Selects Edition – How to Implement Getting Things Done with David Allen

Originator of GTD, founder of David Allen Co – David Allen

David Allen is the godfather of productivity. If you haven’t read his books yet, you must. But it’s one thing to read a great productivity system, and it’s very different to implement it and sustain those tactics in your everyday life. In this episode I grill David to find out how to make daily overwhelm disappear, and how to organize everything in business and life. (and keep it organized!!)

You don’t want to miss this!

Here is a quick visual of the GTD workflow so you can understand how to implement pieces into your life today.

David’s Website:

Davidco.com

You can follow David on Twitter

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Have you ever felt overwhelmed? Have you ever said ?I wish I had enough time,? or ?I don?t have enough time for that?? That?s something that entrepreneurs say over and over and over again. Today?s episode I feature the godfather of productivity, David Allen, from the book Getting Things Done. Now if you haven?t heard of it yet, you need to go out and get it, or watch this episode because he does a whole recap on exactly what that is. He doesn?t think you should have anything, anything in your head. No to-do?s, no remembering the milk, no, none of that stuff. All of it should be out in a system that you can trust. Now I?ve learned all about Getting Things Done, and I thought it was really difficult to implement at first until I did this interview with him. Listen in because he sort of scolds me on exactly what I should be doing, and it?s helped tremendously. I did this interview a few weeks ago, and I just wanted to do the intro after I had done a few weeks of it. Let me just say it has really changed all of my productivity. Thank you so much, David Allen, from me, and I hope you enjoy listening to it. David is a riot. Take care.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I?m Jaime Tardy, and I?m really excited today to have David Allen. He wrote the amazing book called Getting Things Done. I?m sure you?ve heard of it before. If you haven?t, you might have been living under a rock. We like to call him the godfather of productivity. I?m so excited he said yes to come on the show today. Thanks so much for coming on, David.

David: Sure thing, Jaime. I?m happy to be here.

Jaime: So just so you know the people that are listening to this either want to be entrepreneurs or are entrepreneurs. What I would love to know because you?ve been doing this for a very long time, do you have any tips, like one or two quick tips on what entrepreneurs can do to really get their schedule better? If you know, people that are entrepreneurs have a thousand ideas and not a lot of productivity habits that we stick with. So do you have any one or two things that we might be able to do?

David: You know, overall, especially for people who are kind of running their own show and wearing a lot of different hats, it becomes particularly critical that you get the appropriate maps as I say to orient yourself. You know a calendar is a map. How do I orient myself today? You walk in with an agenda for your bank, and you?ve got seven things you want to go over. That?s a map that you use to orient yourself for that experience. You actually need maps for your life. Getting a map of your business, what are all the things that have your attention, what are all the things you need to pay attention to? Getting all that out of your head, it?s really game changing when you when you do that. It doesn?t solve your problems, but it makes them evident. It makes it a lot easier then to make good intuitive choices about where you ought to be putting your focus, and where?s it okay that you don?t put your focus today. As I say, you need to know what you?re not doing before you feel comfortable about what you?re not doing. Getting a map of all the things you?re not doing, what are all the projects right now that you?re not doing if you?re listening or watching this? You better know what that is, or you won?t be present with anything that you?re doing. Being present, becoming present, so that you?re in your zone. You?re there. Nothing is distracting you. Nothing is holding your attention hostage, and you?re able to give your full attention to whatever that is, whether that?s playing with the dog or writing a business plan. That?s really where you want to be, and that?s a critical component. That?s true for anybody, and that?s especially true, and you can really feel that pain if you?re an entrepreneur, or you?re trying to manage a business while you?re trying to start a business. 

Jaime: See. This is the key, critical point that I took away from the book too that I actually recommend to all of my clients too. As we?re going through, I?m like ?You need to get this out of your head,? because most entrepreneurs, business people live in their head unfortunately. So what sort of advice do you have? I?ve had people go through, in your thing, have sticky notes and write everything out of your head. I highly recommend and everybody should definitely do, but how do we keep doing that? Because I?ve done this quite a few times, and so have my clients, and so have people I?ve chatted with, we do it, and then somehow we forget about it. Then we later have to come in and sort of redo the system again. It seems as though we?re doing productivity over and over and over again. 

