This is episode nine, Reflections on GTD: What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part Two, and therefore the last 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.

In this cast, Augusto Pinaud, Francis Wade, Art Gelwicks and I discuss what we wish we knew when we first started or came across Getting Things Done, the book and methodology, as we tried to understand and/or implement it.

This certainly isn't the last time we'll talk about GTD, but we had a great time discussing GTD in this series and hope you enjoyed it, too!

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/047 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part Two

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part Two

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

Getting Things Done Virtual Study Group

Zeigarnik effect

GTD Fast audio program

Todoist

Waze (driving navigation app)

Raw Text Transcript | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part Two

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 0:16

Welcome back everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things productivity I'm recently Smith I'm joined here with August to pronounce Francis weight in our galaxy. Welcome to the show gentlemen.

Augusto Pinaud 0:28

Good morning.

Francis Wade 0:29

Thanks Ray.

Art Gelwicks 0:30

Morning. Hey guys, how's everything going,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:32

it's good to have all of us on the show again this week and and we're back at it with a continuation of the conversation we were having last week. And to fill you all in. If you haven't listened to Episode 46, hop on back over there and listen to Episode 46 at productivity cast.net forward slash 046. And you'll be able to hear the first part of our conversation about what we all wish we knew. When we started GTD, some of us are not GTD practitioners now, but we've all been acquainted with the material and have probably attempted to implement it at some level. And these are all things that we wish we had known when we first attempted to go ahead and implement. So I'm going to kick us off here with the first item that I really am thinking about as we continue the conversation from last week. Which is this idea of, of trusting your system. And so David Allen talks about trusting the your system. And and through this concept of trust, you'll be you'll be more comfortable with externalising your tasks and projects. And I'm very curious about what you will also have to say about this. Because when I first thought about that, it was a real game changer. For me. I felt very excited about this idea that if I trusted where I was good to put things, then then I was going to I was going to be able to know where I put things. And what I learned was that trusting your system isn't merely externalising those tasks and projects it really does fundamentally require you to go back to your projects, lists and your task list and work those lists. Right. If you're not maintaining them, then you very quickly erode the system. It's not just trusting your system from the fact that you're trusting yet you're capturing into it, you must remember that you're not just capturing. But you have to also be clarifying. You must also be organizing, you have to also be reviewing and doing the work. If you're not doing each of those stages, then the system can't be trusted. The tools that you're capturing into won't be trusted, because you're not coming back to your your brain basically says, Well, yes, you're putting these things in the system. And they're not getting done. Why should I trust where you're capturing externally, I've got to bring all of that stuff and back into my, into my mind's eye in order to be able to keep keep going. Because you're not, you're not actually getting those things done.

Augusto Pinaud 3:22

I came from a heavy or bro heavy, unbroken Seven Habits from the Highly Effective People. When I discovered GTD and there was a lot of things that were happening at the time. But one of them was that the role and the job and the responsibilities on the personal side has changed so much that they ABC one two tree wasn't caught it anymore on I was kind of drowning dot said one. The things that make my transition harder at the beginning was the fact that I trust

so much my ABC, one two tree system, it was broken. And I was on I understood that. And I understood I need a better thing. But But when I read that concept on the book, I wasn't completely agreement. Because

until you earn that trust, then if you don't have that trust, you are not going to go back and do all the work that is required to maintain that system. And that applies to getting things done

CABI put it into your arm doesn't matter. If you don't trust that that system is complete and functional, you are not going to do the necessary job to maintain it. So it stays functional. And what the sad part is, your system goes from fully update fully functional to broken in really the blink of an eye.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:11

And there's always going to be some level of of information that you retain in your mind, you know that it's not, it's not a complete letting go. It's it's the conscious stuff that tugs at you, that goes away, but there's still an unconscious tug. And and I think that's okay, I don't think there's anything wrong with your brain exercising those those memory muscles, so to speak,

Francis Wade 5:37

I think we've talked about the organic effect for for our listeners who might not remember or didn't catch that episode. It's the subconscious way of remaining, or pinging or conscious mind that there's something it's it's not, it's likely to forget, or likely to not remember, or, or is part of the system that's not trusted. So the idea is simple as that when you complete a task, the task disappears from memory, and your subconscious mind no longer holds on to it. But when a task is left incomplete, it keeps sort of sending the signals to your conscious mind. And if anyone has ever woken up in the middle of the night with justice, you know, in a panic that I forgot to do something, and that I remember to send that email to Mr. Smith that I was supposed to send yesterday at the beat the deadline and, and I think I forgot, and that's all those, the garlic effect. And what it does over time is that it It destroys our peace of mind, because it leads to a feeling of overwhelm, as our subconscious mind goes into overdrive and tries to hold on to all these demands on our time. All these promises and commitments that we've made, the good part is that there's recent research from a couple of guys that you University of Florida, which showed that if you have a trust, essentially, is to put it in the language that we're talking about today, if you put your tasks in a trusted system, then the guy Nick effect goes away. That's that was their big fanning. So essentially, it matches what David Allen was saying, in principle is that his he was right and dead on by saying that as as if you can deploy as many tasks as possible to your trusted system and not use memory, you will be doing yourself a great service and avoiding any sense of overwhelm the problem this is a Google said, which can happen in the flesh of an eye. And this is sort of weird David Allen goes a little too far my man is that if you have a huge influx of tasks, new project new baby just bought, the hose car broke down, all of a sudden, you have a lot of tasks demand is and therefore very little free time to manage them with is that you go back to almost as if you are just starting all over again, because of the guy Nick effect kicks right back in just as if you are a beginner who doesn't even have a task list.

And at that point, you've got to either mitigate if it's a temporary kind of thing, or change your system to match the number of tasks that you're trying to manage. And that's the part that David Allen didn't mention in his book, he just said, Do this part. And this will create a trusted system for you, I think, a lot of work but other people are no seeing and all the work that we're doing

in my shop shows that that's not true in the sort of the end all and be all sense that you've got to change your tactics depending on the number of tasks that you've got to manage. And being flexible. And being aware of this guy, Nick effect is sort of a way to the listen to your subconscious, and then change your tactics accordingly. And that's that's that's the piece that I would add in that he he doesn't mention,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:09

This is episode eight, Reflections on GTD: What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part One, and our second-to-last 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.

