuff. I finally with Microsoft OneNote, I finally dumped all of my Evernote into OneNote. Mhmm. Because I can share that with my wife and with my small team, and they have access to things I give them access to in there.
David Allen:I just ordered dog treats. I went to OneNote and did a search for my dog treats, and I'd already put in there the link and then go to their their store and order the dog treats.
Skippy Mesirow:That's awesome.
David Allen:I was one of the first Lotus Notes users years ago in terms of Lotus Notes, and then it became IBM Notes that became, you know, somebody else. And there's been nothing really that good that's really showed up that that you could manage that way. One note's coming close and that Microsoft's getting better. I mean, there are a lot of GTPers inside of Microsoft, so I think it's helping to improve a lot of the coordination of what they're doing. Unfortunately, a lot of what something like Microsoft is and Outlook and 365 are doing, they bought so many components into this to try to make sense out of the different components.
David Allen:And how do you coordinate them is still a work in progress, for sure.
Skippy Mesirow:What's your review process like personally? How do you do that?
David Allen:I just sit down and look at my calendar, last 2 weeks, look at the next 2 or 3 months, then go to my lists. I go to my action list and see what I've done and haven't had time to mark off as complete. Then I go to my project list and look at, okay, which one of those does not have an active project right now? Because I marked it off and I still need to come up with something. And that's pretty much it.
David Allen:I used to have to do, again 79 this year, and my life is a lot simpler than it used to be when I was 60. I maybe 79 is the new 60. I don't know.
Skippy Mesirow:So my camera
David Allen:However they say that, I don't know. But now my life is not so complex, but there were times when I had to do almost like a weekly review almost every day because things were happening so fast at so many different levels. And as you talked about your life and and public service, that could show up that fast. So it might be that you need to do some level of review on a daily or by daily, weekly frequency simply because things are happening so fast. You got a whole lot of new stuff has to be integrated.
David Allen:You have to then make sure you're not missing something that just showed up.
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm.
David Allen:See, most everybody listening this or watching this probably has had things show up in the last 7 days that they need to do something about. They haven't figured out yet exactly what they need to do. They just need to know they need to do something about it, but they so when are they gonna decide that? And that's the review process that needs to be set up. So they do that whether you do that with coffee at Starbucks in the morning or had a had a good friend in his weekly review on Sunday nights because his daughter was in the choir.
David Allen:They would go to choir practice on Sunday nights, and he'd sit in the back pew and do his weekly review. Who knows? Sorry to out
Skippy Mesirow:that to the daughter. So when you're sitting down with a client and you're working them through their process, how do you guide them to figuring out what review structure is right for them? Because it strikes me that there's probably more diversity in reproach to review than most of the other steps.
David Allen:I have two answers to that. They need to get all that stuff together, and then they'll tell themselves, how often should I look at this? On the other hand, sit down and do a review about anything you've got. Whatever. Reviewing and reflecting is one of the biggest lacks out there in terms of management and executive thinking.
David Allen:It is trying to sit back and go pull up the rear guard. Where are you? What's happened? What's new? What do I need to now integrate and recalibrate in terms of my focus and my priorities?
David Allen:And that better happened weekly in the world that you're talking to, I would imagine. Yeah. If not, boom.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. K. Beautiful. Do you still have I mean, yes. You are 79 years age chronologically.
Skippy Mesirow:If anyone was with me looking at you, they wouldn't assume that. If they were looking at your productivity, they wouldn't assume that. Do you still do long term planning? Are you still having, like, a 5 or 3 year horizon review at this point in your life? I know you had a new book coming out soon, so you're doing big stuff still.
David Allen:Oh, the new book. Well, that was a big thing. So there's a new book that's filling a big gap in that in our training and this methodology over the years called team getting things done with others. So that's been on my radar for a long time to see if we could find some way to get that message out and create a manual about how to do that. Mhmm.
David Allen:So that's been a big thing. It's launching in May 2024. I don't know when anybody's hearing this, but that's the official launch is May 21, I think. After that, I get better at my flute, get better at painting. These are things that I've just had been let lie for the last 2 or 3 years simply because I've been so busy with other stuff.
David Allen:And otherwise, no big thing. Well, my wife and we just took a 5 week road trip to Spain, which was really kind of fulfilling her vision of finding a place to go in the wintertime when it's rainy and cold and gray. She's 65, I'm 79. So we figured, I don't know how many more of these we're gonna be able to do, but setting those up. So, you know, it's been on Sunday, maybe less time and seen Iceland yet.
David Allen:I haven't seen New Zealand yet. I haven't seen there's a few other places that would probably like to go. So it's more like in the more leisure part of our life. I don't know that I'll have it leisure in my life because I can't stop doing this. I can't stop doing what I'm doing.