David: Yeah, it?s a habit you have to build. Just like learning the banjo or learning to tango or learning Italian, it?s going to take you two years to really start to make this so it becomes automatic. You want to become unconscious about this. You don?t want to think about your system; you want to be using your system. Until your system really catches up with your own creativity and the kind of systemic process that you really need to manage the complexity of your life, you?re going to have to invest in that, and you?re going to have to focus on it until you get those habits. One of the biggest problems is that most people don?t completely get it out of their head. They?re still using their head. They?re not trusting their system. Until you get it a hundred percent outside of your head, some part of you is still going to use your psyche as your system to decide who you need to call or what you need to do this afternoon. I don?t have any idea of who to call because it?s all in my system, and I?m not at a phone with time right now, so why should I, it?s like Einstein said, ?Why should I be thinking about my phone number? I can look that up. There are better things to think about.? Getting used to not trusting that your head is the place to be your system, and your head is for having ideas, not for holding them. Your intelligence and your intuition are for making choice about your options. I don?t know how long I?m going to be preaching that, but it?s really just a mechanical, it?s just a mechanical process once you understand how the brain doesn?t work. Then it?s just about practice, practice, practice, and keep going. The more that you start to trust that the system is there then that just becomes automatic. You would feel uncomfortable keeping stuff in your head. For instance, if I said ?Hey, Jaime, can you meet with me next Thursday at three-fifteen,? and you go ?Sure.? I would imagine that most people would say ?I better write that down.? Right? Because that?s the one system that people use fairly consistently and pretty much trust. Then it?s also not on your mind where you need to be next week because some part of you trusts that you?ve got the right date in your calendar, and that you?ll look at it. That?s just, that?s only three percent of your life. The ninety-seven percent of your life, the same principle applies. Why on earth would you think that your head can keep track of that kind of stuff? It just doesn?t do that very well. 

Jaime: And this is what I wanted to see. I want to talk to somebody who does this. I talk to a lot of people who adore Getting Things Done but aren?t really using the, I mean me too, right. I have to admit I love Getting Things Done, and I use a lot of different pieces of it, but keeping up and having it go and not necessarily going ?Oh, and there?s a new app. Let me try this new cool app.? I just downloaded the carrot app which was really fun. It?s based on Getting Things Done, and it yells at you I guess every time you don?t do something. There?s so many little cool changes and things I haven?t gotten to your state which is, I can?t imagine feeling weird about keeping something in my head. Tell me about what that?s like for you to sort of go through a typical day, writing things down and not having it all in your head. 

David: Well, I go through my day, and I write things down. I don?t keep it in my head. 

Jaime: That?s it. Simple as that.

David: Right here, this little pad, and three or four different kind of pens. Depends on what kind of pen I want to write the idea with is right there. My in basket is right over there. I could show you. Hang on.

Jaime: Yeah. I?d love to see it.

David: Take a look. There?s my in basket, right. There?s a note that I took. Somebody said ?Hey, there?s a ten x you ought to look at.? And there?s something else I need to do. That?s written down; it?s over there. Why on earth would I want to keep that in my head? There?s a lot better things to do. It just becomes habitual because that?s the way I live my life. I don?t write everything down. Heavens, no. A lot of times I?m just grazing like right now. I don?t need to write down our conversation. If you said ?Hey, David, here?s a really way cool app that you ought to try and test out.? If I think, ?Hmm, you know I might.? That?s exactly what, that?s why whenever I?m anywhere there?s a flat surface, longer than fifteen minutes, I?ve got a pad and a pen because God knows when the bell?s going to ring or the lightening will strike or whatever. It comes from the strangest places. Most of the things I?ve created in my life were random thoughts that started in that way. I throw away probably ninety percent of them. When I?m having the thought, I?m not sure what it?s going to mean. If I force myself to figure out what a thought means or what I?m going to do with it, I?ll stop having thoughts. It?s too much trouble. I?ve just lowered the barrier to entry to thinking about anything that might be potentially meaningful. I don?t know whether I?m going to go look at that ten x or not. Don?t force me to decide that yet. When I?m ready to sit down and make decision about what I?m going to do, that?s when I don?t want to remember what I thought of. I want to now take what I thought and put it in front of me and be an executive about that. What does this mean? Where does that go? Is this reference? Is this trash? Is there actually something I want to do with this? That?s the stage two of the Getting Things Done process. The first one is to capture the thoughts. The second one is to then, as you?ve noticed, there?s not much in that in basket. That will get emptied. I don?t maintain a big backlog. I zero out as often as I can because that makes it much more evident when I?ve got new ideas. Then they still need to have meaning determined about them. The whole system is about externalizing potentially meaningful stuff, deciding what that stuff really means, and then parking the results of it in appropriate places. That?s how you keep nothing on your mind.

