Zack Arnold

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The Zen-like Art of ‘Getting Things Done’ | with David Allen

About Episode

I’m commonly asked, “How in the world do you balance so many different projects at once?” In this episode I give away my secret weapon and the foundation of my entire productivity system – GTD.

In my never ending quest to eliminate as much busy work from my life as possible and take clear action towards my goals, I’ve spent years navigating the world of productivity and learning everything I can (hence my obsession with Trello). There are so many tools, apps, websites, and resources to help organize your to-do lists, but the fatal flaw of every single one of these tools is just that – they are just tools.

If you are truly interested in learning how to not only get more things done, but also ensure that you get the RIGHT things done, you need more than a shiny tool or a fancy to-do list app: You need a system. And in my opinion, the system that is going to – help you clarify your goals, organize your next actions, and most importantly clear the cobwebs in your head so you free up space to be creative again – is the GTD system developed by my guest David Allen.

Whether your tool of choice is Trello, OmniFocus, or even post-it notes, the GTD system can help alleviate tremendous amounts of stress and anxiety, avoid the never ending busy work, and get you on track to accomplishing your life’s work.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with the David Allen, and if you are not in the productivity space, you probably are not familiar with who David Allen is, but if you are, David Allen is the mastermind of this thing that I talk about all the time, called the GTD system, or getting things done. So, David, it is beyond a tremendous pleasure to have you on the other end of my microphone today.

David Allen: Zack, delighted to be here. Thanks.

Zack Arnold: I talk a lot about martial arts in this show, and I’ve had Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Master on in the past. I talk about this philosophy of trying to be zen-like, and you’ve taken that approach to productivity, and I feel that that’s a really important thing to really talk about, because we could really get into the weeds and the nuts and both right away, and let’s talk about the flow chart of GTD, and all these things, but to me the why is so much more important. So, where I want to start today is you talking more about why the system was developed, and how you’ve kind of created this entire culture around it, and where I want to start is a very specific quote from your book, and how it relates to productivity and martial arts, and that is the idea that your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax. So, let’s start there and get a sense of why you developed this and why it’s become the phenomenon that it has in the productivity world.

David Allen: Well, there’s a very long story, and we only have an hour, you know. I could fill up 20 hours with the story behind all this, but let me see if I can compact a little bit for you and folks listening. I had a good bit of experience in the martial arts after I dropped out of graduate school. I wanted to find my own enlightenment instead of just studying people who had theirs, so that was one path. I’ve been interested in Zen since I was in high school. I’d read Suzuki and Alan Watts, and all of that, and I loved the esthetic and the idea, and just there was something about it that was really cool. When a friend offered to teach me karate, I wasn’t interested in the sort of macho, you know, aspect of it, I was more interested in the philosophical, spiritual aspects of it. How does something that physical, you know, relate to that? So, you know, spent four or five years getting a black belt, and in the process discovering, you know, a clear, a clear head was actually a key component to that. I mean, the high levels of the martial arts, you know, there’s usually a number of meditative kind of practices, there may be a spiritual component, but there’s a very practical component. If four people jump you in a dark alley, you. Don’t want 2000 unprocessed emails hanging somewhere in your psyche, you know. You need to be clear, and so the whole idea about clear space and having a clear head. I use the image, as you know, mind like water, that Bruce Lee sort of made famous from his, and say, you know, that hey, look, a clear head allows you to then respond appropriately. An appropriate response really is that wound up becoming, I mean, who knew? I didn’t know it back in the late 60s, early 70s, when I was doing this, but that has become essentially the key element of this whole methodology, is being appropriately engaged with your world, so you don’t overreact, you don’t under react, you appropriately engage with it, so that you know if you’re taking work to home or home to work, you’re not in mind like water, and if you think you’re trying to watch your daughter play soccer, but you’re on your iPhone, you’re not in mind like water. I mean, come on, you’re not, you’re not present. So the whole idea about being present was something I started to get attracted to, and then I, you know, wound up just for hook and crook creating my own little consulting practice, and then I was interested. As my life got more complex, more mature, you know, up in the professional world, I discovered how easy that was to screw up mind like water. You know, you start to make more commitments. It doesn’t get easier, folks. I’m sure many of you listening would know that, as you got, as you grew older, it didn’t get easier. You got more complex, you got more ambiguous, you got more ambitious, you got you created more of your own stuff you needed to handle and manage, and so the I, the whole idea, then being able to sort of surf on top of that game was something I was very, very attracted to find what could work for me, and then as I uncovered these techniques and these best practices, I turned around and used them with my clients, it turned out that they produced exactly the same result. You applied these principles, it created more space in your head, more ability to be meaningfully focused, more ability to have room for creativity, more ability to think strategically about what you were doing, without exception, zero exception. But I didn’t know what I’d actually learned. I was not, wasn’t really engaged in the corporate world at all, in terms of the training about all these kinds of things, and I’d never – I’ve never had a traditional business or psychology course in my life, a lot of non-traditional training and experience, you know, that whole personal growth game back in the 70s, and you know, I was in – I dropped out of graduate school in Berkeley in 1968 so you can imagine, as they say, if you remember being in Berkeley in 68 you probably weren’t there, so it was heady times where a lot of that stuff was kind of going on, and I was experimenting, exploring a lot of that, and then finding out, oh wait a minute, How can I somehow be in this world but not of it? And what are those techniques I can use? And I started to use those with people, I went, wow, these things really work, but they don’t show up automatically, you actually have to get yourself to sort of apply your cognitive ammunition to these things to make the right decisions about stuff, and you actually have to then engage in building what the cognitive scientists now refer to as the external brain. I need to build these outside my head, and a lot of that started to be just developed over time, and then you know, to make a very long story very short, took me 25 years to figure out what I’d figured out, and that it was unique, and nobody else seemed to have figured this out, and that it was bulletproof. So I said, let me write the manual. So that’s when I wrote Getting Things Done in 2001 and then that sort of became a global brand, almost out from under me. I didn’t even plan on doing that, but GTD sort of hooked on, especially to the tech community, and sort of spread around the world. So now you know, me and my small little company are trying to figure out how to, you know, handle the fact that this is a worldwide phenomenon. How we leverage that, so to get these best practices to as many people as one.