David Allen:But building in some time and doing that and enjoying that kind of stuff, that's just part of the icing on my cake in terms of my life and my career.
Skippy Mesirow:That's beautiful. I'm definitely coming back to team. I mean, look in our world, the more team focused we can get the better and it's challenging right now. So I think that's gonna be a huge benefit to people. Before we get there, I just wanna kinda get a little bit more background on the creation of this.
Skippy Mesirow:And the reason is a, it's a personal interest, but B we're sort of in the business of taking ideas in our head out into frameworks and rules for the world. And so it is not dissimilar, although it's, you know, it's not passed in statute in many ways, you are creating a framework as many of us are creating a framework. And I'm interested to hear how you've thought about that through the process, because it's been wildly successful, both in adoption and public acclaim and impact and effect. And so I think it's, it's super relevant. I wonder if there are other models or frameworks that you have been inspired by or drawn on or incorporated through this process.
Skippy Mesirow:One that came up just because of the political world angle is sort of the the famous Eisenhower model. Right? The urgent and the important and the four boxes and which one of those you do, what you delegate, which you trash. There's some basic similarities there. So maybe with that as a starting point, are there any other models that you've thought of, been inspired by, incorporated, or really love and admire, but they're just separate and different?
David Allen:Not really. I mean, they're all quite useful. Everything from, especially, we have a whole chapter in the new book called about the new work. Everything from Deming's work back in Japan, and Kanban and Scrum and Agile and 6 Sigma and and all that are models that are highly useful. They're all about external workflow.
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm.
David Allen:And they're usually useful in a manufacturing or a software environment where you've got somewhat rigorous steps that need to be managed and no waste in that step process. And a friend of mine who runs an institute in California about lean said, David, GTD is lean for the brain. How do you make sure you have no waste in your thinking? Well, I haven't thought twice unless you like the thought. So there are models out there like that.
David Allen:In the Eisenhower, we get that we even mentioned that in the book and Harvey Volz and other kinds of things people have used to set priorities. But we're just sitting in front of the TV at night to relax. Which quadrant does that sit in? Mhmm. Right?
David Allen:It doesn't. Which quadrant does it sit in to research whether you wanna give karate lessons to your little girl? Where does that sit? Right. So there's a whole lot of life that does not fit into those kind of categories, into those things.
David Allen:They're useful way to think about it. Oh, okay. What thing is worth me doing now? And so those give some models about how to think about some things in that way, but they don't include all the stuff in life that you have to deal with.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. It's interesting you say lean for the brain because one of the analogies I've used with people, I hope this lands for you because I've been using it, but I'm a big fan of Marie Kondo's work, the art of tidying up. I do that once every 6 months at my home.
David Allen:Yeah. She has kids now. And so she's loosened her lease.
Skippy Mesirow:Well, good luck. Yeah. That's yeah. I mean, I don't have kids yet, but I have enough friends with them to see that, you know, a lot of that goes out of the window. Sometimes literally.
David Allen:No. She's great. I mean, you should get rid of, you know, every year, every so often. Catherine and I only buy new clothes if we can give away as many.
Skippy Mesirow:Right. The analogy Davos uses, like, what Marie Kondo does for your physical space is what GTD does for my brain. It makes sure that everything there is there for a reason that it has a purpose, that it has a place, that I can see it and appreciate it. It doesn't get lost in the background and is fully presented for me to do the best of it I can with what I have. And that's just always an analogy that sort of landed to me.
Skippy Mesirow:I don't know if you ever heard anyone say that. But
David Allen:No. No. That makes sense, for sure.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. That's cool. Okay. So some background stuff. I am curious what your recommendation would be around tools, knowing that the GTD intentionally doesn't specify.
Skippy Mesirow:However, there are innumerable new tools that come out every day. Some of them may purport to add benefit, some may not, but it can be overwhelming. It's like you go to the grocery store and now there's 45 100 cereals and you're like, oh, I just, I just want some great nuts. Like it's enough. What's your recommendation on staying up to date with the tech, with the new stuff?
Skippy Mesirow:What is the appropriate balance and when does it become too much of a job in and of itself?
David Allen:Well, it depends if you're into productivity porn where you just like that and you like to explore all those. Like, fine. That's a nice hobby as well as anything else. Why not? Wouldn't wouldn't hurt.
David Allen:But otherwise, forget it. Relax. Mhmm. Decide what you need by implementing the GPD process. And then say, okay.