Jaime: That sounds so simple. So simple, but not easy. Definitely. So what do you do?

David: It actually is, it is simple, and it is easy. What?s difficult is changing your habit. I think keeping stuff in your head gives you a false sense of control.

Jaime: I can totally agree with that one. So do you think though that it takes a certain type of person to be able to do all of that, or it?s just a habit and that?s it? 

David: It takes a kind of a person who wants to have nothing on their mind and wants to get rid of all that distracting bull that?s going on in their head. That can be anybody, but it?s mostly people that want to get rid of drag on your system. Interestingly it?s the most productive people that create the most stress because they create a lot of blowback from their creativity and their productivity. Their systems haven?t caught up with them. So a lot of what GTD did was to give them a way to make sure that blowback is handled very rapidly, so it gets rid of the drag and residue on your system that you?re creating by your creativity. That?s why it?s the most productive people and the people that need GTD the least that are the most attracted to it. 

Jaime: Interesting. Okay, can you tell me about how that would work in a scenario for somebody who maybe doesn?t have GTD beforehand, and what it looks like afterwards?

David: Well, a good friend of mine, a rock guitarist who?s got a, who?s running a publishing studio now, Evan Taubenfeld, he was Avril Lavigne?s guitarist, and Evan?s a big champion of my stuff. He said, ?David, before GTD I started a hundred and fifty songs a year, but after GTD I finished a hundred and fifty songs a year.? 

Jaime: Okay, that?s huge. That?s amazing.

David: That is huge. 

Jaime: Why don?t you use, I?m looking at all your stuff, and I have an inbox over here, but why don?t you have digital? Why are we paper, and you have paper and pencil and everything with you? 

David: Because paper doesn?t need a wireless connection and it has the batteries inside a pen and paper you know last a long time. You can write on anything anywhere at anytime. I can still use digital. As a matter of fact, I can call an eight hundred number for TalkScribe, leave a message, and in five minutes it?s transcribed and in my email. I can text myself something out of my phone into my email account. There are a lot of way you can collect stuff, but why bother? Because what I?m putting in there is not going to be the permanent thing I?m going to keep track of, very likely. 

Jaime: Okay, because you give it a second once over before you put it back in your system.

David: I need to think what it means and what I?m going to do about it. If I think ?Hey, gee I need to call Bill Smith.? I can go right to my calls list and put it on there. There are things that I can rapidly decide what I?m going to do and park it in there. For the most part, I want to rethink the stuff. Let me grab it, and then let me run back through it. That?s the problem is that most people don?t make the distinction between collecting and organizing. They?re two very different things. 

Jaime: Okay. Can you just describe it so that way we can make sure we have the distinction? 

David: Sure, collecting is just grabbing notes, and I don?t have to think about what I?m going to do about it, or how important it is. I just want to grab it as a raw piece of something to then think about. Then when I?m sitting down and ready to empty my in basket, okay, now is where I have to, that?s going to force me to say ?David, what the heck are you going to do with this?? Are you serious about this? What does this really mean? That requires a different kind of thinking. See, the entrepreneur, visionary, crazy maker part of me has a gazillion ideas. The chief operating officer part of me has to go ?What the heck was that, David? What a dumb idea. What, what, what were you thinking, thinking or drinking when you wrote that down?? We have both, and both of those parts of us need to have their own patterns. If you only have one, you might be talking to a lot of people that are the crazy maker type, the visionary, and they need to bring the discipline of the ?Excuse me, you cannot do seventy-five things.? You know? How about you pick five? That?s the part of us, and you know different people will be more or less comfortable with one side of that or the other. The highly operational, results oriented, let?s make, critical thinking, some people are going to be born that way, and they need to potentially have more vision, take more risks, be more willing to stretch out a little more. The visionaries and the crazy makers need to, they?re the ones that have to focus a good bit more on the discipline of deciding, the triage of how important really is that? By the way, if you haven?t really collected and captured every single thing that you?re committed to so you can see that regularly, you?ll always over-commit. 

