This is episode six, continuing our discussion of Step Five of the Workflow Diagram / Map, Engage (Doing), in our nine-part series on the Getting Things Done (GTD) personal productivity methodology and eponymously-titled book, from the perspective of the ProductivityCast team–as long-term practitioners, critics and observers of GTD.

It makes sense that each of [the Horizons of Focus] levels should enhance and align with the ones above it. In other words, your priorities will sit in a hierarchy from the top down.David Allen

In this cast, we finish our discussion of the concept of Engage / Engaging (formerly Do / Doing) on your system on a frequency and in methods that work for you, so that you can iterate on your productivity and make strategic next action decisions as your life and work circumstances change.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://productivitycast.net/044 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

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In this Cast | Doing - Getting Things Done (GTD)

Ray Sidney-Smith

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Doing - Getting Things Done (GTD)

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

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life by David Allen

Tony Schwartz - The Energy Project - ultradian rhythm

Skedpal

The Power of Intuition by Gary Klein, PhD

Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein, PhD

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R, Covey, PhD

The 8th Habit by Stephen R. Covey, PhD

First Things First by Stephen R. Covey, PhD, Rebecca Merrill, and A. Roger Merrill

Remember the Milk

Trello

Asana

15,000 Feet: The Space Between Projects and Areas of Focus and Responsibility

Franklin Covey Mission Statement Builder

The table below is sourced from the GTD® Personal Productivity System in Google Sheets template.

Horizons of FocusContextAltitudeQuestionGroundNext-ActionsRunwayWhat is it? What’s the desired outcome?1Projects10,000 feet levelIs it actionable? What’s the next action? (Does it have more than one next action?)What has to happen first?What does doing look like?Where does it happen?2Areas of Responsibility20,000 feet levelWhat do I need to maintain?3Short-Term Goals30,000 feet levelWhat do I want to achieve?4Long-Term Goals40,000 feet levelWhat would long-term success look, sound and feel like (usually further than two years)?If you were wildly successful in the coming years, what do you imagine or see yourself doing or being?5Purpose/Mission50,000 feet levelWhy/How am I (are we)?

Raw Text Transcript | Doing - Getting Things Done (GTD)

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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Unknown 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. Welcome back everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm recently Smith. I'm Francis Wade. And I'm Arthur Gelwicks. And we are here today to continue our episode from last week where we started talking about getting things done the art of stress free productivity. And the next step in the workflow diagram where the final step in the workflow diagram which is engaging or the former term doing, we ended the discussion last week talking about the threefold model of work and then we started into the four criteria model. So far, we covered contexts and time available and now what we're going to do is continue our conversation with me.

Unknown 1:00

And priority. And then we're going to talk about the six level model, which most people know as the horizons of focus. So let's continue on from where we were discussing last week, which is the next two steps in the four criteria model for choosing work in the moment, and that's energy and then priority, how do you all deal with energy as it really as it is a resource that we need to be productive in our systems? How do you how do you kind of manage energy in your own productivity system and or tools?

Unknown 1:38

Yeah, well, I don't, I don't organize by energy. It's not the primary criteria for me, time is the primary criteria. But if I have to choose between different kinds of activities,

Unknown 1:52

for example, how do I use a time that's between eight and 10am and how do I use it differently from a time between five and

Unknown 2:00

6pm or five and 7pm, both of them are two hour slots. But the choices that I make our own it to 10 do use energy, they not a parameter criteria, like I said, but it is an important one. So I, I prefer to do my creative kind of work between six and 10 in the morning between five and seven in the evening. I not very good at doing creative, not not heavy duty creative work, it's just too much. So I have an idea in my mind of when I'm best able to do certain kinds of tasks using a certain level of energy. I buy into the idea of bio rhythms to some degree, and I realized that each person has his or her own preferences, or your synchronicities but I think they're important. In fact, though,

Unknown 2:52

I have to agree with Francis I don't use it as my primary measure and guiding criteria.

Unknown 3:00

area for what I'm going to do and when I'm going to do it, but I do make sure I'm aware of it because I know it can be a major detrimental factor. If I don't take it, take it into consideration. There are certain points during a day that I know I am basically worthless for certain types of tasks. So I have to I have to plan around those. If I want to get the most out of any given day. Am I always successful? No, not even close. But being aware of those and taking that little bit of time to assess my energy levels and then say, Okay, this type of work works best when I'm in this type of a mindset or feel. It does help quite a bit. It reduces the friction doesn't guarantee success, but it definitely reduces the chance of failure. And for me, I am someone who, who definitely uses energy in in my world and I'm actually fairly focused different than you guys I'm fairly focused on

Unknown 4:00

on developing for myself a system where I'm aware of all of my biological necessities of being productive, and I really, I'd fall on the line of if there is a aside in that regard that you really need to focus on your ability to be biologically available, you know, fully fit to be productive before you start fiddling with tools and fiddling with with ways in which you can, quote unquote, hack your system. And so energy is one of those broad resources that I think can be maligned, if you start to think about it too much, then it becomes needle in a haystack to find the right thing to organize and categorize so I've just chosen focus that is my my ability to attend to the current state of something as my as my quote unquote energy and in my system

Unknown 5:00

I have various tags that allow me to identify how much energy something will need. I've chosen just a three part scale so that I don't get overly complicated, you know, because once you start having a five point scale of high, you know, medium, high, high medium, you then medium low and low, it just becomes way too cumbersome to to decide what the nuance is there for me. So I've just chosen three parts high, medium and low energy. And in essence, those actually only require then two tags. One is E plus for me, high energy and a minus. Basically, I could do this whenever I have low attentional abilities. And, you know, I'm not highly focused that gives me the ability to look at my my tasks and say, at any given moment, what are the things that I think I can do?

Unknown 6:00

If I'm really feeling as you know, we've heard colloquially, in the, in the GTD world, brain dead. And so some people have a brain dead context. And, you know, you fill in the staplers you're sharpening the pencils, so to speak, I use that for when I, when I really am in that state of, I just need to do a little bit of mind wandering. But I want to be doing something physical, those are typically going to be the low energy tasks. And this actually matches up with the work of Tony Schwartz and the energy project and the understanding of what's called the old trading rhythm. And so folks should really pay attention to your trading rhythm, you should know what it is basically it's a it's a, an up and down cycle that follows the the mapping of your circadian rhythm. So once you identify your general circadian rhythm, then you know that there's an up 90 minute cycle and down and down 90 minute cycle that you go through throughout the course of your day. So that other

Unknown 7:00

90 minutes is when you have high focus. And that down 90 minutes is when you have low focus. But that doesn't mean that you don't have energy to use. It's just that your mind takes time off every 90 minutes to do that kind of what we call memory consolidation. It does mind wandering, for purposes of pattern recognition. It does problem solving all of those kinds of creative thinking....