David Allen:Probably the best thing to do is use whatever tools you currently have to do that. Mhmm. And then you might wanna explore. I mean, there are 100, if not thousands of forums out there of people talking about all the GTD tools that that people could use and pick and choose. Decide what you wanna do.
David Allen:So there have been twice in my career where we tried to build software around the GTD model and neither of them worked. They worked in a way, but they didn't work in the market. So I just gave that up. People asked me for recommendations. They want me to come on their board.
David Allen:They want me to look at their what they've come up with and give me an endorsement or whatever. How I just go, not my world.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. When you say it worked in a way, you mean, like, the software itself functioned. You were happy with it, but it just wasn't adopted broadly. Is that what you mean? Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:Any idea why?
David Allen:The market was already. Why does anybody out there think they need to empty their head?
Skippy Mesirow:And yet they're buying books by the truckload.
David Allen:Sure. Well, you know, we tried to build those things, and then, you know, Microsoft sort of won the the desktop. And there just wasn't a market out there, really.
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm. Yeah. Interesting.
David Allen:So there is many different implementations and tools as there are GTD champions and friends out there, for sure.
Skippy Mesirow:Totally. Who have you found if you were to build sort of the archetypal character, who's the human who GTD seems to be most attractive to, and who is most resistant to it?
David Allen:Well, as I mentioned before, the people most attractive to it are the people who need it the least. Big champion that I coached for a year, a guy named Brad Keywell, the CEO founder and CEO of a company called Uptake out of Chicago. He built Groupon. That's why he has his own jet. He's on 5 boards.
David Allen:His uptake in its 1st year or 2 as a start up got a $2,000,000,000 cap. What they did was develop the software that allowed you to put a little device inside of a little caterpillar, big engine thing. And it would tell you when it's oil data changed, when, you know, something going up with his tires or whatever. So we give you a readout essentially of the of the condition of a vehicle. He created the big ideas thing in Chicago.
David Allen:He and he's 40, 45. I don't know. You couldn't find a more productive person that you would identify in the world. And he called me, and I said, Brad, why are you talking to me? He said, I'm up to here.
David Allen:I wake up with $1,000,000 ideas. I don't know where to put them or who to give them
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. In other words, like, I'm doing a lot, but I'm stressed out as fuck. I'd like to do all this and feel good about my life. I can relate to that.
David Allen:Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. So that's who's most attracted to it. Who's most averse to it? I would imagine there's a distinction between people who, like you said, they would describe their life as fine and it's not for them and that's okay. And people who, from the outside looking in, clearly could use this, who are in meaningful roles, who are struggling with organization overwhelm, over commitment, who would genuinely benefit and the people they work with and for would benefit, but for whatever reason, have like, an adverse reaction to this system.
Skippy Mesirow:Have you encountered that, or is that a thing I'm making up?
David Allen:All the time.
Skippy Mesirow:Okay. Talk to me a little bit about that situation. Like, what are the common things that you notice? And then how do you respond to that?
David Allen:They say it's too much work. I say, well, would you like to have a clear head? It's not free. You know? Here's how you would get that clear if you like that.
David Allen:That's up to you. But, again, I'm not a motivational speaker. I didn't build a business trying to convince people that they needed to do this.
Skippy Mesirow:Right.
David Allen:As I said earlier, I just define the game, how you wanna play it, whether you wanna play it, to what degree you wanna play it. Your choice. Now I still do it because I care, because people who actually do this, it does it can totally improve their conditions in life and work without exception. There's no exception for that. Anybody implements any part of this, you don't have to implement the whole thing.
David Allen:Just the 2 minute rule will change your life. Just figure out next actions on things that have your attention before they blow up. It'd be a huge improvement. So this is as we say, it's not like running with scissors. There's nothing dangerous about this methodology.
David Allen:It hasn't been my job to figure out how to motivate people to do this.
Skippy Mesirow:Right.
David Allen:Well, in a way, it has. Because the one of the ways that I can motivate people, and and I've done so many speeches and keynotes and been out there for years doing this. It's just model what it's like. People meet me and they go, god. You're nothing like I thought you'd be.
David Allen:They thought I was gonna be buttoned down, anal retentive.
Skippy Mesirow:I mean, that's what I would have thought reading the book. Yeah. That's totally what I I didn't think you're gonna be like a karate doing meditating dude.
David Allen:You're nothing like that. I'm nothing like that.
Skippy Mesirow:Right. And the
David Allen:reason I'm nothing like that is I have the freedom to be nothing like that because I came up with all this.
Skippy Mesirow:And the truth is you're both. Right? Like, there is part of you that is super organized and doesn't wanna do the extra work, and then there's a part of you that wants to go explore and learn and try something new and do karate. And, you know, that's it's all part of you. And I think it shows up in this.