Jaime: Ooh, okay.

David: You?d be living in overwhelm.

Jaime: Which so many people are, so how do we do that though? I?ve done it before.

David: The world is not overwhelmed. Look around. The world is fine. So where does the overwhelm fit? It?s in here.

Jaime: It totally is. But how do I do that? I had a thousand, like I use sticky notes, alright. I?ve had thousands of sessions of tons of them all over the place, in my inbox, all that fun stuff. Then I take them with me, and I try to write them down.

David: Throw them away. 

Jaime: No, no, no. I don?t take them. I take my plain ones with me so I can write them down in other places. I don?t ever feel like I can get all of them. I?m so thankful that you?re here to tell me that it is possible to have everything out of your head because I didn?t know that that was possible. Even for you, before I chatted with him, how much does he really have out of his head? You have everything out of your head. How do I get every, like extract everything out of my head? 

David: Get it all out of your head. It?s not hard. Just sit down, and say hey. They?ll only pop up one at a time, so keep going until it stops. It might take you a couple hours. 

Jaime: And then? What, but okay. Constantly, my brain is constant, always, always. And sometimes I don?t have something.

David: Sure. 

Jaime: I have small children, and so I have a good idea, and then children need things, et cetera. Life gets in the way.

David: That?s why you keep pads all the way around you. At every phone, keep it at every flat surface, and of course, I carry my NoteTaker Wallet with me. Keep a three by five card, keep the pads with you.

Jaime: Okay. So traveling?

David: And, and, and, Jaime, give yourself a break. Say ?Hey, I got nothing to write it down. I?ll just let it show up again. If it does, if it doesn?t, that?s fine.? Let it go. There is a kind Zen detachment from data. Don?t get too attached to all that stuff. 

Jaime: I appreciate that. Good. 

David: In any case, it?s not worth worrying. That doesn?t solve anything. 

Jaime: I love how Zen you are.

David: No, I?m old. That?s all.

Jaime: That?s different. Okay, good. So can I get that? Can I have what you have even though I?m young and have small kids, and blah, blah, blah? Can I feel that Zen?

David: Sure, yeah. Look. The solution is absolutely inevitable. It?s called you get older, every day. 

Jaime: I don?t want to wait for that. That seems like I would have to wait too long. 

David: It?s happening right now; you don?t need to wait. 

Jaime: See, I love this. What happens when you?re traveling? If you?re in an airport and you don?t have your inbox? Do you have a system that you travel with to put all your notes in an inbox?

David: Sure.

Jaime: Okay.

David: Absolutely. I?ve got, usually I?m traveling with a Tumi briefcase like this, and what sits on the outside pocket is a red folder called ?in.? Every single piece of paper, every single receipt, every single business card, every single business meeting note, everything goes in there so that?s the virtual or portable version of that collection tool. If you do any kind of business travel, just the receipts will eat you alive. Not to mention all the business cards you write on and capture, and all the notes from your hotel room pad that you wrote on; that?s crazy. 

Jaime: It is a little insane. I have Shoeboxed which is an app on my phone where I take a picture, but then sometimes it doesn?t work, so some receipts I have don?t have pictures taken, and some do. It?s very confusing, so you don?t even deal with any of that stuff. Just that once you put everything in there. 

David: I use TurboScan on my iPhone. I?ll do that stuff too, but again, you digi-freaks, if ain?t complete, and you don?t trust it, you won?t use it. 

Jaime: Let?s talk about that trust. Because I think that?s a really key point too. If we don?t trust the system, we won?t use it. Tell me more about that.

David: If you don?t trust the system, you won?t use it.

Jaime: I knew you were going to say that. 