In this cast, Augusto, Francis and I discuss what we wish we knew when we first started or came across Getting Things Done, the book and methodology, as we tried to understand and/or implement it.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://productivitycast.net/046 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part One

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part One

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

Perfect Time-Based Productivity by Francis Wade

Getting Things Done for Teens: Take Control of Your Life in a Distracting World by David Allen, Mike Williams and Mark Wallace

GTD Fast audio program

Top 6 Mistakes GTD’ers Make

Raw Text Transcript | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part One

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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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 re Sydney Smith and a goose open out with Francis Wayne an art gallery.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:16

Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm recently Smith and I'm joined here today with acoustic burnout. And Francis Wade. Good morning, gentlemen. Good morning. Good morning. Morning. We are going to be talking today about what are the things that we wish we knew when we first learned about and attempted to implement getting things done getting things methodology, this closes out our series on the Getting Things Done methodology. It's certainly not the last episode will have about it. But it's certainly in this particular series, we wanted to close that we can pass along to you about getting things done. So that if you are just going getting started, or if you've been chugging along and having some level of success, and some two steps forward, one step back with getting things done, you'll hopefully learn a thing or two along the way with our conversation about how to get moving forward, get that momentum around areas that you might be having some problems. This topic was proposed by Augusto So, okay, so why don't you kick it off for us? Why don't you tell us a little bit about what brought this topic to mind. And your first thought about what you wish you knew when you started becoming a GTD practitioner,

Augusto Pinaud 1:38

it took me a while to to get into a solid system of getting things done. And there is a lot of things about the methodology that I think are extremely powerful. So so I want to start there because I don't want this to go into all this is your having this topic because this doesn't work. Because has nothing to do with that. I just wish that when people start reading the book, and when people start implementing, there were certain things that they were aware. So the process gets to be a lot less first training and a lot more productive. With that said, I would like to start with what David Allen called the Black Belt because at least to my knowledge, there is a lot of things said about what being a black belt means what you're going to experience what you are going to do and not do. But there is not that much information about the price. And the time that is going to take to be black belt, David Allen assumes that most people will read black belt and understand and will understand on it that it takes a significant amount of time in order to read there. The other thing is, there is no stages, you know, towards black belt. So you are a blowout, no belt, okay, then you read the book, now you are a white belt. And then suddenly, you need to end on a black belt. And I understand why he used that analogy. I wish that he will have spent a lot more time so people understand how they're progressing on on being how they're progressing and implementing getting things done. Because what happened is on the way it is right on the book, it is almost as well you read the book and you will be black belt. And that's not true. And,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:43

and I and I want to just poke in here just quickly to say that the the belt concept was something that really wasn't fleshed out in the book at all. And it was something that he he talked about in seminars and he talked about in many of his other media and and it comes comes from the fact that he had a martial arts background. He was a karate teacher. And so for people who had some experience with the martial arts this really resonated with them Case in point myself. So since I had that background, it was very in Chinese martial arts, which is where my background is my brother is a Chinese martial arts teacher and I had that background and we have sashes not belts but it was very easy to translate for what he meant by this concept of grading up by leveling up your system. But he never created a clear cut line between what was a beginner and how you made your way up through those levels. So I fully agree with you a gusto would would have been helpful to know what things allowed you to take your system to the next level where you should start and where you should finish he gives you kind of the the acceleration lane which is the the weekend project of the mind sweep and getting everything out of your system. And then going through the workflow diagram step by step. But he doesn't he didn't give you you know, after the weekend. What do you do the day after?

Augusto Pinaud 5:10

Well, by experienced you fell off the wagon.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:14

Francis, I wanted to I wanted to turn the conversation over to you. When when you first learned about GTD, what was your first experience with it. And what did you wish you knew when you came across that I picked up

Francis Wade 5:26

a another system actually taught another system in the early 2000s and use it heavily. And one of the key precepts was to put everything all of your all of your tasks in your calendar and thought it worked pretty well. Stop teaching the program trigger the you know, I was already baked. And then when I moved to Jamaica, from Florida ran into all kinds of problems, because I had way more demands on my time than before. So I think that the problem we're looking for a solution and I ran into GTD downloaded the app for look and figure based on what the book was telling me that I was doing everything wrong. So I went from scheduling everything to using the multiple lists that GTD talks about I was you know, after reading the book, so by must have gotten it all wrong. And things became worse. As a result. It took me about six months to a year to try as much as I could implement GTD it so I quit after about a year, went back to putting everything back in my schedule, figured out what was wrong with the way I was doing it, and then sort of sailed on from there.

So I ran into GTD a bit late in my sort of productivity game. And it wasn't until much later on that I really could explain why I did what I did, and why people make the kind of mistakes I made in implementing a fixed set of practices, which are sort of meant that when they're shared, their they're sort of written as if this will, this will last you for the rest of your career to go from that point to seeing them as just a suggested set of behaviors that are only temporary and that at some point, you have to change them for a number of reasons to get from that point to the next. I'll show you that in the next. And so but that's my introduction to GTD

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:22

for me. I feel like I entered GTD at exactly the right moment in my life. I don't know why. But it was a felt need that I didn't yet know how to express but when I came across the book, it filled that that need at that very moment. And so you know, my The first thing that I wish I knew about getting things done was that it's akin to, again, going back to the martial arts. And Bruce Lee's system that he developed was called g condo. And one of the primary tenants the G condo was to take of systems that which worked and get rid of the rest. It was this absolute utilitarianism of martial arts. And so it said, if this if this punch worked, if this kicked worked, if this block worked, if this strategy work, let's use this, but if it doesn't work, then let's cast it aside. And that became g condo. And with that martial arts analogy, I really wish I applied that to getting things done. Because I tried to use everything that GTD offered right out the gate and in reality and applying it to every aspect of my my life when in reality, GTD is in a way classified for me in the in the area or category of organizing, helps you organize the things you're not doing. And then after that,

This is episode seven, where we discuss the powerful productivity practice of the Weekly Review, 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.

