Getting Things Done: The Roadmap

These notes have been posted on some previous sites of mine, but this is “home” for them now!

given by David Allen, August 17, 2005, San Jose, CA

Notes by Terrie Miller. See more info about my class notes here.

I had a great opportunity to go to the Getting Things Done: The Roadmap seminar.

GTD Roadmap is on one hand an attempt to distill the methods from David Allen’s book, Getting Things done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. On the other hand, the seminar goes beyond the book and fills in details that are difficult to grasp.

Our workbooks included some exercises that were nothing more than fill-in-the-blank as the presentation went along, yet it really helped to keep me engaged with the seminar. I’m always intrigued by these little “tricks” to get the brain to do what you want. It made me wonder if they’ve been reading Kathy Sierra’s blog. (Of course there are also more substantial exercises in the workbook — in fact, I’ll probably be carrying it back and forth to work for a couple of weeks as I implement some of what I’ve learned).

There are some extensive and useful notes from the seminar on Buzz Bruggeman’s site. But here are some concepts and/or off-the-cuff quotes from Allen that I added to my workbook during the day.

  • Teams always work better together in a crisis. The key is to figure out how to get high-performance behavior without the stress.

  • “You’ll give as much bandwidth to buying a quart of milk as you will to buying a company. The mind is a good servant but a terrible master.”

  • Matrix of self-management: vertical axis is “Vision” - top is the visionary, bottom is the “don’t know what’s going on”. Horizontal axis is “Control” - at left is “out of control”, at right is “in complete control”. Quadrants: lower left: the Victim. Lower right: the Compulsive. Upper left: the Crazy-Maker (implementation is for schmucks!). Upper right: the Commander. Allen works with a lot of Crazy-Makers.

  • If you decide you need to clean your garage, but you put it off for six years, there’s a part of your mind that thinks you should have been cleaning your garage 24/7 for six years. If you can park that on a list, it will get out of your “psychic RAM” - your brain can let go of it and more of its resources are available to work on other things.

  • The real payoff in ALL of this is that you can free up your brain for higher-level thinking and creativity.

  • “As soon as you know how many agreements you’ve made, you’ll start making fewer!”

  • For reading stacks/list out of control: put all of your to-read objects in one place. The sheer volume will make you think differently about new stuff that comes in.

  • There’s a real psychic “win” that comes from crossing things off a to-do list. Sometimes so much so that people will write down things they’ve already done just so they can check them off!

  • Anything that’s a “problem” is a “project” (see below).

  • The biggest reason for people leaving a job is their boss. It’s usually a value issue — something important to them isn’t being valued.

  • “When in doubt, clean up your email.” (sometimes you just need to get active on *something* instead of wallowing)

  • When you have an inbox, if you put reference material into it, you’ll get numb to the inbox. File the reference material, get it out of “in”.

  • A “project” is something you *finish*. A “project” is also anything that takes more than one action to complete and is finished within the year. (If it’s more than this, it’s probably an “area of responsibility” or a “value”.

  • It’s fine to have multiple next actions for one project. There isn’t a one-to-one mapping between projects and actions.

  • Most professionals have 150-170 next actions at any given time. You must sort them by context to make sense of them.

  • This system is somewhat complex. But complexity calls for a complex system. One to-do list doesn’t work because you drown in items.

  • There aren’t any good software solutions for seeing next actions by both category and by context. Grouping by project doesn’t work because most people don’t work by project. Most people work based on context.

  • The higher level the view, the less complex your system needs to be. Your purpose/values level is probably just a text paragraph, but your daily emails and to-dos need more structure for tracking.

  • The system needs care and feeding to sustain. If the lists aren’t complete, they aren’t really worth it; your brain won’t trust them.

  • Next action: has to be granular enough that the brain stops trying to think about it. You need to finish the thinking process.

  • Use “draft” instead of “write” (less intimidating to have “draft proposal to yada yada” on your list than “write proposal”)

  • Make your next actions win-able…eg. it’s “look for receipt”, not “find receipt” (you may NOT find it, but you need to look)

  • How often to review? If it’s on your mind, it’s time to review.

  • Vertical map, 50,000 ft: when thinking about critical behaviors for success, can be helpful to think in terms of behaviors that have prevented success in the past (withholding information, burning out). Ask “We are at our best when…”

  • Vertical map, 40,000 ft, Vision: tip: get the team to write the WSJ article about their future success.

  • Projects: anything that takes more than one action and is completed within a year.

  • Projects should be written in the form of completed goals. Eg. it’s not “make a plan for”, it’s “implement”.

  • A complete project list is the most powerful of all the lists, but it’s the most rarely found.

  • Your system is only as good as it works when you have the flu and feel like crap. Simplicity is key (but not oversimplification).

  • Lots of things we think of as next actions are actually sub-projects; next actions need to be really granular.

  • It might be useful to keep a list of completed projects, but don’t bother with a list of completed next actions. It’s not worth it.

  • “How can I get my teenager on board with this?” “Tell them they’re not old enough for it.”

  • To get any of this to “stick”, must spend some time envisioning the results. “Reticular Activating System”. Have an image of having “mind like water”.

  • Comfort zone: need to change your internal standards. No emotional response is triggered while in the comfort zone.

  • Repetitive involvement. “Fake it till you make it.” — acting as-if is a powerful tool for getting there.

  • Always have to push thru the “Yeah, but…” (”Risk of the Visionary”).

  • We did an amazing paper clip exercise. I can show it to you sometime…

Great stuff (and those are only the “extra” things that I noted in the margins of the workbook). It was also nice to see some familar faces from ETech there. I have a hunch that the interest in GTD is partly a response to information overload culture. I was a big fan of the Franklin planner system and similar methods for a long time, but those methods seemed to fall apart for me over the past few years, and I think it’s because they just can’t handle the sheer volume of “stuff”.