Zack Arnold: Well, I think that one of the key points here that really stands out for me is you saying that I don’t have formal training in the corporate world. I didn’t learn business speak. I don’t have an MBA. That to me is so important, because you’re looking at all of these things from an outside perspective. Because if we just continue approaching the world the way that we’ve been taught for the last 40 or 50 years, we don’t know how to process it anymore, because the world is so fundamentally different on so many different levels, on a neural level, our world is different than it was 20 or 30 years ago. So, from just from an evolutionary and a genetic perspective, the human brain doesn’t know how to process the world that we live in. We, it’s going to take us hundreds of years to catch up to it.

David Allen: Well, new research is the human brain evolved over, you know, hundreds, hundreds of 1000s, if not millions of years, to basically handle four things that you couldn’t handle in the moment, that’s about it. They used to think it was seven things back in the study in 1959 your short-term memory could hang on to and still relate to it. Well, seven plus or minus two, now it’s four, that’s about it. So that’s how your brain evolved to do very, very, very brilliant things. You know, everybody listening to this, your brain is currently recognizing things like computers and files and chairs and people and lights and whatever, as opposed to just vibrations and light and sound, because what your brain evolved to do was to take long-term history and pattern recognition and say, based upon my history, that’s a light, based upon long-term history, that’s a table, and that’s a person, and whatever, and you do that brilliantly, computers. Barely even starting to even start to be able to do that a little bit, and yet you go to the store for lemons and you get six things and no lemons, so your brain is screwed in terms of its ability to remember or remind, and it’s an absolutely crappy office, and everybody’s out there trying to use their brain as an office to try to remember, remind, create relationships between things, try to set priorities, and it absolutely sucks. It does not do that. So, the cognitive scientist, actually, since I wrote the first edition of my book, the cognitive science has now proven what I learned on the street out there, which was your head’s absolutely the worst place to hang on to any of this stuff.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s really what the human brain is all about, is the opposite. It’s not about carrying information. Your brain is not a filing cabinet. Your brain is a place to spark ideas, like it’s all about being creative, which is the heart of everything that I’m trying to build. And whether it’s using movement, whether it’s using diet, whatever it is, it’s all about how do I fuel my brain to maximize creativity, and one of the worst possible ways to do that is to fill it with tons and tons of information, whether it’s all in the moment or whether it’s things that need to be done tomorrow or things I need to do in a week, that’s not allowing you any space to be creative.

David Allen: The problem is, as you say, when you load that stuff into your head, that part of your head that’s hanging onto that doesn’t seem to have any sense of past or future, so that means that some part of you psychologically thinks you should be doing all of that all the time. You need to be buying cat food, you need to be getting a life, you need to be writing a business plan, you need to be finishing that editing, you need, and all of that. It feels like you should be doing it all the time when it’s only managed internally inside your head, and that’s that’s the big mistake out there.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s the thing that I talk about a lot, is this idea of working harder versus working smarter. That’s a very common theme, and a lot of the blog posts that I do about everything, but especially when I focus on productivity, is that we’re so consumed by busy work, and the next thing that has to be addressed, that’s urgent. I must take care of this, but we lose sense of what’s important versus what’s urgent, and we just spin our wheels, and basically we have no time to do our lice work, because all we’re doing is busy work.

David Allen: Yeah, and but the thing is, you can’t get rid of the busy, you can’t ignore the busy work, but you need to appropriately engage with it. So, when there’s six things you need from the hardware store, you need, don’t make six trips to the hardware store, Jiminy, Christmas, create a list of stuff that the next time you go out, where you might go buy the hardware store, you can get all those six things, so you still need to get those six things from the hardware store, they’re not the most strategic things in your life, but you still need the light bulb, you still need the batteries, you still need, you know, whatever that stuff is, you just need to make sure that you’ve externalized that, that you’ve organized it in appropriate places, so your brain’s not distracted by any of that, and you also can be highly efficient to really just how you move around, you know, on the planet and what you’re doing, where, and when.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and this is a obviously an example that anybody’s gonna react to and say, “Well, yeah, of course, like I’m not going to run to the store six times and buy six things, I make a list and do it all at once, like that’s called batch processing. But when you look at all of the things that we need to do now in our daily lives, and all of the notifications that we’re getting, and all the incoming information, we’re not applying that to the way that we process our entire life, even though we might be doing it with our grocery list. So now I want to start getting into the weeds a little bit, and give people the system, so if they say, I want to get all this junk out of my brain, and I want to get back to focusing on the things that do allow me to be creative, and also allow me to do the important work in my life. Where the heck do I start? I’m so overwhelmed. Like, just, just tell me what to do. Give me the steps. Paint by numbers. Let’s do it

David Allen: Right. Step one, get a pen you like to write with. Step two, get a big pile of just printer paper, just plain old letter size paper. Get an end basket, if you don’t have one, an in tray, a physical space or spot you can throw stuff, then sit down, give yourself one to six hours to unload every single thing, one per piece of paper that’s on your mind. I need cat food, write it down, throw that paper in your in basket. I need to call Bill Smith about xyz, write that down, throw it in the paper. I need to update my insurance stuff, write that down, throw in the paper. God, my 401 K. I don’t know what the hell is going on with that. Write that down, throw it in the paper. I need to, I need to potentially research putting my paper on the street, getting a new resume. Write that down, etc. etc. That will take, if you actually did that with integrity, it would take you one to six hours just to capture the things that are pulling on your psyche, you’ve loaded in there that you haven’t tracked somewhere else, so that’s that’s step one. Like, now that that in and of itself will be transformational for most people if you actually paid attention to this and you actually followed those directions.