David: What else is there to say? That?s the problem. A lot of people, as soon as there?s something that you can?t. What if you didn?t trust your calendar? What if you didn?t trust that you put something in there that would stick? How critical would that be? You?ve got to have absolute trust in place. If you don?t trust that you?ll empty your in basket, you?re still not going to get stuff out of your head by writing it down. Because some part of you is not going to trust that you will loop around soon enough to pick it up, so your head?s going to go ?Don?t forget, Jaime, don?t forget. You?ve got a thing; you?ve got a thing.?

Jaime: How do you know what my head sounds like? No. 

David: If it actually did sound like that, it would be a lot easier because you?d shut it up. The problem is it goes subliminal really fast, and now you have the pressure but you don?t know the source. You just have this noise inside of your brain. Have you ever been in a room where there was a noise going on, but you didn?t know it because it was so incessant? And you didn?t know it was there until it stopped? That?s what my stuff does. Most people don?t realize they?re in a room that?s got noise in it because they live in that noise. They think that?s the way it is. 

Jaime: We hear the words like stressed and overwhelmed and all that stuff, and those are sort of the accumulation of that stuff that?s in our brain that we still have. 

David: Yes. Look around the world. Do you see does the world look stressed? Does the world look overwhelmed? It doesn?t look confused. 

Jaime: I remember saying, doing a thing about productivity and chatting with someone saying, ?If you had nothing, think of your schedule tomorrow. Imagine if you couldn?t do anything. You had nothing on your schedule, no. You didn?t have to eat; you didn?t have to walk. You didn?t have to do anything. You just sat there in a room. How stressed and overwhelmed would you be?? It?s right. Nothing to do, nothing at all, of course that stress would go away. But it?s so much different in real life, right? It?s amazing to be able to see you being able to deal with actual real life and having that sort of Zen state of mind. Which is very inspiring. 

David: Well, it is kind of a paradox in that if you?re here to actually do things, you have to be appropriately engaged with doing in order to be. A lot of people, ?I want to go be.? I say ?Fine. Just go be, but as soon as you have to do something, whatever that is, and you.? We seem to be intentional beings, so we?re here to have, to grow, to express, to expand, something. You can?t stop, so whatever it is that is your intentionality there, if you don?t appropriately engage whatever that?s bringing for you. It could very well be I need to start my own business. You need to now appropriately engage with that inspiration or that drive. Being appropriately engaged with it is then what allows you to be peaceful with it. You don?t have to go very far to see where to apply this stuff. Just start to notice what has your attention. Because if you don?t give appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will start to take more of your attention than it deserves. In other words, I need cat food should pop into your head once. As soon as it pops in twice, you are not appropriately engaged with your commitment about your cat or your cat food. Right?

Jaime: Yeah.

David: To appropriately engage, I need to capture something. I need to decide what it means to me. I need to park it in against all the other commitments I?ve got, and I need to constantly keep reassessing against that game. I?m the hardest working guy you ever saw about how to constantly stay involved and engaged with all the different possible things I could be doing. It doesn?t look like it right now because it doesn?t take but a few seconds a day. The system is complete, and it?s relatively current. Once a week I bring up the rear guard by doing a weekly review and making sure I grab it all. It?s slippery stuff. I have to work at that. I?ve got sixty-seven point six years of practice.

Jaime: That?s what I wanted to hear though, that you actually have to work on it a little bit too. I was going to ask, how do we build the habit? Especially like, I?m a pretty analytical mindset, so I assumed I liked having things organized and stuff. I assumed it would be a little bit easier for me, but it?s still kind of difficult, especially GTD is a very wide system of many different pieces. Implementing all of them and creating a habit seems overwhelming.

David: It?s not that many pieces. There are nine different categories of stuff. You have reference material. You have projects you need to be reminded of to finish. You have action steps about those projects you need to keep track of. You have incubate; I need to hold on this until two weeks from now or three days from now or review someday maybe stuff on a consistent basis. There are actually not that many things; it?s not that difficult. When you say there?s so many things, yeah, your life includes buy cat food, get a career, call Bill, launch the ad campaign, get a car, research a new cell phone. You know life?s like that. It?s funny. People get mad at me for their list. I?m sorry. It ain?t my list. Your only choice is where you keep track of your commitments and how thoroughly you engage with them appropriately. So that some part of you says that?s okay that I?m not doing that. Right now, and I need to constantly keep reassessing on that. It is common sense. You do need to have a system that is as complete as your commitments are. It?s kind of that simple. 