David Allen:Well, it it has been. My new project that I've been resisting like crazy is to learn to cook risotto, and my wife has been on me forever. David, come on. You need to stay engaged, and one of the ways to stay engaged is learn to cook better. And how about learning to cook risotto?
David Allen:Oh, that'd be such a cool thing, and I've been resisting that project for months.
Skippy Mesirow:What are you trying to avoid feeling by not cooking risotto?
David Allen:I just don't think about it that much. Next action, actually, Catherine says she's gonna cook risotto, and let me watch exactly how she does that. So I go, okay. I'm okay with that.
Skippy Mesirow:Would a lot a little accountability be helpful? You want me to reach out once a week on a text or something?
David Allen:No. Thank you. Get out of my get out of my face.
Skippy Mesirow:Just trying to help out the wife. Happy wife, happy life. Right?
David Allen:Mhmm.
Skippy Mesirow:Okay. So I wanna come back to team as a place to stop, but there's one more question that I have for you that I think will resonate with a lot of the audience. And as background, I've heard you describe yourself as mister approval, which is a common thing. Like we all want the approval of others. We are high social primates.
Skippy Mesirow:This shows up a lot in the public service space. We have a lot of type 2 helper archetypes. One of the biggest reasons that we fall into, and I say we, I'm speaking with clients that I've worked with myself in many cases, we fall into overwhelm. It's not just the lack of systems, but it is the belief that if I don't do everything for everyone, I will be rejected. I won't win reelection.
Skippy Mesirow:I won't have inherent worth. Like, I am my actions. And it seems though you refer to yourself as mister approval, that in some way, the GTD system has helped you navigate that predisposition. And I wonder if you could talk about the link between those things.
David Allen:Well, a big key is the word it's a two letter word called n o.
Skippy Mesirow:It's hard for people.
David Allen:Of course. Yeah. But there are lots of ways to say no. Say, Skippy, that's a cool, cool idea. Right now, I just don't have the bandwidth to give that the attention that that idea probably deserves.
David Allen:Let me give you some suggestions, some other people who might do better at this and quicker than I could. So you could be much more political about how you say no than just no. I don't have time to do that. Go away. You know?
David Allen:That's not exactly what you'd like if your approval suck like I am. So it could just be, god, what a cool idea. But, you know, it's I I don't have the bandwidth right now to handle that in the way you'd like it handled. How else might we do this? So there are a lot of good interactive techniques communication wise about how you get past the commit to everything game.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. What I'm hearing is that in the GTD process, by getting clear on what's important to you, having it all out there and being able to make intentional choices, then you can give a no from a clearer place that is in integrity that is more likely to receive a positive response than a blanket unjustified no.
David Allen:Yeah. If you just say yes, then you don't deliver in time or on purpose. You're screwed.
Skippy Mesirow:Because trust diminishes at an automatic price of broken agreements.
David Allen:Indeed.
Skippy Mesirow:I'm circling that one. I just adore that. I'll give you examples of this that came through my GTD process. I was doing the thing of saying yes to everything and everyone. I got clear on what projects I'm gonna use it properly within the city council bucket mattered to me most where I wanted to invest my time as a consequence of not wanting to let people down or drop other important balls, but that were just less personally important to me, I made a point to figure out who really cared about those other things.
Skippy Mesirow:So, as an example, I had a fellow city council member named John, who was the biggest environmental advocate. I care about the environment, but it was not in my top two things that I wanted to work on. And so when an email or a comment came in about the environment, I didn't say, fuck the environment. We're done here. I said, wow.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. I totally hear that. It's super important. John actually would be the best person to talk about. He's really passionate and tuned in on this, and I think he'd be able to help move your issue forward, like with the most intensity and focus and attention.
Skippy Mesirow:And they loved that because they were getting to the best source. He loved that because he was being acclaimed for the thing that he care about, and I loved it because it cleared time on my calendar. And I don't think I ever got a negative response from that. Another example, I got some negative response. I'm getting thumbs up from Dave.
Skippy Mesirow:I love that. All right. Another, example, and this will be the last one, is email. I used to be the person who, you know, nearly encountered every car because I'd cross the street answering my emails and then walk into a meeting answering my emails, just, you know, head down all the time, like some deformed version of a human.
David Allen:IPhone zombie.
Skippy Mesirow:IPhone zombie. Yes. I was an iPhone zombie. And I decided it didn't want to be an iPhone zombie. I wanted to be with people across from me, and so I set a rule that I was not going to check email more than twice a day.