Zack Arnold: I cannot overemphasize how important the step is. If anybody out there listening is like, you know, I’ve wanted to lose five. Five pounds, for a while. This is how you do it. You just spend a day, you get all this stuff off your head, and the scale may not tell you you’ve lost five pounds, but your body and your brain are going to feel so much lighter. And this is a process that I forced myself to do a couple of years ago, and I did it right before the Christmas holiday, so I didn’t have any other distractions, other than, you know, just like family stuff, but I didn’t have lots of notifications, I didn’t have a lot of work, and I said my only focus right now is eliminating everything that’s in my brain, and just do it’s, you know, another common word for this is a brain dump, I just did a giant brain dump and put it all on a pile, and just that alone, without doing anything else, was transformational,

David Allen: I’ve actually had people lose three or four pounds in two days just by coaching them, simply literally quite physically doing that.

Zack Arnold: It’s amazing how liberating it is.

David Allen: Yeah, so then, but that’s that’s step one. But you can’t just leave it there. If you leave it there, now you’re a pile maker or a list maker, so you actually then need to empty that pile and get it cleaned up, just like you empty your mailbox, just like you should empty your email, or whatever. And then you take all those things one at a time, and you put it through step two, which is basically a thought process you need to apply to these things. Why did I keep this? Why didn’t I throw this away to begin with? Oh, because it’s potentially meaningful. There might be something I might need to do, or decide about cat food, or about the business plan, or about my editing, or you know, or whatever, or about Christmas, right? So then, then you need to go through the thought process, which is basically clarify step, step two, is it actionable, yes or no? If not, you trash it, you take a letter, you file it. If it is actionable, decide what’s the very next action on this I need to take very, very, very next physical thing. If I had nothing else to do in my life but handle Christmas, or to handle the business plan, or to handle cat food, you know what’s the next step? And by the way, will one step handle this? And if not, you then need to track what’s the outcome I’ve committed to, what’s the project here? I need to submit the edit, I need to finalize the business plan. I need to handle mom’s vacation. I need to, you know, deal with Christmas and get that under cruise control, you know. So, once I’ve decided those two things, action and outcome, then I need to move to step three. Now I need to organize reminders of those things. So, where do I put all the projects I have, like handle Christmas or handle mom’s birthday, or finalize the business plan or finish the edit, and you need a project list, and so you need to then park reminders of these commitments that you’ve got at these levels. Now you’ve defined more discreetly what your work is, park those in appropriate places. So that’s the organized step. Step three. Okay, if it’s reference, it goes where reference goes. If it’s trash, it goes in the trash. If it’s an action, where do I put a reminder of that action? That could be stuff to buy the hardware store, it could be stuff to talk to your boss about, it could be stuff to talk to your life partner about. Just park those appropriately. So then that’s step three. Once you’ve done that, then you need to make sure you use your external brain appropriately. So when you’re talking to your life partner, you glance at the stuff you said you need to talk to him or her about and this stuff, you, when you go into the hardware store, you need to pull up the list to go, okay, here’s all the six things I need, or you look at your calendar, which is also a list, and you know, for the next week, and say, oh my god, okay, here’s what I better block some time with, given what’s showing up on my, you know, in my day and time here, so that’s then the review process, which is step four, so now I’ve captured this stuff, I’ve clarified exactly what needs to be done about it, what I need to be reminded about. I’ve now parked those in a trusted place. I also then have that habit, and I have the practice of looking at the right things at the right time. I don’t need to look at everything in my list, I just need to look at what I could do where I am, what I need to look at right now to know that I’ve located myself in space and time appropriately, and then step five, you make a good decision about how do I put my attention or my activity right now. You know, do I take a nap, do I have a beard, right? Do I do I make this phone call, or whatever. So, in a way, it’s a simple thing, that’s how you, that’s how you get your kitchen under control, is you recognize, you walk in, it looks like it’s exploded, but you got guests coming over, so the first thing you do is you notice what’s off, right? That’s the capture step. Then you clarify, oh, that’s a dirty dish, that’s a clean dish, that’s good food, that’s bad food. Then you organize, you put the clean dishes where they go, you put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, you put the good food in the fridge. Then you reflect, okay, guests are coming over, they got 45 minutes, here’s what I want to cook. Oh, okay. Let me pull out the butter. Step five, and you melt butter. So I didn’t make this up, I just identified what we actually do to get your kitchen or your consciousness under control. It’s just consciousness a little more complex than your kitchen.

Zack Arnold: Well, you had said a little bit earlier, you said it’s actually pretty simple, and I agree with you, but there’s a gigantic chasm between simple and easy, so I want to walk people through a little bit more in depth, step by step, because I think that the first part, which is just the brain dump, creating your giant inbox and getting it out of your head, that’s really liberating, but I know that I’ve gone through the next step and I. Talk to other people that have gone through this, and they say, I do all this, and I feel great. And then I look at the inbox that has 243 pieces of paper, and I start to freak out, because now I’ve externalized this giant cobweb that I had in my brain, and now I need to process it. So, now that we kind of have the general overview, I want to break down step by step, how we can simplify this, so the first step that when you have this giant inbox, like you said, is processing it, and one thing that I want to talk about is this kind of idea of the two minute rule. So, can you go into that a little bit?

David Allen: Well, the two minute rule only comes into play while you’re doing the clarify step. What’s the next action on this, and if the next action, once you decide the very next step on something, if you can, if you can, where you are in the context you’re in, if you can actually complete that action in two minutes, you should do it right then, because it would take you actually longer to track it, to organize it, and review it than it would be to finish it. So, in a high email environment, most people’s actionable emails, 30 40% of them, you could actually handle it in two minutes or less, in terms of getting it out of there, answering the thing, moving it forward to somebody who needs to see it, or whatever, as long as you made the decision about, well, that’s what’s next, you know, that’s the next thing to do. So, the two minute rule is great, it’ll give you an extra six months to your life if you start to, if you don’t have that as a habit already.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, that’s a really good point, and what to kind of bring this back out into the more general before you go into the weeds again. That’s something that I’ll, what I’ll use as an example, when people say, yeah, but that takes time, like I don’t have six hours to do inbox processing and do a brain dump. I’ve got too much stuff to do, and the analogy I say to them is, imagine if I were a bank and I said to you, listen, you give me $100 today, and in a week I’m gonna give you $500 Nobody’s gonna turn that down, they’re gonna say, “Well, duh, that’s a no-brainer. It’s the same thing with your time, you’re putting in this specific amount of time, so let’s say it’s 100 minutes to do your brain dump, but within a week, and maybe less, and then over the course of weeks, months, and a couple of years, the return on your investment was not only time but quality of life is so immense that it just cannot be overstated enough.