“The Weekly Review is the time to: Gather and process all your stuff. Review your system. Update your lists. Get clean, clear, current, and complete. You have to use your mind to get things off your mind.” David Allen

In this cast, Augusto and I discuss the power of the Weekly Review and some of the hangups that keep people from doing the Weekly Review and flourishing with the practice consistently.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://productivitycast.net/045 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Weekly Review - Getting Things Done (GTD)

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Show Notes | Weekly Review - 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

Raw Text Transcript | Weekly Review - 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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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 re Sydney Smith and a goose open out with Francis Wayne an art gallery. Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Raisa D. Smith and have a good job you know and welcome back to our series on getting things done these last several episodes and the next couple of episodes we are covering all of the unique aspects the the fundamental components of getting things done the the methodology based on the book, getting things done the art of stress free productivity by David Allen and I am actually holding a copy of the march 2015 edition that David Allen put out almost three years ago and today August You and I are going to be talking about the weekly review and in that copy of the book, David Allen really calls the

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:00

Weekly Review one of the critical success factors and we're going to talk about three fundamental pieces one. Today we're going to talk about defining the weekly review in GTD terms, as well as in ways in which we really view the GTD weekly review construct today in our own systems. We're going to talk about our practice of the weekly review and what we've changed over time, how we have implemented the weekly review in our own systems today, and then some of the challenges that we all face in the implementation of the weekly review because the weekly review is a challenge for so many people. We're going to talk about how people really make the weekly review happen. So let's start off Augusta with how do you define the weekly review and what I will. What I'll do first is I will I will give David Allen's definition here. And what David Allen did is in the 2015 edition, he was so kind in the appendix to provide a goal.

We have terms like Glossary of getting things done terms. So he's given us some some definitions, which is actually really awesome. So under weekly review, he has the best practice. I'm quoting here from the book The best practice recommended of regrouping at an operational level once a week, bringing up the rear guard by getting clean, clear, current and creative to sustain week to week control and focus so good so how do you see the weekly review? Do you agree with that definition with David Allen in terms of it being what you do for your system and how does that approach work for you it does and I really believe on the impact of of the wiki review also I really agree with what he said that it is a fundamental part on on the success of getting things done and really anything you know, over the years working on

Augusto Pinaud 3:00

With people one of the things that I have seen with with a lot of these people is they don't have time to slow down to think to really be strategic about what is on their plate then instead of making good calls or or making decisions that will impact their goals, their objective and the direction they're taking, they tend to have a more reactive approach to life that at the end of the day, the only thing that it costs is a mess. The one way that I see the weekly review being the definition being lacking and and and this is what you know, due respect but the component for me that I really use a lot in my weekly review is that I break down my reviews based on monthly, quarterly and annual component.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:00

So there are things that I have checklists for that end up getting placed into my weekly reviews. So if you break up your year and two quarters, you know, that's, that's 13 weeks, every 13 weeks in my weekly review is a longer review. So from week to week, I'm not muddying the waters on my in my system by having these components bleed from from week to week, they are in essence in the checklist for those weeks. So I don't want people to misinterpret the fact that just because you're working from week to week, you don't have a longer view of the of your year and the and the things that needs to be done in them. So it's not it's not really that the the the definition is lacking so much that I want to make sure people know that they can be different reviews every week when we get to talk about how we do that review. I want to revisit this topic because there is a couple of things that I that I do that I have advise

Augusto Pinaud 5:00

people over the years couple of strategies that I think bring that variety to the weekly review on the time, energy and mindset that you put to it. So so when we get to that I would like to revisit this. This topic I want to before we move on to our own systems really cover the components of the of the of the weekly review, David Allen provides an 11 point checklist broken into three different sections. And I'm going to cover this just very briefly, for those of you who are listening and have never heard about the weekly review before. This will give you a good idea. And then I'm going to turn the mic over to Augusta to talk about how his practice of the weekly review is today versus from when he started and some of the things that both of us have modified over time. So David Allen, like I said, has it broken up into getting clear getting current and getting creative and under

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:00

Get clear, he calls us an initial stage where you collect all of your paperwork, you know, things that are lying around in paper, but also in digital and getting them into your in-tray or inbox where you can then zero them out. So you have collecting newspapers and materials, getting your inbox to empty and then emptying your head. In essence, you're doing a mini mind sweep so that you can get all those ideas about any new projects, action items waiting for us, and so on so forth. They're captured and clarified. Then we get into the get current stage where again, he talks about bringing up the rear guard and this is where you review your lists. And so as I was saying earlier, and my definition of the weekly review, I include the longer reviews because on those quarter months, quarters and then annual reviews, I'm doing those reviews as a part of my weekly review, but he says review your next actions lists review previous calendar in this case two to three weeks of calendars.

In the past to see if that brings up anything that you need to do for the future reviewing your upcoming calendar. So he says look to the long and short term calendar entries to see if there aren't things that you need to do for upcoming events. You know preparing for meetings are preparing for upcoming travel and meetings and so on. So forth review you're waiting for list so if you're waiting for things from someone, you can go ahead and capture those actions to follow up with those people you have reviewed projects and larger outcome lists that means evaluate evaluate the status and quoting here evaluate the status of projects goals and outcomes one by one ensuring that at least one kickstart action for each is in your system and quote then he says review any relevant checklists and this is where my longer term checklists would probably fit in so you review any checklist you that you need to get your various engagements interests and responsibilities as he says done then he gets to get creative and get creative is a review of your someday maybe list

And then he calls this the be creative and courageous portion where a quote Are there any new wonderful harebrained creative, thought provoking risk taking ideas you can capture and add into your system or external brain and quote and so this is his opportunity for you to be creative but you know I find and gusto you probably agree with me here, you know, I find that the Get creative portion of my weekly review really happens in the mind sweet portion. And really throughout the rest of my weekly review,

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.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

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.

This is episode five, on Step Five of the Workflow Diagram / Map, Engage (Do), 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.