Jaime: So if we trust our calendar. Like I?m thinking about what you have, and if I trust my system, I guess that?s more or less part of the issue that I have, that I think most people have in general. I have a system that I use. I don?t use it to the extent, but I?m wondering for someone as we?re going. Like a calendar, I totally trust my calendar. I remember one day I accidentally imported another calendar, and it screwed everything up. I couldn?t trust my calendar. That was really bad. We?re daily pretty much running on systems that we don?t trust. You?re saving everything in them, so therefore we can?t trust them. Therefore, we can?t do it. How can we trust our system? I get the point of trying to take as much information, everything out of our head, putting it in the system. How do we get to the point of actually using that system on a consistent basis? As soon as I travel, or as soon as somebody travels for a while and doesn?t use the system, or comes up with a stumbling block, and we stop. The whole thing usually goes away for a while until we pick it back up again. 

David: There are two sort of key things. We call it ?The Five I?s.? First of all, you have information, about GTD.  Okay, here?s what it is, maybe some inspiration to test it out, find out more about it. Then you have the instruction. Then I need to get instruction about how do I do that. The book gives plenty of that instruction. Lots of, lots of ways to get it. You could get coached by one of our coaches. Then you have installation. Okay, now I see how to do that; let me structure the thing. Let me create the blueprint, and here?s where I?m going to put the lists. You build a structure, and then you install that. The installation, I build a structure, and I park stuff in it. Then you have the implementation where you actually start continuously to use the system and continue to put stuff in it. And then finally, you just are integrated so that that becomes habitual. That?s the stages of sort of implementing the stuff. What you?re talking about is you?ve probably done some degree of installation and some degree of implementing. There are two big keys practically speaking. First of all is to give yourself a weekend to actually sit down and get as much as you can out of your head and do as complete an install as you can. Then the second thing is to build in a two hour period at the end of every week for a weekly review where you bring up the rear guard and catch up again. This world?s going to come at us a lot faster than you can keep it pristinely captured and processed and organized because it?s coming at you. You don?t want to let it go too long before you bring up the rear guard and catch all that stuff. It?s very easy to fall off this game. It?s very easy to get back on. All you have to do is sit down, write stuff, get it out of your head again, decide what?s the next action on the list, park it on the appropriate list, and keep going. You fall off, you go on, you fall off. If you don?t fall off of this at least six times a day, you?re not playing a big enough game. 

Jaime: Thank you. Okay. Good.

David: No, really. You need to know what the game is so that you can get back on it. You don?t want to stay off. That?s the problem. People fall off, and then they stay off. Then they live in their psyche, and their psyche has no sense of past or future, so as soon as you?ve got two things going on simultaneously in there, which you can?t do. It?s trying to multitask because it doesn?t trust any other place. The psyche just doesn?t work that well. As soon as you give yourself two things to do, and your head?s the only place that?s got that, you?ve created failure and stress because you can?t do them both at the same time. That?s just a mechanical process. At least if you understand that cognitively, now let me just keep coming back and getting stuff out of my head again until you start to get used to it. Once you get used to having nothing on your head by the way, a very cool place to be, 

Jaime: I love that you say that. Good inspiration for everyone that we can actually live in that place. It sounds like it might be, is it commitment? Is it commitment to this system, that?s what we need? Where do we need to work on this so that?s what we continue doing?

David: Are you committed to brushing your teeth and taking showers? 

Jaime: Hopefully, yeah. Yes, I am. 

David: Well, it?s that kind of commitment, not ?I got to go commit.? No, you just have to take a shower. The scuzz factor gets too high if you don?t. 

Jaime: That?s it, right? I could be like ?Wow, I really need to take a shower. I don?t want to be around people.? The consequences seem high. The consequence for getting things done in my head isn?t that high because that?s the way I?ve always lived it. 

David: Correct.

Jaime: How do I fix that?