David Allen: Well said.

Zack Arnold: So to go back into the weeds, now when you’re talking about email and this idea of the two minute rule, I actually recently did an entire hour long podcast with Zack Sexton of Asian Efficiency, who I know that you’ve done a show with as well, and he’s actually kind of the, he’s the enabler of GTD. He’s where I discovered it in the first place. So, you know, when you’re talking specifically about email and the two-minute rule, that’s a really good example of, all right, I’ve got 100 emails in my inbox right now, and most people think, well, I just need to process them chronologically, so I’m just going to go from newest to oldest, and this one. Oh, okay. This person needs this. Okay, this is going to take me 25 minutes to do, so I’m going to do it. Then you get back to your inbox. Well, I got to do this and do that and do that. If you start to employ that two minute rule, and also this idea of touch at once, which is something that also comes from the Asian efficiency philosophy, which is, if you read it and you’re like, well, I can do this in less than two minutes, why would I run this through my entire GTD processing system, and put it in a project, and assign it a context, and we’ll go into more about what that means in a little bit, but if you can just do it in two minutes, get it out of your life, like don’t process it at all, other than just actually acting on, and if there’s five or 10 things that take two minutes, take those 15 or 20 minutes cumulatively, and that stuff is done and out of your life forever.

David Allen: Yeah, and people often misunderstand. They think, well, gee, David, if I had did that, I’d spend up my whole day doing two minute things. I say, no, you should never have had those show up to, you know, pile up to begin with. You only do this, you only do this when you’re processing new input, you know. So I can stop processing my email and go do real work. I now need to go edit this thing, right? So, you just, you know, unhook from email, and you go edit that thing. But it’s when you’re dealing with new input and making those decisions, touch it once is actually a hoax. You don’t touch it once, you touch once the things that you can do in two minutes that you’re ever going to, that you know that you need to do it sometime anyway. Yes, indeed, but a lot of things you’re going to touch multiple times, because you need to keep reassessing whether to do it, not given all the other things in your life,

Zack Arnold: Which is why, if it’s going to take less than two minutes, don’t touch it 12 times, don’t run it through an entire process, because that process takes five times longer than it would be to just do it. So now we’ve kind of talked about this idea, like we have this whole pile of papers, whether it’s physical and you’ve actually done it on paper or you’ve done a digital version, and I want to dive a little bit deeper, kind of into the tech and ways that I do this and ideas that you suggest as well. But whether you’ve done this in a digital fashion or physical fashion, you have all this stuff in front of you, you’ve looked at the things that all right, these just take me a couple of minutes, like I get them out of my life, but now we have to start building them and assigning them projects, if these are things that are groups of actions that need to be done, or they kind of belong to a specific project. How do we start to break down how to organize them? Because you can go crazy with projects and have 100 of them by the time you’re done with this, if you don’t do it properly.

David Allen: Well, no, most people have between 30 and 100 so you have as many. You have given our broad definition that a project is anything that takes more than one action to complete. If you can finish something in one sitting, you don’t need to call it a project, but if that’s going to take, I need to call them, and then they need to get back to me, and then I need to fill out a form, and then I need to send that, and then I need to get a confirmation, or whatever. You got a project, whether that’s getting your watch fixed or getting your business plan launched, you know, so though all of those need to be tracked and handled, and you know, people get mad at me for their list and go, “Excuse me, ain’t my list, you know, that’s yours, you have to decide where you want to track that. So this is not creating anything new, it’s just, it’s just making explicit what those internal commitments are, so you actually have a real game plan that can sit outside of you that you can navigate,

Zack Arnold: All right. Well, then let’s talk about that game plan. Let’s say that somebody has gone through and they’ve created 75 projects based on their actions. They’re like, “Alright, I need to make sure that I like using one of your examples. I need to check on my car insurance and do this or that, and that’s going to take three specific steps, so now we have 75 projects that have multiple steps in each. Now, what do I do? Because, again, I’m starting to feel really, really overwhelmed, because I have all this stuff in front of me. Where do I go now?

David Allen: Well, you go to India and get a rice bowl in a cave,

Zack Arnold: As I’m sure many people are doing, given the political climate that we live in, but I’m not going to go there. But you know, how do people avoid the overwhelm? Because when you first start the GTD system, it can be overwhelming, and it’s easy to just say, “Ah, this is too hard, I’m going to go back to the old way. So, there’s a bit of a learning curve, and there’s an investment in the beginning. The payoff, like I’ve already talked about, is immense. But how do we get them over these little humps as they’re learning this process?