When it comes to your real-time, plow-through, get-it-done workday, how do you decide what to do at any given point?As I've said, my simple answer is, trust your heart...your gut, the seat of your pants, your liver, your intuition—whatever works for you as a reference point that has you step back and access whatever you consider the source of your inner wisdom.David Allen

In this cast, we cover 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/043 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

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

Ray Sidney-Smith

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Engage - 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

Myers-Briggs inventory - Perceiving

Zimbardo time perspective inventory

Perfect Time-Based Productivity by Francis Wade

Todoist

Raw Text Transcript | Engage - 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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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 race, Sydney Smith and a goose open out with Francis Wade and our gal wicks

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:16

Welcome back everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith

Francis Wade 0:23

I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:24

And I'm Arthur Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26

Welcome, gentlemen. And here we are in our fifth episode in our ongoing series about getting things done, or the GTD methodology. And as practicing GTD years, once practicing GTD yours or non practicing GTD years, we are here to talk about the various aspects of how the getting things done, methodology works and how we all view it from our our different areas of expertise and experience with the Getting Things Done world. And what want us to do today is to talk about the fifth stage in the workflow map or the workflow diagram that most people know as doing or engaging now in the first edition of the book it was called doing. And now in the march 25 edition, which is the latest edition of the book, David Allen talks about it as engaging. And this is actually a change as I talked about in the last episode from the march 2010 book, making it all work by David Allen, he had changed some lingo. And that has made its way over to the latest edition of getting things done. And what I'd like us to do is to In this episode, talk about what engaging means to each of us, then we will cover the models that David Allen provides to us for being able to engage in the productive work that we're trying to accomplish. So let's start off with defining engaging, I'll say that, for me engaging is the process of being able to get into action. So I really see it as many different pieces of the puzzle that are the glue that holds the system together, as we've talked about before. And as I frequently quote from David Allen. The reality is, is that getting things done GTD is not about getting things done, it's about actually knowing what you're not getting done. However, once you do start getting things done, knowing how to appropriately engage as he talks about is so important. Because if you don't know how to engage with the work, he doesn't know what work you're doing, by the way, that's the thing is that he doesn't know what what you're doing, whether you're a programmer, or an executive or house cleaner, none of that really matters to him, what what matters to him, because he doesn't know how to do your exact job is to be able to give you the tools to be able to engage with that work that type of work when you get there. So that's what engages for me, it's the it's that glue that holds together, your ability to get into action, when you need to

Art Gelwicks 3:13

engaging to me is one of those things that it's actually partway through the process. Because at that point, you've already figured out what you need to do, it's just a matter of getting started on doing it, and having everything set up so that you can start to make progress on moving through whatever that particular item is, whether it's working on that report, or cleaning up a room, or whatever it's taking its taking that next logical step of I've got it planned out, get off your Duff and get moving on. At least that's the way I see it

Francis Wade 3:48

coming at it from the all the other direction in apart from what David Allen says in his books. If If I look at the average person who does what they do on a regular basis, on a daily basis, they're either doing or they're thinking about doing some, I think of just more with the in terms of two steps, you're either engaged, you're either executing, or you're thinking about and planning to execute. And that's about it. That's sort of simpler if I come at it from looking at what people actually do.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:21

David Allen gives us the threefold model for identifying work. And tell me if I'm on target with what you're kind of talking about here, Francis. But David Allen gives us a three threefold model for identifying daily work, which he gives us the three bullet points, quoting here, when you're getting things done, or working in the universal sense, there are three different kinds of activities, you can be engaged in doing predefined work, doing work, as it shows up and defining your work. And so he gives us these three, the threefold model as a mechanism for understanding you're really only doing three types of work and in the sense of buckets of work. And those are the three buckets Am I am I on target here, Francis, in terms of what you're talking about, or

Francis Wade 5:11

Yeah, the first I in my world, the first kind of work is the thinking about and the planning. And the latter two, which is doing the work that's already defined. And doing the work as it shows up is what everybody does every day. Anyway, it's the actual doing of work, I don't see them as three. And this is my criticism of the modeling, yes, I don't see them as three. But as just two kinds you're either planning or you're doing and how you do is a different matter. But I think it's just it's kind of binary for most people.

Art Gelwicks 5:46

Yeah, I have to agree with Francis on that one, I look at it two different ways you have, you are either working to work or you are working on work beyond that, you're going to recap and figure out what you did. But at the front end of it, you're either figuring out what you're going to do, or you're doing it, I don't know, unless somebody else can articulate something to me, that would fit as a third category for that, that's about as basic as I get it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:12

Yeah. And I think that David Allen is just basically saying that defining what you're going to do is the type of work

Francis Wade 6:19

there's doing the work. And then there's thinking about or defining the work, he's broken down, doing the work into doing work that's already defined or doing work that shows up as emergency. But the distinction is between planning and doing, you get the difference,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:37

right. But But either way, you're, you're taking pre defined work, and bundling it into just work. And then you, then the other coin is defining what you're going to do with that, understanding that, at least from David Allen's perspective, there are three working modalities. And then he takes us to, and this is now going kind of going backwards again. But stepping back to his first model, which he calls the fourfold model, let me get this correct. The fourth four criteria model for choosing actions in the moment, there's nothing pithy about that, but but the four criteria model as I tend to call it is, is basically his ability to define the, the factors that help us to filter out what actions we can do in any moment. So this is not the, the modal verb would could should in that sense, but it gives us what we can do right now. And so in that sense, we want to be able to look at context, time available, energy available and ultimately priority. And so let's start to unpack this, let's define for listeners will we all think about in terms of context, time, available, energy available on priority, and then how we approach these different pieces of being able to filter down to what is it we can do. So let's start with context.

Francis Wade 8:16

context for me is,

This is episode four, on Step Four of the Workflow Diagram / Map, Reflect (Review), 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.

“[...O]ne of the requirements it that you have to come back and reflect and review on your system and care and feed it and make sure that it stays current."