David: The same way that you started to take showers and brush your teeth. You didn?t want to do that when you were born. You didn?t even have teeth when you were born. The authorities just kept making you do it until at some point you went in and did it by yourself because you couldn?t stand not doing it. You?ve got to get used to it. You?ve got to just stick around. Get around people who do this. Reread my book. It will be a different book every time you read it. That?s my job. That?s what I?ve done in terms of my career. I?m really an educator, perhaps a little bit of a motivator, although I?m not a motivational speaker. I?m somebody that?s going to turn you off. I?m a disorganization guy. Hey guys, the way you?ve been organized, give it up. It doesn?t work. I?m not out there trying to, you know, passion is highly overrated. You?ll get depressed as fast as you get passionate about something. 

Jaime: Really?

David: The best thing to do is get one or two. You can be hopefully. I hope people are just being bored stupid by what I?m saying right now, but catch one or two things that I?m saying and actually go start to do that a little bit. You start to raise the bar internally about what you?re used to, what you?re used to doing. 

Jaime: Are you passionate about GTD anymore? I mean you?ve been doing it for such a long time. 

David: Well, I can?t stop. It?s like are you passionate about taking a shower? Are you passionate about being a nice person? I guess. I can still do GTD when I feel like crap. You don?t need to be passionate to get stuff out of your head. 

Jaime: That?s awesome. Thank you. I?m glad you?re still able to do it even when it goes down. It?s such a thing for you. 

David: Yeah, and you take showers when things go down. Sometimes it?s a little harder than others, and sometimes. It?s not really about the content. It?s really about the process, and the content can be more or less inspiring, more or less challenging. GTD doesn?t get rid of your challenges. Heavens, no. If you didn?t have challenges, you wouldn?t grow or expand or express yourself. It?s not about getting rid of all those problems or issues or challenges. It?s about getting a clear deck internally so that you?re more available then to bring all your resources to bear. And when you feel like flu, and you?ve got the flu and feel like crap, you still need all your resources to bear just to get out of bed. So it?s not about always being happy, you know, heavens. You don?t have to like your life to get it off your mind.

Jaime: That?s a great quote. Okay. Good. I love that. So what does your head look like? I meditate and stuff like that. 

David: I can?t see. You can see. 

Jaime: Beautiful. I love this interview. Inside, we meditate, and things come up all the time. Is your head, are you better at sort of dealing with nothing in your head because your brain is so used to just giving it what it needs and that?s it? 

David: Yeah, you can?t really have nothing on your mind if you?re conscious. Really, you?re always going to have something focused there mentally. There the mental aspect of things, and there?s what I call the spiritual aspect of things which is actually a different level. Many times your inspiration will come from something that?s not my mental thinking. It may come from your intuition or some other place. Who knows? I?ve got my own working hypotheses about that, but the truth is that I want to be free to not have something distracting or holding that attention hostage, so I want to be able to put it where I want it to go. By the way, I will keep a pad and pen by me when I meditate because many times when you start to relax. See the universe is always on; it?s always on. The universe is not stopping. So meditation is not about going into nothing or quiet; it?s about quieting a part of the universe so you can listen to another part. Right? So which part of the universe are you listening to? The really noisy one out here, or do you want to listen to a really noisy one in here? If you want to talk freaking people out, what if absolutely nothing was on your mind? Most people just get really freaky because they?re like, ?Oh, God.? Suddenly all the demons are going to run across the barrier into your head that you haven?t allowed yourself to be thinking about, but they?re still there. I oftentimes will, people learn to keep a pad by their bed so they don?t keep waking up at night thinking ?Oh my God, I need to.? Hey, write it down so in the morning you can, then turn around and go to sleep. In a way it?s the same thing. You?re just keeping it clean. It?s like you?re keeping it swept. You?re keeping, we call it a mind sweep. Just get it out of your head. Sometimes it?s helpful for people to get the image of psychic RAM. RAM being short term memory space that can fill up and clog up, and suddenly everything just slows down. They?ve now proven it. A lot of the psychologists, a lot of the neuropsychologists have now done enough experiments. They say ?Gee, we?ve now proven what David has said through all of his street smarts was really true.? Trying to keep a lot of stuff in your head diminishes your ability to keep anything to think well. They?ve proven that. 