David Allen: Well, I think you just got to identify all those things that are really there. I need to handle my next vacation, I need to handle, you know, my car insurance, I need to get a dog, or I need to research getting a dog. I need to look into whether my kids should take a karate class or not. I need to look into whether I actually want to learn Spanish or not. I, you know, yada yada yada. So, as long as you get honest with yourself and you start to just identify these things that you’ve got rolling around internally inside of your commitments, get that list out of there. In other words, get them out, get them out in front of you, because you’re going to have an option, as you know, there’s an option to have a someday maybe list, in which case you say, wait a minute, learn Spanish, maybe not now, but you know, might be a cool thing to do, but I want to keep track of that, so making them good executive decisions about your life, that’s what this is going to start to entail. So, yes, you need to identify what all of these things are. By the way, if you haven’t got them all, there’s a part of you that will never totally 100% trust whatever you’re doing, because you’re going to go, “Wait a minute, there’s something back in there, something lurking in the corners, in the dark edges of my universe that I think I’ve committed to, but I forgot what it was, but it might be more important than what I’m doing. Oh my god, so then you allow yourself to get sucked into the busy trap and the distractions of life, you know, simply because you know there’s stuff you and, and you don’t know where it is, but you don’t want to, you know, you don’t know what the algorithm is about how to identify it and capture it and get it out of your head, so you just get run around by life, and that’s welcome to what most people are doing.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s that for me. It’s I remember for years I dealt with just this intense anxiety and this physical pit in my stomach. So it’s not some metaphorical idea, it was a physical manifestation in my body of, well, I just have all these things to do, and I don’t know what I should be doing right now, and like I have, or I had, I’ve been able to manage them now, but have massive attention issues, and have been diagnosed with adult ADD, so this is like a game changer for me. But I remember that physical feeling of just always thinking, I’m sure there’s something else I should be doing right now. Oh, it’s probably this, so I’m gonna do that. Oh, it’s this, so I should do this, and you get run around by the shiny object syndrome, and once you start to lay everything out in front of you, you get a sense of priority, and you actually kind of already went somewhat to where I was going to go next, which is this idea of prioritizing your projects and saying, well, there are things that I want to do, but am I really going to do these in the next week, or even the next month, or is this something that I want to do someday, so that someday maybe list was a revelation for me, because I was holding on to all these things that I felt like I had to do, like for example, I want to learn to play the piano. Well, is this something that I want to do someday? Is that something I’m really ever going to act on, or is that something that needs to be in my priority list? And it sat in my someday maybe list for over a year, but because during my review process I always read through at least once a month, all of a sudden I said, “You know what, I’m going to act on it. And now, for the last year, I’ve been taking piano lessons every week, because I was able to prioritize where it fit into my life. So, do you have any other strategies that we can talk about?

David Allen: It was that just that, just that could be life changing, you know. I don’t know if you know, but the majority of The Simpson writers are big fans of my stuff, and I won’t name him, but one of the guys I interviewed him, and he said, “Look, David, he said, “I’m so undisciplined, I don’t do hardly any of your methodology, except once a year I sit down and do a huge brain dump about all my someday maybes. And all these other things he said it absolutely saved my life, so just that in and of itself allowed him a lot more creative space to be able to have an idea and not feel like he was committed to have to move on,

Zack Arnold: And that’s hugely important, is knowing that this is not a system where if there are 12 steps and you miss step seven it falls apart, you really can just extract what makes the most sense for you, and still get tremendous, tremendous benefit,

David Allen: Huge.

Zack Arnold: So, yeah, so I definitely agree with that. The next area that I want to go to help people really start to discern what needs to be done, what doesn’t, and how to organize it properly, kind of going back to this idea of creating the list for the hardware store, is the idea of contexts, because, as I’m sure you would probably attest to, this is the one where a lot of people kind of get stuck, and they’re like, I don’t really understand what is a context. How do I apply it? How do I organize it? And I know that with the advent of so many different technologies, you’ve kind of had to evolve your definition of what contexts are. So, can you kind of give a basic idea of what a context is, and then how to use them to process your information more efficiently.

David Allen: Let me do a little history, Zack, on this, because I think it makes a lot more sense. First of all, the data is most people listening to this have between 102 100 next actions on all of their current commitments, that includes stuff to talk to your life partner about, stuff to buy at the hardware store, things you need to do at your computer phone calls, you need to make, etc. So, if you add all that up, that’s a lot of stuff. So, then we say, well, you could put all that on one list, you know? I have one huge gargantuan list, you know, and I need to buy this size nail. I need to talk to my life partner about our next holiday. I need to talk to my boss about this. You could stick all that on one list, but that would be, that’d be really overwhelming if you looked at that. So, say, well, wait a minute. How can I add a little bit more complexity to add some simplicity? And what that would look like would be, well, let me group all my phone calls of all the calls I need to make, and let me group all the stuff I need to talk to my partner about on that list, and let me group all the things I need from the hardware store on that post-it or on that list, so you’ll start to see that when you add a little more complexity, it adds a little more simplicity, given the complexity of our lives, so that there is a principle there that is at play, where you need, you need to add some complexity to your system to be able to make a complex thing more simple. Now, the history of this was in the old days, back before people listening to this were probably born. I used to teach this stuff with, I was using a paper planner, we were teaching seminars about this, and I had even splitting out the stuff you had to do on a day, that your calendar stuff versus all the other things to do as soon as you could, as opposed to having a daily to-do list, no, no, no, pull off all the other actions you need to do as soon as you can do them against the things you absolutely have to do on Monday. So that was a big dynamic change just from that I sort of uncovered and publicized back in the early 1980s and but then I had a friend of mine who said, “Hey, David, this is kind of cool. Oh, first of all, the mobile phone showed up. Now, when they first showed up, you know, they, you had to hook them onto your belt, and they made you lopsided because they weighed about six pounds. I don’t know, but when they first showed up, then I went, well, because I used to have then a list of all my actions, and then all my calendar stuff, and I didn’t have to rewrite the actions list, but then I started to see, well, now I have a phone with me, because there are a lot of places that all I could do would be make calls, so it might make sense to make a separate list. Let me make a separate list called calls, and that was hugely productive, because then when I was out and about, I had this mobile phone with me, I could actually do work, but the only work I could do was make calls, I didn’t have to look through, you know, 100 things to find the phone calls, I had them all grouped together, so all I had to do was look at that page and then crank through a bunch of stuff and be highly productive in a window of 20 minutes that I had before a client was late for a meeting, so like that’s pretty cool. Then I had another friend, friend of mine who semi-retired, he had a, he had a sailboat up in Maine, and he lived in Boston, and he went through a seminar of mine. He said, “Wow, David, I just realized there are a lot of things I need to do on my boat, but only when I’m there. I don’t need to remind myself there, because they’re things I love to do when I’m on my boat. So he created a third list. Not only did he have a calls list and action list, but then he had an at-boat list, whoa, that’s really cool. Now, again, that was with we were back in paper planners then, but then when the palm showed up and the digital list manager showed up, oh wow, that’s pretty easy to create a whole lot of separate lists and actually move things around, you know? I could have something on a waiting for list, and then when I got it back and I needed to then make a call about it, I could just drag it over or change the category to calls. Wow, isn’t that cool? So, when the digital world showed up, we said, wow, now we have the capability to actually get a bit more discreet about all these different contexts, and so if you knew the methodology, then giving yourself the freedom to be able to then organize these reminders in. And you know it became pretty elegant, and people could start out with some basic ideas. Here, you know, here’s all the things I need to do when I have a phone, here’s all the things I’m to do when I’m at home, here’s the things to do at the office, here’s the things do when I’m out for errands. So there were some basic contexts that pretty much everybody could sort of relate to, but I don’t think I’ve ever met any person who’d been into the GTD system for a couple of years that didn’t have their own unique customized version of all that,