"See a lot of the value of Getting Things Done methodology is being able to offload off your psyche the job of remembering and reminding. In order to do that though, you can’t fool your own mind. It knows whether or not you’ve looked at what you need to look at as often as you need to look at it and if you’re not doing that, that’s not just the weekly review, but if you’re not looking daily at your calendar and you know you need to, then some part of you is gonna be bothered by that all the time."

~David Allen (Source)

In this cast, we cover the concept of Reflect (formerly Review) 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/042 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

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

Ray Sidney-Smith

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Reflect - 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

18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bregman

Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin

Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin

Evernote

OneNote

Journey

Day One

IFTTT

Raw Text Transcript | Reflect - 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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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 hosts Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

Welcome everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things productivity. I'm recently Smith, and I'm joined here this morning with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Good morning gentlemen,

Francis Wade 0:27

morning.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:28

Good day, good day to you all. And Good day, to our listeners, wherever you might be listening from today, we are going to be talking about getting things done. This has been in a series of episodes where we've been discussing getting things done the art of stress, free productivity by David Allen, and really having a conversation around each of the fundamental components of the GTD methodology. And so we are going to be talking about reviewing and reflecting. So in the first edition of getting things done back in 2001, David Allen called this stage reviewing. And I think it created a number of different confusions for people. And in the march 2015 edition, actually, subsequent in the 2011, making it all workbook, he changed the terminology to reflecting. And then in getting things done in the march 2015 edition, pe changed the term to reflecting. So reflecting is what we're going to be talking about today. And what we're gonna do is we're going to co define or at least talk about the differences in which we see reflecting as a fundamental function of our own productivity systems. Then we're going to talk about how each of us really implements this concept, the skill of reflecting in our own systems, because we, we went from the capture process, we then clarify that information, and then organized it. And now this is that point where things are on our lists, they're in our calendars, they're saved as reference material. And now we need to do something with those things. Who wants to start us off with defining reflecting in your own way, how do you how do you all define reflecting,

Francis Wade 2:18

it's actually a function of the way you have your tasks organized. So if you have them organized in lists, then reflecting is about checking in a different point to today to make sure that you are working on the best possible task at any point in time. So you're it requires going back in

making sure that you're looking at the best possible list based on context, choosing, choosing the right context, going through the items that are belong to that context, and then making sure that you're executing the best possible one. So there's this if you have lists, and lots of less than it requires this kind of recursive kind of checking, completing the action checking completing, If, however, you you don't, don't necessarily follow his prescription, which I don't, and you set up a plan for the day, which is detailed and you have reminders, then the checking checking isn't as important they're reviewing the reviewing actually just happens once in the morning, and then you're following a plan for the day and you want to revisit your plan, if the there's disruption to the original plan. So I think it depends on the tools that you use, if you're using lots of lists, lots of reflecting, if you're not using lots of lists, then you can reflect once or twice per day,

my take

Art Gelwicks 3:47

See, I look at reflecting a little bit differently. Because I look at it more as a bigger picture aspect of this, when you take you go down the path of reviewing that's a detail level. But reflecting is more if I use analogy, if you were standing by like, say, a lake and looking at the surface of the water, the reflection that you're seeing of everything around, you can get this great idea of what's around. But nothing's entirely in razor sharp focus, and you're not trying to get it in razor sharp focus, you're just trying to get the overall feel as to what everything you're viewing. And when I think about reflecting on what I have within my system, it's is are the things that I'm doing taking me in the directions that I ultimately want to be going or need to be going not down to a specific step one, step two, step three. But the larger paths involved is am I going in the right professional direction, am I going in the right personal direction.

I know it's more of a touchy feely kind of approach. But that's the way I view the term because it helps me wrap my head around how this fits in as whether that's an hourly or a daily or a weekly thing. For me, it's, it's kind of an item of need, when I'm doing something, if I just kind of my spider sense, tingles a little bit says is this doesn't feel right, I have to back up and look at it a little bit and say, okay, is everything still going in the right directions? Yep. Okay, I'll figure out what's wrong, then move from there

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:20

is something that I always think about when it comes to reflecting is that the reviews skill itself needs to be split among as you were talking about art, you know, kind of the higher level stuff and then what Francis was talking about which was the more granular what's happening today, stuff I consider if you're doing any, any level of hourly or daily reflecting that is the that is the short spurt, very quick review. So I consider those short reviews. And then the long review or long Taylor reviews happened on the monthly, quarterly and annually. And then David Allen, of course, has created this structure. This methodology he he's termed as the weekly review. And for listeners, we'll be doing an entire episode on the weekly review. Since it's such a big topic, we're going to do an entire episode on that. So we're actually going to act like the weekly review doesn't exist here in this episode today. And we're going to talk about the other ways in which we implement reviewing and consider it that way. But many years ago, I read a book called 18 minutes by Peter Bregman and what Bregman offered was this concept of spending 18 minutes a day, preparing for checking in and reflecting on Wednesday. And so you took five minutes in the morning, a minute at each hour of the day of an eight hour day, and then five minutes at the end of the day. And that's where the 18 minutes comes from. And I really liked the idea of it. So I, of course, develop my own system, my own method for for checking in hourly throughout my day. And it actually happens now every half hour throughout the day. And so every 25 and 55 of the hour, I actually go ahead and have a have a timer that actually goes off if I'm not in a meeting, or if I'm you know, not focused on something exclusively, then this little timer, of course, just has me check in so that I can make sure that I'm focused and staying on track with regard to the things that I want to be doing. And not everyone is really built for this.

Host’s note: You will notice that Art Gelwicks stopped speaking about 13 minutes into this week’s ProductivityCast about the GTD step, Organize. Unfortunately, there were technical difficulties. Our apologies for any parts where it may sound like we jumped from segment to another; it’s likely where Art was speaking and his audio wasn’t available.

That said, this is episode three, on Step Three of the Workflow Diagram / Map, Organize, 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.