Skippy Mesirow:Now, to shift from iPhone zombie to a twice a day email checker without any context could be viewed as an f u from the people not getting an immediate response. Understood. So I crafted a simple automated response that said something like, hey. To offer the most attention and acuity and care for the person sitting across from me, which might be you one day, I'm only checking email twice a day, so I will get back to you within 24 hours because I do an end of day clear inbox. And if you need me immediately, you can call.
Skippy Mesirow:Right? And, yes, there were some people that were upset by that, but 95% of people went, oh my God, I want to do that. Right? But I had a reason. So I so appreciate you sharing that, and I hope that that people can hear that by using a system like this and getting clear, the come from with integrity, even when it's a no, can be met with real appreciation.
Skippy Mesirow:That can be such a key to freedom. So thank you for that, David.
David Allen:Well, Skippy, you you touched on something that we talked about in the book. And one of the biggest issues these days is channel
Skippy Mesirow:creep. Yes.
David Allen:How many channels have you allowed into your ecosystem that have input that you need to make decisions about? And decide what it is, where it goes, whatever. Technology hasn't changed much except speed and volume. And so all teams and Asana and Slack and all those things have done just add more in baskets to you. So we talk about the fact that you personally, it becomes that much more challenging that you personally manage as you've demonstrated what you've managed.
David Allen:What do I do with that input? How do I manage that? We actually have a company that, you know, we work with up in Norway that has taken all those different channels and they have produced a policy about here's how you handle SMS. You use SMS for this reason. You use our internal communication system for this reason.
David Allen:You use telephone for this reason. Use face to face for this reason. And they actually created a policy around that. It looks like a huge constraining structure, but the company is like, wow. Thank you very much.
David Allen:It has released a lot of stress and pressure to then agree. So the problem is agreeing in your protocols about all the channels that you've got. How often are are you committed to return emails or return to a response on Slack or return to a team? That hasn't simplified the world. It's complicated it.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. And to your point, you can renegotiate those agreements. You're not locked in forever. You can change and shift. And, gosh, I can't remember the name, but I wish I did.
Skippy Mesirow:There was a woman who was on the Armchair Expert podcast recently, and she was talking about her working with me letter, which is basically a how to guide to work with her, like what communications, what to expect. Very, very precise. She managed large teams. I can't remember her name, but it sounds like you're talking about something like that at an organizational level. And I think it's important to remember, we do train people how to treat us.
Skippy Mesirow:Right? Each time we have an interaction with someone, we're giving them feedback on what works and what doesn't, what we like and we don't. And it's also our responsibility to cultivate the conditions for success that we claim we want. That's that's part of leadership. So I yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:Really great thought. Okay. Let's shift to team. It's coming out May 21. It may be out by the time you hear this.
Skippy Mesirow:We shall see. I'm very curious about this. So maybe just kinda give the broad overview of how the integration of this works. And one of the things I was actually curious about because you have a coauthor, what's your coauthor's
David Allen:name on this?
Skippy Mesirow:Ed Lamont Ed Lamont. Presumably you have others, whether from the publishing team or the members of your staff, copywriters, etcetera, but you have a team that's writing the book. So I'm also curious how you use GTD with that team along the way.
David Allen:Well, we used the planning process, the natural planning model. Ed and I, for 2 years, have used that. What's the purpose of the book? Even every chapter, what's the purpose of this chapter? And then brainstorm and then whatever.
David Allen:So we've used our own process to talk about it.
Skippy Mesirow:Can you describe that for folks who've never heard of the natural planning process?
David Allen:Sure. We just say, look. What do we try to do here? What's our purpose? What would wild success look like?
David Allen:And what are all the things we need to consider about making that wild success happen?
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm.
David Allen:So it's purpose, vision, brainstorm. And then out of all that stuff that you come up with to say, okay. How do we organize these? What are the most important pieces? What are the components?
David Allen:What are the sequences or whatever that we might might need to handle? That's the organized piece. And then you go, okay. What's the next step on any moving part here? Mhmm.
David Allen:So purpose, vision, brainstorm, organize, next action. That's how you got dressed today, Skippy. I need to be dressed. Great. What would dress look like?
David Allen:And what do you need to consider in terms of getting dressed? Fabulous. Okay. So which thing do you put on first and how do you organize that? Great.
David Allen:What's your next step? So that's why it's called the natural planning model because we all naturally plan all the time.
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm.
David Allen:It's just that when it gets more complex, most people don't follow that model. They don't know what the purpose is of what they're doing. They have no vision of wild success. They don't brainstorm all the potential relevant stuff that needs to be considered, and they don't have a sufficient organization system that they trust. And, you know, they don't decide next actions on moving parts.