Zack Arnold: And I think that’s one of the areas where some people get stuck is that it’s not plug and play, like everybody understands how to put items and to-do lists together, like everybody can write out 50 things that I need to do in the next month, and anybody can organize those into projects, but there isn’t a one size fits all for context, and I feel like that’s where a lot of people get stuck, is they say, well, I see this person’s context list, but I can’t use any of those, they don’t make sense for my life, so it’s hard when you kind of don’t have that paint by numbers approach, but contexts were the difference for me between just having a new way to organize a bunch of project lists, because I already had project lists and I had to do lists, and I didn’t know how to organize them, and they were overwhelming, but I still, I mean, everybody’s kind of familiar with that basic idea. Contexts were the revelation that completely changed the way that I do everything, because right now I’m, and we’ll talk a little bit more about the tech, if we have time, but I’m in Omnifocus right now. So, Omnifocus is a program that I’ve talked about a little bit on the show in the past, which is how I manage my to-do lists and manage the GTD system, and I currently have 316 to dos, so those are actions that are current, not even part of a someday maybe list organized into 38 active projects. If I were to look at that every morning, my brain would explode. I, there’s no way I could process it, but when I have the context and I just press a little button and say my context is here are the people I need to reach out to this morning, so I’ll do it live as we’re here. I click on reach out. Oh, my list went from 316 to two. Now it’s like, well, I can do two things, that’s easy. All right, well, I finished reaching out. Now let’s see, what do I have that I want to do around the house? Bam! I look at around the house. Oh, I’ve got nothing to do today, but I have probably 15 actions that I have flagged to show up in my around the house context on Saturday morning. I have no idea what they are like. That’s one of the liberating things for me, is that I have all these things to do, but if you ask me, what do I need to do this morning, I’d be like, I have no idea what I need to do. My system’s gonna tell me, but that weight has been lifted, and it just reduces so much anxiety. Also, I’m not going to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it also immensely improves the quality of your sleep. The context that I want people to hear about, that is the biggest game changer of all of them, and this is the one that I feel everybody, once they adopt it, will think, okay, I can get behind this. That’s the low energy context. Can you talk a little bit about that idea?

David Allen: Sure. Well, there’s, you know, we all have different forms and different amounts of, and types of energy during any 24 hour period. So, there’s certain times when you should not be making an important phone call to an important person, because you’re not, you’re not there, you know. You’ve been in, you’ve been five meetings and beat up in four of them, and you’re absolutely toast. The best thing you could do then is water your plants or fill your stapler, because you have to do those at some point anyway. So, when your brain is toast, do brain toasty things like that that you’re going to have to do anyway. So, organizing things oftentimes by how much energy is required, or how much time is required. I’ve probably seen 25 or 30 or 40 different contexts, people have used people have used. Hey, when I’m brain dead, here’s what I do, and they actually organize that way. Here’s all the things that required very little mental energy, and so when I have very little mental energy, let me still be productive and do that. So, as opposed to, you know, play chess or go or solitaire on my computer, let me go, you know, turn this screw and turn that screw, and just do some dumb, dummy kind of things, but still get that stuff done, so that certainly can be, you know, a way to categorize these, but again, there’s no right or wrong way to do that, some people find that useful, some people find, hey, you know, I’ve even got a category in my system of creative writing, I used to have only one category of called at computer, and a lot of my creative writing stuff tasks that I need to do, or might want to do, would be on that ad computer list, but then I look at that ad computer list, there’d be so many things, a lot of that just be the day to day business stuff that I needed to do at the computer, but it included, because it included those things that required a lot of creative mental energy, I tend to avoid the whole list. Then, as soon as I split it out, and then said, “Hey, here’s creative writing projects at the computer, so I could see those in their own category. So, when I was in the frame of mind where I actually had the time and space and mental energy to do those, that was cool, and it also took the pressure off the other list, so I could just crank that stuff out. I didn’t need to have a lot of creative energy available to me, so hopefully that wasn’t too sophisticated for people listening to this, but that’s, that’s, you know, what you’re getting at. There are could be a lot of ways that make, make a difference about how you remind yourself what map do. Need to see to orient yourself, given where you are,

Zack Arnold: And again, this just goes back to this idea of running to the grocery store six times for six items. If you organize your day like that, you’re going to get less done, and you’re going to be more exhausted. And if you manage your energy that way, the same thing is going to happen. And probably one of the most common questions that people ask me when I’m speaking, or if I’m, you know, on Facebook, or whatever it is, they’re like, how in the world are you managing all of these things and getting seven hours of sleep every night? It’s because I’m managing my energy the same way that I would manage a grocery list. So it’s funny that you brought up the writing context, because I have the same thing, and what I’ve done is I’ve kind of almost separated my context into specifically context, like we’ve talked about, but then I have mindsets, so one of my mindsets is I’m in a creative writing space, and I’m writing a blog, or you know, we’ll use that one as an example. So when I click on that context and omni focus, the only thing that I’ll see is outline current blog post about x, and then the next step is, you know, write first draft of blog post about X, everything else goes away, and it just, again, it’s that sense of relief, like, all right, I’m in a creative writing mindset right now, these are the things that need to be done in that mindset, and then conversely, like, just for example, yesterday I was just totally worn out at like five or 6pm and I had a fairly sizable list of high energy tasks, and I’m like, you know what, I’m just not doing these today. Clicked on low energy context, and I got a bunch of stuff done, even though I was just kind of sitting there and tired. I’d got some bills paid, and I took care of a couple of glitches that I had on my website. These are things that I kept putting off, thinking, you know what, they’re not urgent, but I’m going to do them. I just need to wait until my energy is lower, and bam, they all got done, and it required no energy, because that’s where I put them and organize them.