“Being organized simply means that where something is matches what it means to you. No more, no less.” ~David Allen

In this cast, we cover how and where to organize after clarifying items in our inboxes, so that we can effectively trigger next actions when we have discretionary time to make progress on our projects and tasks.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://productivitycast.net/041 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

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

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Organize - 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

The Happiness Advantage: How a Positive Brain Fuels Success in Work and Life by Shawn Achor

“Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity” (p. 5 flowchart with processing/organizing questions)

Evernote

Remember the Milk

Google Calendar

Mind42

Simple Mind

FreeMind

Tony Buzan

Goodnotes 4 (iOS)

Raw Text Transcript | Organize - 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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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 hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

Welcome everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm recently Smith and I'm joined with my co host goes to pronounce. How's it going to gusto.

Augusto Pinaud 0:26

It's going to. Well, good morning.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:28

Hello. Hello. And we have art galleries with us today. How's it going art

Art Gelwicks 0:32

doing pretty well, so far? Guys?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:33

How about you guys? I am doing well. I glad to hear you're doing well. And we're going to hope that our listeners are doing well. And in this cast, we are going to talk about organizing, and we're going to be talking about it in the GTD flavor getting things done by David Allen flavor in this series that we've been ongoing. And we're going to talk about the idea of what is organizing? How do we define organizing, at least in the context of getting things done? Well, then talk about how each of us organizes our projects, next actions and other items, whether that be in a traditional list or otherwise. And then we're going to talk about some of the challenges that we know people face in getting organized in GTD and then maybe how to overcome them, or at least commiserating with you about the travails of getting organized and GTD. So let's start off with the definition of getting organized. David Allen basically says, He says, having a total and sing I'm quoting now out of the book, having a total and seamless system of organization in place gives you tremendous power, because it allows your mind to let go of lower level thinking and graduate to intuitive focusing on distracted by matters that haven't been dealt with appropriately. But your physical organization system must be better than your mental one, in order for that to happen. So being organized means nothing more or less than where something is matches what it means to you. So that's getting organized, and David Allen's definition and I'll add a little bit more here to this art. And then I'll turn it over to you in the sense that I was recently reading an article by Francisco SES, who is the proprietor of facile things, the the software, the GTD inspired software manager, and he starts off his article here with something that's actually very salient. He says, quote, while some people believe that GTD is a personal management system, somewhat complicated to implement. The truth is that it's extremely simple, technically, it's just about managing lists. And that's something that is available to all of us lists let you capture an inventory of all your activities and review it when necessary, and quote, so in essence, Francisco is absolutely right. David Allen is basically saying here that what you want to do is to be able to have a an external physical system, whether that's physical or digital, but basically an external system that should be airtight so that your your mind can relax. And it is really all about managing lists.

Art Gelwicks 3:19

I do agree with that very much. It is absolutely about managing lists. But the problem is that the term list almost creates a difficulty because it I can't help but go back to that will chest not a place for everything and everything in its place. When you're doing like physical declutter, that's one of the things that comes up and mental organization of your content has to have some sort of a physical component for it to be useful. I mean, we can organize our the insides of our brain no matter how hard we try. And I mean, unless we're Sherlock Holmes and in our mind palace, it's not happening. So we have to have some sort of a construct that's helping us organize. So to me, defining that following that chestnut have a place for everything in the thing and everything in its place really helps me galvanized around the organization piece. The problem I get into with that is

not going down the rabbit hole of everything having its own spot, really thinking about like the the Chinese herbalist medicine cabinets, where every little thing has a drawer that's almost to a level of minutia, where it becomes unmanageable to. So to me, the organization is if you need something, can you get to it, can you find it without increasing your stress or your work, but even that, that's I don't know that that's necessarily a good definition.

Augusto Pinaud 4:54

What am I saying, for me to be able to put the things in the place, I'm going to find them what I need them, if that makes any sense, is how you're going to get all that input and put it in a way that you are going to be able to find it in the easiest and most effective way when you actually going to need it, to do something about it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:24

Right. I think the great example is Sean Acker in his book, and the the name is escaping me now. But I'll put the link in the show notes. But he talks about this idea of being able to, and this has been a long kind of rubric for many people, which is, you know, you put out your gym clothes in the morning, so you kind of stumble over them, you can't miss them. In the morning, when you have your clothes stacked right next to your bed, right, you put it on a chair next to your bed, on the floor next to your bed. And when you get up in the morning, they're there at your feet. So you're ready to get dressed. In essence, that's a list it's a trigger, right? It's, it's basically you're incapable of missing it, you know, unless you learn to levitate, you shouldn't be able to see your clothes sitting there in front of you in the morning. And what you're kind of all talking about is the idea of doing that consistently across your entire world. So that you are you have it available to you when you need it where you need it.

Augusto Pinaud 6:28

Additionally, when I when I talk on coach and work with people, and they will die, the organizing part is difficult. I tend to tell them, well, let's change the perspective on this and think that being organized. It's really a gift you're giving to yourself. Because you don't organize this stuff that yes, is to find it on the on the moments you needed the most just so you can be happy. Yes, is looking at you know, if you pick that example is looking at your calendar the night before and saying, geez, tomorrow, I have a really packed day. And unless I do my exercise first thing in the morning, it's not going to happen. Then you real quickly reorganized that. But being organized at the end of the day is nothing than a gift you're going to give to yourself or your future self in this case. Because the reality is though things that you're putting the system are you want to do it or you need to do it. And what better thing that been able to accomplish that on the best place, you know there is nothing more exasperating. And this has happened to everybody that goes to the grocery store gate, get back home and discovered you forgot milk, okay, because milk was not in the list because you haven't process or because you never write it down. And it is extremely frustrating. So you need to change that perspective that it's not that being organized is hard or difficult.

This is episode two, on Step Two of the Workflow Diagram / Map, Clarify (formerly Process), 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.

“Without a next action, there remains a potentially infinite gap between current reality and what you need to do.” ~David Allen

In this episode, we discuss how we all define Clarify and how we process/clarify in our own systems today, as well as what challenges we see GTD practitioners face and how to overcome those issues in day-to-day productivity.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://productivitycast.net/040 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

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.

Evernote

Toggl

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).