David Allen:Could have fooled me, But 40 years ago, people say, how do you plan a project? And I go, I don't know. I have no idea. Let me go see. And I tried and I checked because I was already involved in the training and then corporate training world.
David Allen:I said, do you have any good project planning, seminars or models or whatever they say? No. We don't.
Skippy Mesirow:How old were you when the first version of GTD came out?
David Allen:2001. I was born in 1945, so I don't know. Do the math.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. So you were, 56.
David Allen:Yeah. 51 or 52 or whatever.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. Yeah. Got it. And how long had you been teaching the complete model as a consultant prior to that?
David Allen:I don't complete model. I don't know. We still are complete. I still have
Skippy Mesirow:Fair enough.
David Allen:That that keeps adding this. But for the most part, the basics of this, you know, I've been doing for 20 years anyway before I wrote the book. Skippy, I I didn't know what I'd figured out. It took me that long to figure out that what I'd figured out was unique and nobody else has done it, and that it was unique and that it was bulletproof. Wow.
David Allen:And so I had some good advice. People said, David, you should write the manual. Write the book. Well, okay. So I had no expectation.
David Allen:I was excited to think it might be useful for a lot of people out there, but I had no expectation. I just need to get out of my head and to write it down and to get it out. It took 4 years once I pulled the trigger of writing the book from 97 to 2001. And I had no idea how much uptake there would be. So it kinda surprised me.
David Allen:3,000,000 copies, 30 languages out there. You know, it's like, wow. Who'd have thought?
Skippy Mesirow:Okay. Back to team. So tell us about how how this works.
David Allen:Well, team is just the application of the basic GTD principles to a team context. So if I walk there and say, well, what's got the team's attention? Called CAPTCHA. Because if the team has attention on something, that means it's not on cruise control yet. There's something bad about that.
David Allen:It just means that's just data that there's things you still need to decide about it. So the capture process is critical for a team. And then what are you gonna do about what you got your attention as a team? Something to move on, something to do. Is this references?
David Allen:What what is this? So it's a clarify process. And if you decide there's something to do, who's doing it? And where do we park that reminder in some way? We need to organize that data in some way, whether that's a Kanban board or whether that's Asana or whether that's some digital tool or whatever, where you park.
David Allen:Okay. Here's what we need to do about that.
Skippy Mesirow:Let's say I'm a city manager at a midsize city, just so that there's like, some relatability to people in the larger and smaller side of this. And, you know, I've got call it 350 employees. I've got 25 different departments. If I want to go implement this system, how many people are involved in the capture? Is it just me and my immediate staff?
Skippy Mesirow:Is it all 25 direct reports? Is it everyone down to the street sweeper operator? Who who's involved in that and who's not?
David Allen:No. It would be if I if I were coaching, I'd be the senior team.
Skippy Mesirow:So department heads, basically?
David Allen:And they would they might have attention on things that people downstream for them have either brought up for them or that they're aware of. Then they would need to bring that to the table if that was something that that team needed to address or might need to address. K. So no. It shouldn't you shouldn't probably have a meeting any with any more 20 people is is is even more than you need.
David Allen:Probably 6 to 12 is is best.
Skippy Mesirow:How would you determine which 6 to 12 that you chose?
David Allen:Whoever your direct reports are.
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm. In many cases, it'll be more.
David Allen:You're not gonna have more than 12 you have more than 12 direct reports. You got a screwed up organization.
Skippy Mesirow:You'd be surprised. You'd be surprised. There's a lot of that going on.
David Allen:Well, you might have a lot of people that are that are heads of things that need to be part of some sort of a larger group context, but they're gonna be highly functional. If you have anything more than 20, it would be absolutely a max having a room. Let's say what's, you know, what's got our attention. But actually, you could you could grab attention. You could have a groom of a 1000 people and say what's got all of your attentions and somebody capture them on a big whiteboard somewhere.
David Allen:Nothing wrong with that because all you're doing is capturing stuff. But then the next step is who needs to then decide what to do about whatever it is that showed up out there. You may have a a a community meeting where you're saying, okay. What has all of your attention, you know, about, you know, as you can imagine, how many different issues that they have community wise, and then somebody capture all that. And then somebody's gotta do something with those.
David Allen:The capture process could be as big as it needs to be. Where do you need to get input in terms of what's not our cruise control out there? Ideal scene would be that your directs have been doing some version of that themselves. This is okay. In my community or in my purview or in my whatever, here are all the things that have our attention.
Skippy Mesirow:And then are you going through you're going through the steps in the same way? So with that senior team, you're doing the clarification organization, or how does that then filter down?
David Allen:Well, it doesn't. You just do that. Because if you do that, the clarification says what's actionable. What do we do something about? What does this mean?
