Over the next nine episodes, we are going to be in conversation about Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. We are going to talk about each of the steps in the GTD Workflow Diagram / Map. We will cover capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting and engaging, then a discussion about Weekly Review. Finally, we will cover what we wish we knew when we started our GTD practices many years ago.

In this first cast in this series, we discuss GTD's first step in the Workflow Diagram / Map, Capture. Capture is more than simply writing things down. GTD gives us a cohesive method for getting all of our incompletes and commitments into places where you know you'll look at it again.

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In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes

Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Getting Things Done Virtual Study Group (live call-in discussion and podcast)

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Perfect Time-Based Productivity (2nd Edition) by Francis Wade

Google Keep

OmniFocus

Amazon Echo Devices (voice-based assistant)

Remember the Milk

Evernote

Livescribe smartpen and notebooks

Everlast reusable notebooks (not the Wave Rocketbooks - do not microwave these!)

Amazon Kindle

How to Escape the Zeigarnik Effect

Francis has a self-assessment for Capturing Skills: https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=how-good-are-you-at-capturing

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

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Voiceover Artist 0:00

Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

Welcome back everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. This is Episode 039 Episode 39 of ProductivityCast. And today I am joined by Augusto Pinaud, Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Welcome to the show, Gentlemen.

Unknown 0:35

Good morning. Great to be here.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:38

Good morning, everybody. Over the next nine episodes, we are going to be in conversation about getting things done the art of stress free productivity by David Allen. We're going to talk about each of the nine steps in the GTD workflow diagram slash map. And we will cover capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting and engaging and then have a discussion about the weekly review. Finally, we will cover what we wish we knew when we started our GTD practices many years ago. In the final two episodes, I think it'll be really interesting for us all to kind of look at this from the different perspectives we have on getting things done. Some of us are GTD practitioners, some of us are not some of us have been critics of some of these parts of the book. And some of us have been great advocates and enthusiasts for it. So I think it'll be really interesting for us to be able to have a conversation about each of these pieces. And Up first is the concept of collecting and or capturing David Allen started by calling it collecting and the collection habit, as he used to call it, and still does actually in the second edition. And then he led into calling it capturing and I think they still Harken the same feelings for me in terms of what the functional action is associated with capture. But let's get into it and start off with how do you define capture as a function with your in your own productivity system? And how to David Allen's material confirm your thoughts about it. Change your thoughts about it as you were developing yours. Let's start off with a gusto. Since since you probably have been talking about this publicly, longer than any of us, starting with the GTD virtual study group what and how did did the capture habit the collection habit affect you when you first came into contact with it? And and how does that how has that changed from then to now

Augusto Pinaud 2:35

I came to GTD on I was a big coffee fan but I wasn't necessarily a great collector of information, the capture part of the getting things done really make a difference for me and and I embrace it pretty quick. Because I understood the power of that to this day. I can I can can capture things that may see not necessary to capture him, then I can purge them later. But I I'm pretty good at capturing. And the reason is it allows me to do two things. One, it allows me to empty the brain that he's always a good thing. But also it allows me to have the peace of mind that I'm not letting things go. Processing then is another story. But we will get that into next week. But capturing for me was I'm my tools over time has changed my love for capturing half notes. But we will talk more about that today. In the show.

Francis Wade 3:37

I had attended a training program before doing GTD and I as I mentioned that last episode, I'd been teaching a training program. And what that program had in common with GTD was that they're both process oriented. So I think GTD borrowed from the process movement of the 90s the business process reengineering take us movement and came up with a workflow of activity that was laid out in a linear fashion all the time. So when I ran the GTD, the concepts were were of capturing and others were pretty familiar to me. So I had already heard them was already using them was already teaching them. So it didn't offer a whole lot that was new to me at the time. So it didn't strike me as different over time. That's changed. But I think you're looking for the initial just initial reaction

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:30

when you came to contact with the original construct, even if it wasn't through David Allen. I mean, was it something that was there something that stood out,

Francis Wade 4:37

you know what I mean? Like, I'm just curious, yeah, sure. It sure did. It was the it put into Sato relief what I had actually been doing and what other people have been doing, because I wasn't the first to capture and neither neither was David Allen. And in my book actually referenced the fact that we all start capturing at around the AIDS around age 10 or 11 in are using our minds. And, you know, Ben Franklin was doing it according to what he wrote about it. So it's not a new, it's not a new concept. What he did was to, to put it into words in a book for the first time that that was his, I'll say, his hit that part that he added that no one else had done before, as clearly as he had done

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:22

right. And he says as much in the book, you know, that these aren't new concepts. He just basically gathered them together into a cohesive system. And one can appreciate that when I first saw it,

Art Gelwicks 5:35

I'll be brutally honest, my reaction was, Hey, I wasn't amazed. I wasn't impressed. I wasn't shocked her in all. And a lot of the things have already been mentioned, it seemed I don't want to say reductive, it was very much everything that had already been out there, it was boiled down, it was calcified in a way where business people could say, Oh, I have a book, I can go through this process, I can do this. And supposedly I will be successful. I mean, this is I was doing some looking up that the book was first published in 2001, palm pilots were out in 1997. So the concept of digital capture was starting to become mainstream for years before the book ever hit the market. I was a day planner kid for years, I was one of those geeks in high school that had a day planner. So the concept of capture was not necessarily new or innovative. I think what the book did, though, and it's one of those watershed moments that you find in pretty much anything, it gave it a lens, it gave it a focus to be able to say, Okay, this is something that you should be doing, regardless of all these other disparate systems, there's a process here that you can follow to be able to do this. And to me, that's where the capture part of this kind of flipped over. I don't want to use the term jump the shark, but it makes that leap, instead of just taking the post it notes. It's like capturing for a reason.

And it still has that connection today, capture for an ultimate purpose. And when you go back and you say GTD, GTD has become the Kleenex brand equivalent of productivity where everybody kind of knows what you're sort of talking about when you mention it. But it doesn't change the core piece of it. Of the capture, which I think like Francis said, we've been doing this for a long time, everybody does that. You learn that in school, you learn that in elementary school to write things down. It's just writing things down with a specific purpose.

Augusto Pinaud 7:46

You see, I I agree. I and I wanted a Palm Pilot. Good. Okay, I save the time I was I'm not going to say how much of my salary save and I work side why to be able to afford my first pump pilot. But But I was the I had before the pump pilot, a Casio planner that or electronic thing I was always electronic guys. So I had a Casio one that had the thing that you could not backup. So every weekend,