Read More

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 hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:19

Welcome back everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things personal productivity I'm recently Smith i'm joined with my co host Augusto Pinaud. How's it going? Good morning, Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. How are you gentlemen? Great. I'm doing well, we are going to be talking about the second stage of the workflow diagram within getting things done by David Allen. And this is the stage that he calls processing and the first edition or clarifying in the second edition. And so for the rest of our discussion today, just know that we may note processing or clarifying as, as the terms sort of equally, okay, so I wanted to start off the discussion with how each of us defines the term processing or clarifying in the context of GTD, what we remember, say, from what David Allen told us, it was in in our readings of the book, and how we determine or define that in our practices today, and our productivity systems today, because they obviously change over time, I don't think that the term processor clarify is immutable, just because over time, the way in which we do it is so fundamentally different, because if we do it, and we do it well, long enough, it changes, we become better at it. And therefore processing clarifying becomes a different process for each of us. And so I'm open to discussion on that as well. But let's start off with defining processing or clarifying,

Augusto Pinaud 1:45

you know, as I said, you know, that collecting assumption that for me was Oh, super clear, super cool. The processing part to me a lot longer to understand, okay, now, I have old days what I'm going to do, and to really slow down enough so I could really process this stuff, you know, the beginning was like, Okay, well, I get this envelope with papers of new car. Okay, then file and I, my default answer was, when in doubt, file,

what produce in many cases was a ridiculous big file cabinet.

And me going back to all I forgot to register the car. So good. I knew now where the papers were, that he was a big win to comparing the day before. But I did not really process some of those stuff on some of that stuff, went back to the inbox multiple times, until I understood what that process in mean, and really slow down and ask enough questions to understand what was what the action that I needed to take, so that they never did not come back to the inbox was required. So I think, I think it's a matter of time, it's not incentive collecting is a really easy to understand. Now, clarifying processing, it takes a little bit longer to understand

what are the good questions that you need to ask yourself to really get that thing out of the way and to really get that thing moving forward.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:30

Francis, how do you define clarifying or processing in your day to day productivity world?

Francis Wade 3:36

Yeah, I see a little bit differently. But it's only really a difference in language I, I can see visual as capturing. But I can't visualize processing or terrifying in terms of it being, like you said, a physical action. In retrospect, before I even knew about GTD, the other system that I I picked up, it led me to think of it as emptying. So that's the term I use in my work is capturing and, and there's empty capturing is putting tasks or time demands into a capture point. And then at some later point, emptying of the boat, removing them. And in the process of emptying these capture points, there is clarifying, processing, prioritizing, deciding, choosing and all these other actions. But I prefer to think of it as emptying a capture point, like an email inbox, leaving it void of commitments once you're done. So that's a lot of seed read differently,

Art Gelwicks 4:41

how about you are, for me, the processing part, or the defining or refining is really a two step process. One is to identify all the stuff I didn't actually capture about something when I initially initially captured because let's be realistic, a lot of times when you start to capture things, you don't get all the details, because you're in a hurry. So the first part of that refinement is making sure you have all the information that you need to add to us to act on that second for me, is to set myself up for processing that item. So not only is it all the information I need about it, but anything that I need to know or that I know I'm going to need to effectively execute on that item, or their related connections or their related things that I need to go look up, is there a piece is there another task that's going to be triggered by this for it to be able to be successfully completed. So it's, it is a little bit of a cycle that each thing goes through. But it's literally just to make sure that it is set up to be successful when I go to do it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:43

When I think about clarifying and processing, I do appreciate the the new term clarifying over processing. And there there is a minor error in the new version of the of the print edition, which has the workflow diagram. And it shows it says process at the bottom of it. And instead of clarifying, but he he does otherwise talk about it as clarifying throughout the second edition. But and actually that that's a change of perspective. Because before I really liked the term processing, I felt like it was a a, a very physical act. But then I recognize something about the workflow diagram, and GTD which is that you kind of toggle between thought based actions and physical actions. As you go, you as you basically vacillate between these different stages of the workflow, these different skills that you have to do. And so capturing is a physical action. And clarifying is actually all mental action. And so organizing, when we get to next week's discussion, where we talk about organizing, I really start to think about processing is that organizing function is actually the physical placement of of things that you finally identified the next action and the projects for those things. So for me clarifying is that is really founded on and right within the structure of what David Allen says, which is the the next action principle, and we'll talk about the next action decision decision concept in a little bit. But the idea is, is that as something comes in, you decide what it is. And, and so it's sitting in your inbox, you know, one of the many in boxes that we talked about last week, right? your voicemail, your email inbox, your physical entry on your desk, your mailbox, at home, or at the office, and you now need to decide what it is, you have to, like, really determine, you know, is this a, is this a, an invitation to to a wedding? Is this a mortgage, you know, financing document that tells you that you've been pre approved for X amount of dollars to buy a home, what is it and once you determine what it is, then you can start to make some actions upon it in terms of Okay, well, is this thing actionable? Well, what is the action, right? If it's Yes, then what is the action, if it's no, then it needs to go into some state of incubation, trash or reference, right. So we know that he needs to go into one of those places. And David Allen, rightfully so puts things into trash, first, incubation, second, and reference, you know, third, and I think that's also very helpful for people kind of take into account. So that's really clarifying. So I want to talk about some of the fundamentals of how we position ourselves for, for good processing, David Allen gives three guidelines. And I'd like to hear from you all about your tips and tricks for being able to do this. But it gets three kind of best practices, I think of them as ideal practices, because because the world is not ideal. So process the top item, first process one item at a time, and never put anything back into n. So basically, he says, whether it's a life over five foot process last in, first out or first in first out process,

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.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://productivitycast.net/039 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

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,

In Episode 037, we discussed the power of routines in your day, and specifically, your morning routine. In this episode, we cover the evening routine and how to make your evening routine a productivity enabler in your life.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://productivitycast.net/038 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | The Evening Routine

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes | The Evening Routine

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

Outlook

Skedpal

Evernote

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Dr. Roy Baumeister

Apple Pencil

Goodnotes

Remind Me Pro

10 Evening Routines That Will Make You Productive at Work and Life

The 4-Step Journey To A Productive Evening Routine

Checker Plus

Blue Light Blocking Glasses

Google Calendar

Remember the Milk

18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bregman

Raw Text Transcript | The Evening Routine

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).