David Allen: Yeah, cool.

Zack Arnold: So, where I want to go now is this idea of the review process. We’ve processed all of our information, we’ve created a giant inbox, they’re separated into projects, and now I’m narrowing them down to context, so my list can go from 300 actions to four based on where my mindset is, or where I am physically, as far as the location, but I need to make sure that I keep up with this, and it keeps working, because I know that’s a huge stumbling block, and it’s actually one of my largest stumbling blocks, is that you keep this up so well, but then life does get overwhelming, and then all of a sudden you come back a week later when you haven’t been in your task manager of choice, and all of a sudden there’s a lot of red flags, a lot of red circles. What, however, your system works, you’re like, oh my god, like now even this has become overwhelming. So, talk a little bit about the review process and how to manage that, and maybe how often you should do it to really kind of keep the process moving smoothly.

David Allen: Well, your last question, simple answer, as often as you need to to have a clear head. So, there have been times when I had to do what we call a weekly review, called look through every one of my lists, look through every single thing I might should be doing two or three times a day in order to stay afloat, given how fast things were changing, new opportunities and challenges showing up literally by the hour, so but for the most part you just need to have some regular interval where you sit down and pull up the rear guard. Everybody listening to this has had stuff happen in the last, you know, 2345, days that actually represent something that they’re committed to finish, that’s going to take more than one action to finish it, but they haven’t had time to sit down and actually think about what exactly that is. What’s the project and what’s the next action? They just know they have it, so the truth is, it’s like it’s like the challenge is, when are you going to do that? When are you going to hold the world back for at least an hour or two and catch up with all that new stuff? The problem is, as soon as your system gets out of date, as you said, with all those red flags and all those things, or whatever, then some part of you says, “Oh my god, it’s out of date, it’s going to be too much trouble to keep it up. I can’t trust the system anyway, because it’s out of date. I’ll go back to my head. So, you fall off the wagon, so pretty easy to fall off the wagon. Good news is, it’s pretty easy to get back on. You just implement the process again. Hey, wait a minute, just sit down, you know, hold, you know, close the door, hold the world back, empty your head, go through all your stuff and catch it up, so it’s not a big rocket science event to catch up, but it certainly is a huge habit to build in, you know, to be able to do that regularly and consistently to keep everything current.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, really making it habit is key, and I think, like you said, when you fall off the wagon, everybody’s going to fall off the wagon, and that’s the difference between having a program and having a system. If you have a program, I use P 90x as an example a lot, and I love P 90x and I love Tony Horton. When you define your success in the program by completion over a period of 90 days, when you’re on day 17 and you’re exhausted and you quit, and you’re like, oh, I missed that day, oh man, well, now it’s P 94x If I keep going, I quit, I give up, I’m done. But GTD isn’t a program, it’s a system, so yeah, you fall off the wagon, you’re like, all right, well, I wake up the next morning, and where do I go? I go to step one, so that can be really, really powerful and liberating. I believe

David Allen: We use the image in our trainings of the surfer surfing a big wave, you know, and mined like water, sometimes water for. Feels like that, some huge waves, lots of foam, lots of whatever going on, but it’s cool if you have a board to be able to surf the wave on, which GTD can provide. It’s a way to surf on top of your game. However, what’s going to happen to every good surfer, no matter what? They’re going to fall off, but you’ll notice, you know, most every surfer has something called an ankle tether, right? This little strap around their ankle that’s tied to this little rubber thing that’s tied to the board. Why do they have an ankle tether? So they can get back on really easy. Guess what? The more you can trust you have an ankle tether, the bigger ways you’ll be willing to surf. So, what you just described is once you understand the system and understand the systematic approach, and you built that into knowing how to do that. It’ll let you take bigger risks and let you throw yourself. As a matter of fact, if you’re not falling off your game, you know fairly regularly, you may not be playing a big enough game. It’s not about always being in some sartorial, you know, meditative state. Oh heavens, no, come on. It’s really about just being able to recognize when I’m on and when I’m off, and when recognizing when you’re off, how to get back on very fast.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that kind of goes back to this idea of the martial arts and kind of the zen-like state of saying that I don’t even know who to attribute it to. Maybe you do. It’s a fairly common saying, but if you’re afraid of something, you need to run towards it as fast as possible, because that’s where growth happens. So, if your GTD system is super easy to manage, and you don’t have a lot going on, and you know you’re keeping up with everything. Maybe it’s time to, you know, take some bigger risks in your life and go after things that are a little bit more intimidating, because once the system is there, you can scale it. So, like, kind of going back to the review conversation for a second. For me, in general, I’ll probably do a review every two weeks if life is fairly status quo. If things are crazy, I’ll either do one of two extremes. One is I’ll do the review process more often, but sometimes I’ll actually do it less often, because I’m just focused on one project, and I say, all right, I know that if I escape the outside world for three weeks, let me look at the list first. Do I have any urgent bills? Do I have any urgent meetings, whatever it is. Okay, you know what? I’m just going to completely ignore the system and only focus on one project, but then I come back and the system is there. So I love the ankle tether. I had never heard that analogy before, but that’s the perfect analogy for just knowing that it’s always going to be there. You fall off or you choose to jump off, the tether is there and you can always get back on, so that’s the beauty of having that system.

David Allen: Well, Zack, you actually described the system. The system is not just the physical system with the content in it. The system is the behavior you have in engaging with it. So, the system is that that you’ve got. So, that’s the whole idea is building in an approach that says I can trust most people feel best about their professional work about a week before they go on a big holiday. Why is that? Well, what do you think they’re doing a week before you go on a big holiday? You’re checking all your stuff. Will this wait? Will this wait? No, that won’t wait. I have to handle that, but whatever. Basically, you get your life in order, so that you can go play golf, or surf, or swim, or, you know, ski, or whatever the hell you do when you’re going on vacation, but the reason you have nothing on your mind is because you actually manage systematically to renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and everybody else, so you can be clear. I just suggest you do it weekly, not yearly.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, that’s a fantastic analogy that I think really hits the point home of, oh yeah, I’ve been through that, of course, like for a week I feel totally liberated because I know everything’s taken care of, and I can walk away, but you can do that every Sunday night and feel that way for the following week,

David Allen: Exactly.

