April 6, 2006

David Allen and GTD

Recently I had an illuminating day attending a David Allen Roadmap Seminar in Santa Monica. Jon has written in the past about Allen, and I’d like to share some of my thoughts on Allen’s system and philosophy as well.

David Allen, in case you were wondering is a human productivity black belt and author of the best-selling book, Getting Things Done. His system, now labeled GTD for short is a series of structured productivity schemes you can apply to your life in every way. On a surface level it comes across as a rigorous form of list making: you write down every single thing you wish to accomplish in your life, from the most mundane to the most profound; whatever has your attention at that moment. From there, you continue writing down things you wish to remember for the future the moment they come to you. These can be projects in the garden, goals for your next sales quarter, remembering phone calls, whatever. The overarching point here is that your brain is not something that was meant to store information. In fact, the more information you are constantly trying to remember, the more stress you have in your life because of the strain involved in making sure you have everything accounted for. This rings incredibly true to me, and indeed, another phrase Allen uses to describe GTD is “advanced common sense”.

This isn’t a system that Allen wants you to use solely as way of getting more projects done at work, despite the fact that most of the people attending the session with me were business professionals. On the contrary, while his system is acutely useful in the business world, Allen’s ambition with GTD goes farther. Throughout the day he convincingly applied it to the accomplishment of goals at home, in personal relationships, hobbies, (i.e. planning what audio books you want to listen to) and the establishment of lifetime goals. You are also asked to reflect upon what you’ve done every week so that you are constantly keeping up and in focus on what you are trying to do and what underpins what you are trying to do.

I have since begun implementing some of GTD into my life and it has relieved the pressure I’ve attached to what I do in almost every way. You wouldn’t believe how good it feels to write down everything you think about in a given day. When you see it, you can break it down into the actions it takes to get it done, and once you have all of that figured out, it simply isn’t taxing you any longer. Imagine being able to rid yourself of the daily torture that comes from not knowing if you’re doing exactly what you could be doing to reach your potential. I’m not saying I’m a yellow belt with this GTD stuff or even that I will follow everything talked about in the seminar to the letter. I don’’t think Allen is pushing strict adherence; instead he is providing a model of task assessment that can filter out any associated anxiety. It is a very durable framework and you can find many different ways to work it into your routine.

As I said earlier, David Allen’s primary book on the subject is Getting Things Done. He also has a second book which is available through us called Ready for Anything. Take a look, I honestly think you’ll find something valuable here.