Read More

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 are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

Welcome back everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things productivity. I'm recently Smith and I'm joined here today with my co host Augusto Pinaud how's it going?

Augusto Pinaud 0:27

it's going awesome. Good morning. How are you today? Good day.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:31

How's it going, Francis? Francis Wade. Good. Good. Good to be here. So in the last episode, we talked about morning routines. So if you haven't yet listened to that episode, I highly recommend that you hop back over there and listen to us discuss the importance of sort of defining routines. So we defined routines and the importance and benefits of having a routine in this episode, we're going to kind of continue that conversation and switch that to the African noon and or evening routine. No, we're just going to lump this under evening routines, even though it could possibly cover some of our late afternoon activities. And what we're going to do is just go round robin again, as we did last episode, and talk about each of our various routines. So I

Francis Wade 1:17

think I mentioned last episode that I plan I make a schedule for the day

use a number of tools to do that including outlook sketchpad and I go to my go to my Evernote sort of plan for the week. So the mornings tend to be fairly well executed according to plan. However, the afternoons when everything started was the heck, I lose steam at around one o'clock their boats and going to like a extended crash. So I'd have lunch at about one 130 is my normal routine. And that's probably the last productive for the day because I start early and I, you know, I go full steam ahead until about 130 breakfast, I don't do anything brain related for lunch. Usually, I'm usually watching something on Netflix or fooling around on on Facebook or no one again, I might do better heavy reading. But I usually am pretty tired. And then in the afternoon, I try to stick to active activities like returning phone calls, short term things like paying the bills actually have designation in scan power for what's called a time map zone in the afternoon called dead dead branded activities. So I serve all my branded activities into the afternoon because it's it's highly unlikely that I'll do anything that's really really involves any heavy lifting errands, I prefer to do them in the afternoon, anything that doesn't require sort of the flow state or concentrated work. So it tends to be very, sort of haphazard and chip shop, I have become better at following my schedule in the afternoon, because I sort of better at scheduling my day in general, and keeping it updated. But it's rare that I would do something really outstanding in the afternoon and say, oh, man, I was the best part of the day, that's usually not gonna happen, just it it am tired. And, and there's usually some disruptions that by the end of the day, I'm at least somewhat off kilter. Whereas on the morning, I'm more in control. And then I stopped working at about six on the average day, I rarely go past rarely go past six. So that's my average today. That's a

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:33

routine for me what it sounds like, Good advice for listeners is that those who do, you know, start their day, really strong and early, more systems, more ways in which to benefit your future self in the day is going to be helpful to you, right, the more structure as you lose capacities and your energy, you know, just basically energy for the day, you need to make sure that you have kind of things put into place so that you can have a well worn path in that routine, you probably know about decision fatigue.

Francis Wade 4:09

Yeah, so when you set up a plan for the day, the theory is that you're doing your heaviest planning, when you have the most bandwidth if you're a morning person, I guess if you're, if you're a night old kind of person, evening person, you might do it before going to bed, because you probably have the energy at 1112 o'clock and you plan the next day at that point. Anyway, the idea is that you match your best energy and your highest creativity with the hardest task of planning the day so that when you get to the afternoon, in my case, I don't have to do another choosing or are selecting or a lot of heavy lifting to decide what to work on next May would I what I call it my my training and my book switching, my switching occurs in the afternoon in a more sort of planned way, I would say I there's certain items I want to tried to do. I won't try to start reading an article in the afternoon. I usually don't edit one. I though I may do research. So certain activities are strictly prohibited from the morning and they're only done in the afternoon. So that's, that's you're absolutely right, taking away the choice making a choice at 330 after I talked after a tough but a long day is like the hardest thing to do. So I want to take away the choice if you can, the need to choose. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:28

let's switch gears to you a boost. Okay, so what's your evening routine and how does that contrast with your morning routine, since you didn't have a chance to talk about it,

Augusto Pinaud 5:38

my my morning routine is superstructure. Okay? I tend to write on the journal I tend to tend to write them on my journal, I tend to prevent review my goals and I do that every morning pan. And the reason I do that every morning is because allow me to set direction you know, it is as Francis was saying, at that time, I tend to have the the strongest wheel and as the day progress that tends to go downhill. So reviewing the direction that I'm taking in the morning allow me to make better calls and better decisions as today progress so for that reason I checked them daily so that's part of why I get quiet time I get prayer time those are things that are part of of my morning routine but he's pretty strict on pretty rigid if you may, okay I need that that time of reflection of making sure things I that I'm preparing for the day after that's up then I go to to work and to do things then I start interacting with with the world I usually do not interact with the world on tool I have half that morning check copper teen done on my night routine. It usually happen I have kids I so it's usually after kids are to bed, it basically goes into closure today. So I go and again review my goals. Why? Well, because he I like to go and shut down with the idea of knowing where I'm trying to go. So that's that's the second thing I do. And then I try to look at that time I am you know that that laid guy. So for many, many years, I used to joke that I belong to the our club. And I was a guy who was fake up on till really late. And at some point I discover that if instead of staying on till really late, I go to bed early and wake up earlier than everybody and get quiet time. So I tried to wake up around 430 in the morning, what was going to do I was going to be able to do in that hour and a half before the world is up and before the people is interacting in many cases, I'm able to accomplish more than what I can accomplish on the next four. So because of that I try to get into that early time and do only super high impact things. Okay, that's another time to check Facebook. That's not the time to that's the time of doing tasks that are high impact task. And then but I planned them at night before before I go to bed. You know, I don't negotiate with myself. My wake up time in the morning. I do that at night at night. I am a pretty reasonable guy in the morning when the alarm sound I am not therefore I do my best to plan that time of what time I'm going to wake up and what is what I'm going to do at night and not in the morning when I wake up.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:56

Great. Great. And can you can you talk a little bit about the the tools you use to help you be in control of your evening routine. any kinds of analog or physical?