Zack Arnold: And then you don’t feel like you always need a vacation, like I like vacations as much as anybody else, but because the amount of information coming in and the amount of things I need to do don’t become overwhelming, I don’t feel that sense of, oh my god, I have to escape, I’m totally burned out, I’m overwhelmed, and I just need to get away. That doesn’t happen once you start to develop this system. Now that I, we’ve really talked about the system in depth, and people kind of get a sense of, here’s the workflow. Now we do want to get into the tech just a little bit, and again, I want to emphasize, before we do that, this system can be done with Post-Its and pencils, like, so it’s not about the tech, but there have been so many developments specifically around the system, not just in task management and to-do lists in general, but entire apps or programs that have driven their entire business philosophy towards serving the GTD community. So, can you talk about some of the things that you’ve kind of gravitated towards that really understand the system well and implement it well in their tech,

David Allen: Frankly, that Zack, they’re all just list managers, because once people caught this, they say all I need are lists, and they just have multiple different kinds of bells and whistles they built into list managers, so if you wanted to use things to less complex than than Omnifocus, you know, in the iOS platform, but they’re all just the same thing, frankly. There was no better list manager than the Palm Pilot, so you know, too bad it went away, because it was so easy to use. It was so simple. So all these things are simply list managers, that’s all they are. Now, you know, when you get into Azana, when you get into other things, where you know people are, and even be. Know business Evernote, where people can actually share lists. Yeah, kind of, you, you sort of add to the complexity of the confusion, because now you have multiple people that have to, then you know, agree to their own heuristics about how they’re supposed to manage these and what goes on these lists, and who needs to see them, and why. But for the most part, for people, just personally, kind of, you know, there’s there’s a new one showing up every week, that’s why my new edition of the book, I unhooked from even mentioning a whole lot of software, because it’s changing so rapidly, and there there really is no difference in the in the ultimate way between what all these tools are, other than the complexity, so you’ve obviously driven into Omnifocus, because it allows you to do that and create some stuff, some levels of sophistication that other programs won’t let you do, but it, as you know, it took, took you a while to figure that out, and how, and how to work it, so, but so software is great, as long as you have the, it, once you get this, once you get the, the GTD methodology, you can make anything work, if you don’t have it, you’re just going to keep buying software, trying to make the software make it work, and you’re screwed.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I’m very glad that you brought that up. And I had a feeling that that was going to be your answer, because I really want to emphasize again that it’s not about the technology, like if you’re listening and thinking, “Oh, where’s the GTD app? There isn’t one, because it’s not tech, it’s not a list builder, it is a mindset, and it’s a system for processing this information, so I wanted to make sure and really emphasize that, and I think that anybody that’s listened to my show in the past has been scratching their head for the last five minutes, saying why in the world have you not mentioned Trello yet, because I am a huge proponent of Trello, I live my entire life in it, I’ve taught an entire course on lynda.com all about how to use Trello, but when it comes specifically to individual task management, I like Omni Focus because of my ability to manage multiple projects across multiple contexts, and by simply clicking one little tiny icon, have it tell me this is the only thing you have to focus on right now, all of which can be done in Trello, but I actually believe it’s more complicated, so I have kind of a hybrid version of Omnifocus and Trello when it comes to managing projects, and Omnifocus is not something you can do with teams, you can’t like share an Omnifocus list or collaborate. So, if you’re thinking, well, how do I manage this with people, Omnifocus is not going to do it. But to me, Omnifocus has kind of been like my personal assistant, like just tell me what I need to do today. Okay. Thank you. Omnifocus. Now I know what I need to do today, because I can’t afford a personal assistant. So that is why I haven’t mentioned Trello for everybody. That’s like, where in the world does Trello fit in? I personally like Omnifocus for personal task management, and then for team communication and task management. Trello is what I personally use and teach, but you know, Asana is another one, Base Camp is another one, like it’s again, it’s just not, it’s not about the tools, it’s about how you use them,

David Allen: That’s right.

Zack Arnold: So, that being the case, given that we are both into productivity, I want to make sure that I am respectful of your time, and I want to make sure that you know I’m not going to be taking away any of the precious time that you would need to do to enact all of your lists and projects and to-do’s, but if there were one takeaway, somebody listens to this and they hear all this information and they say this sounds great and there’s so much to do, just give me one thing to get started. What’s the action step to get people moving right after they get off this, right after they’re done listening to this conversation?

David Allen: Well, the basic truth is your head’s for having ideas, but not for holding them. So get rid of stuff in your head, write it down, throw it in front of you, make next action decisions about every one of those things, and then watch what happens.

Zack Arnold: So if people want to go deeper, they’re sold on this idea, they want to learn more about GTD, they want to get your book, and they want to learn more about you. I want to make sure I’m sending everybody to the right place to get things done, so how do we do that?

David Allen: Well, gettingthingsdone.com pretty easy place to start, and my book is wherever books are sold, and the new edition of Getting Things Done is worth a read, or two, or three, or four, or five.

Zack Arnold: Yes, and I cannot emphasize that enough, because clearly I’m a believer, and one thing that I’ve actually done, and I don’t worry, I’m not going to trademark this or anything, but I’ve actually created my GSD system, which is my getting done system, so that’s actually the calendar that I have in my calendar app, is Zack GSD. So I’ve just kind of repurposed it and given it a little bit of a bit of a bit of attitude, but don’t worry, I won’t take any credit from you. So that having been said, this has been a tremendous pleasure having you on the show. I’m glad we could finally make this happen, and I wish you the best in everything that you are currently pursuing.

David Allen: Thanks, Zack. My pleasure. That’s fun.

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The Zen-like Art of ‘Getting Things Done’ | with David Allen

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