David Allen:Is this just trash? Is this a bad idea? Is this something we park put on a parking lot? And if it's something we need to do something about, who's doing it? And what is doing look like?
David Allen:This is done when what's true. Now in a team meeting, you don't necessarily need to go to next actions because if you can trust that whoever is taking accountability for whatever this thing is, and they'll make those decisions themselves about how to move this thing forward and move the needle on it. Mhmm. But you better decide who's got it and whether you need some sort of a time frame about when this needs to be done by it, if that's true.
Skippy Mesirow:Right. So just as an example, we're putting everything out. There are gonna be some things that come out that are administrative functions, which means that the body itself can go ahead and take those through and into the engaged step. There will be other things that there will be a legal requirement to have sign off by the elected body. And so at that point, the next action steps become around the creation scheduling of a presentation to go back to them and you'd give them a champion so that you'd know who was doing those things, but those steps would just be that.
Skippy Mesirow:In other instances, there might be a statute requirement that you need public engagement, right, before you can take action on any things. And so, then, your next actions would be around who owns that, What are the things that have to be done to get out into those places, whether it's, you know, book a room at the library or build a proposal or get out an advertisement and you'd be kind of putting those off into their individual places for execution. Is that more or less correct?
David Allen:Correct. But you don't need to decide necessarily what those actions are unless that person you don't trust to know what those actions are.
Skippy Mesirow:Got it. Yeah. So you can just give them the sort of project and then let them go from there.
David Allen:But then that's critical that you can move to step 4. How often do we need and who needs to look at the status of what's going on about that?
Skippy Mesirow:What have you seen be most successful in organizations from the perspective of review and shared information, which is to say, do the direct reports have eyes on other direct reports? Does only the c suite or the manager in this case have eyes on everything? Do you want someone to have eyes on everything, or do you want them to just have like, what what has worked and what has not worked? Have you seen?
David Allen:Beats me.
Skippy Mesirow:Got it.
David Allen:No. The criteria is, what do you need to do to get this off your mind? What do you need to do to assume that this is on cruise control? If it's not, what do you need to do about that?
Skippy Mesirow:It's such a good reframe. Right? Because the tendency is to fall into making sure everything this, that, and the other. But, actually, the goal of the program is to create that space in the mind.
David Allen:And what do you need to do to be able to go to sleep at night and not have to be, oh, wonder about a bath? What should we do? Have they? That's not lean in the brain.
Skippy Mesirow:And what are the experiential or life outcomes of teams that you've directly observed who have been successful in implementing this? What do you see happen in at the individual level and at the team level?
David Allen:Release of stress. Big issue these days is burnout. One of the things we we talk about in the book is a German company. Germany does not take burnout lightly because they have to pay people who take off because of burnout. And the relief of pressure when people come into our seminars that we were doing.
David Allen:You know, they've come in initially with 2,000 emails in their email. And then a year or 2 later, they come in with only 25 or a 100. So we didn't have to teach them anything. We just had to model what this is like when you actually deal with these basic principles. And quality of life, quality of surveys about employee engagement, and satisfaction weigh up.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. I think we could all use some of that. So that feels like a very, very timely and I hope well received message. This has been super fun, and it's been really beautiful for me to get to know you a bit, to meet the man behind the work. That has meant so much to me, and I love your both jovial and matter of fact spirit.
Skippy Mesirow:I I see both of those. Really, I really, really
David Allen:enjoy that. Let me turn this let me turn the table a little bit. I'm on Skippy at in our initial conversation. How'd you get the name Skippy? Is it because you skipped to school or you skipped school?
Skippy Mesirow:Interesting. I'm so glad you asked this. This is a story that I really didn't tell for a very long time, but, yeah, it's interesting. So my grandfather on my mother's side nicknamed everyone in the family. I got my nickname before birth, so Skippy was assigned to me prior to birth.
Skippy Mesirow:I wish he was still with us. He's not. But, we think it came from, like, a 19 fifties comic book of some kind. Little dude getting in trouble a lot kind of tracks. So when I was born, my given name was Matthew.
Skippy Mesirow:My Hebrew name is, but all of my blankets, my pillows, my welcome to this world cards all said Skippy already. And it was the name that I knew that I grew up with. There was only one person in the world who called me by my given name. And that was my dad's mom, which I never liked. Cause it just never, I didn't really know who that person was.
Skippy Mesirow:It just didn't fit, but it was my grandma. And so she did that and I'd ask her and when she didn't it's okay. Right. But then when my father got remarried later in life, my stepmother and I did not have a good relationship. I wasn't treated well by her.
Skippy Mesirow:And you know, she'd been through her own journey, so I have no blame for her. You know, I, I understand looking back, where that came from, but she took to calling me by my given name, seeming to me as a way of kind of needling at me, and it sure worked. And I really grew to resent it and really dislike it as a result of that. And so when I was 15 and getting ready to get my driver's license, I had the realization of, oh shit, they're going to put this name that I, like, I could walk down the street, you could yell Matthew, and I would not turn my head. I wouldn't even think on my driver's license, and that just doesn't feel right.
Skippy Mesirow:So I went to, you know, the local courthouse and got my name legally changed. And so every ID government thing I've ever had has always been Skippy. And so thank you for thank you for letting me share that
David Allen:public story.
Skippy Mesirow:I appreciate that. Yeah. It's a good one. It seems to fit. You know, it's one of those names that could have gone really wrong or or right, and it just, seems to have found its audience.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for asking that. Yeah. Yay.
Skippy Mesirow:Definitely, yay. Is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you would like to share, talk about, offer at all?
David Allen:Well, one of the basic things of my methodology and that I've come up with is your heads for having ideas, not for holding them. Just stop using your head as your office. It's a crappy office. It did not evolve to remember, mind, or prioritize, or manage more than about 4 things. That's it.
David Allen:As soon as you give it more than that, you won't take a test as well. You won't be as present when you're trying to engage with a customer client or your kids. So stop. But that's a big change of behavior because you weren't born doing this. You didn't hop out of your mom and go, gee, mom.
David Allen:What are we trying to accomplish? What's the next step? Is that yours or mine? This these are learned behaviors. Like, you weren't born with knowing how to cook spaghetti or to raise kids or to speak Dutch.
David Allen:Trust me. These are all these are all things you actually have to get. Here's the model. Here's what I need to do so I can do this better. And so GED is nothing but a way to do that about how to be clear about your life.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. And I know that overwhelm is the number one thing I hear from public servants. Burnout is the number one downstream system and they are avoidable and a little bit of upstream effort can yield a lifetime of downstream results. And so I hope people take that fully.
David Allen:Well said. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:Thank you. Lived well lived, actually. How can people find you, look you up, follow you, buy existing books, soon to come books?
David Allen:I'll just go to getting things done.com. And if you like video snippets, you wanna snack on video stuff, you know, go to getting things done dot com slash youtube, and you'll see a lot of too many things I've done. My 3 TEDx's, you get you have a a lot of access to sort of hearing different spins on all of this that have come out of me over the last few years. So that'd be a way to that'd be a way to connect.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. It's an amazing library. Yeah. And we will, in the leaders handbook newsletter that pairs with this, we'll give people a direct how to on some GTD stuff. And we'll make sure to link to that whole library because you've put in a ton of work there and it's really beautiful way to get people in.
Skippy Mesirow:So we will do that Final question of the day, same question goes to every guest, and you may have already answered it. So you can say second if you like, but our audience are not passive observers. These are the humans in the arena doing the hard work to make change on our behalf. And if you could leave them with just one thought, one quote, one practice, one anything that would best resource them to be a vector for healing our politics personally, what would that be?
David Allen:Relax.
Skippy Mesirow:Relax.
David Allen:Give yourself some reflection time at least once a week, if not nightly. Put the kids to bed, put the dogs to bed, put your life partner to bed, and sit back and not have to think about anything and see what shows up.
Skippy Mesirow:Yes. I couldn't agree more, David. Thank you for that. And I'm gonna take us out on and if you're driving, don't follow along. But if you're at home, let's, join David and I for 3 relaxing breaths together, closing the eyes, sitting back in the chair, 3 rounds of breath in the nose, holding at the top and out the mouth.
Skippy Mesirow:In the nose, hold, and out the mouth. And in the nose,
David Allen:hold
Skippy Mesirow:and out the mouth and in the nose, Hold and out the mouth. Opening the eyes, thanking David, and it is that easy.
David Allen:Yay.
Skippy Mesirow:Have a beautiful day, everybody. Yay. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you wanna put what you've heard here today into practice, sign up for our newsletter, the leader's handbook, where each month you'll receive just one email with a curated selection of the most useful tools and practices discussed on this podcast today and over the course of the last month. Delivered in simple how to worksheets, videos, and audio guides, so you and your teams can try and test these out in your own life and see what best serves you.
Skippy Mesirow:And lastly, if you wanna be a vector for healing our politics, if you wanna do your part, take out your phone right now and share this podcast with 5 colleagues you care about. Send a simple text, drop a line, and leave the ball in their court because the truth is the more those around you do their work, the better it will show up in your life, in your community, and in your world. Have a beautiful day.