Jaime: I love that. You?re like, ?I knew this a long time ago. Data is finally catching up with what I already knew.? That?s awesome. What a great place to be. So you meditate. Tell me what you get out of meditating. If you?re not stressed and stuff like that, what are you looking to do? If you don?t mind me getting so personal. 

David: Are you kidding? I?m stressed all the time. Are you kidding? Life is stressful. Noise is stressful. I love massages. I had my chiropractor work on me. It?s so great. I think just living in the world creates an ambience; there?s an ambient stress factor that?s going to happen now matter what. It?s not that you get rid of stress. If you didn?t have any stress, you?d never grow or expand or whatever. As soon as you want something to be true that?s not true, you?ve created stress. You?ve created a dissonance. That?s not a bad thing. If I want to be out of the room, and I?m not out of the room, there?s a delta. I now have a vision that?s not matched by reality. I get out of the room in order to relax. Every time you create something that?s not true yet, or that you have a creative idea or creative intention, you create what the fancy word is cognitive dissonance. In a way we?re living in a stressful world. You just want to be appropriately engaged with that. As long as I?m appropriately engaged with getting out of the room, then that?s not a bad thing. That?s a good thing. If I say ?I want to be out of the room, but oh damn, I want to be here on this. I can?t do it. Oh no.? Now that?s ulcer-ville. Because now I can?t be appropriately engaged on both those things. I?m constantly stretching, having ideas, stuff that I?d like to have true that?s not true yet. I?m constantly living in that so it takes work. Not in a hard way, but it takes, let?s say, concern and intentionality to keep myself as relaxed as possible, so that I stay as healthy as possible. 

Jaime: So it?s relaxation? I was going to say how do we do that? Is it relaxation? Is it noticing your thoughts in the back of your head?

David: Sure, sure.

Jaime: Okay. 

David: Pay attention to what has your attention. There?s an inverse relationship from on your mind to getting done. Anything that keeps being, bothering, if on your mind is because you?re doing creative thinking, and you?re adding value by what you?re thinking about that?s one thing. That?s not what?s on most people?s minds. As a matter of fact, whatever?s occurred to anybody listening to this while I?ve been talking and while you?ve been talking, wherever their minds may have gone that has nothing to do with this is probably wasn?t adding value to what they were thinking abut. They were probably going ?Oh God, I need to? Oh there?s a thing.? What that?s representative of is that there?s some decisions about that situation they haven?t made or they haven?t parked the results in some trusted place. That?s why things are on your mind. It?s not a bad thing. That?s a message that there?s decision about that you haven?t made yet. You?re not appropriately engaged with it. Cat food pops into your head more than once? Hey, that should be a signal. Gee, I need to talk to my banker pops into your head more than once? That?s a signal you have not appropriately engaged with whatever that thing was about yet. That?s not bad. That?s not a negative judgment. It?s just data, just information. 

Jaime: I love that. I?m actually reading a book that I read called Untethered Soul. I don?t know if you?ve read it before; it?s by Michael Singer. It?s actually right up this same thing where we?re paying attention to the person that?s thinking which isn?t exactly us either. The person that?s thinking, we can see that person. Which is kind of crazy. I mean, that?s exactly what you?re saying. There?s thoughts coming in, and there?s someone being aware of those thoughts coming in or something, whatever. Getting a little technical.

David: Sure.

Jaime: But you?re paying attention to what that is, and all you?re doing is sort of putting it down the right chute. Right?

David: Exactly.

Jaime: Okay. That makes a lot more sense. Listening to you talk about stress, I?m hearing that there?s a distinction between stress and overwhelm though. I hear people use them as if they?re very similar. But, correct me if I?m wrong, what I?m getting from you is that stress could be a good thing. It just happens and comes up, and we just have to manage that appropriately. But then overwhelm is where everything else is still living inside our head, and our head is almost overwhelmed. Is that sort of the distinction that you would make too? 

David: Yeah, that?s a way to think about it, yeah. It?s a good way to frame it. Most of the stress comes from your inner conflict. You?re not keeping agreements with yourself. So you can be stressed about something, and be in agreement with yourself how you?re going to then engage with whatever that thing is. Then you?ll be in alignment and appropriately engaged to be relieving that stress or doing what that stress is now telling you you need to be doing. The fire alarm goes off, and absolutely there?s going to be stress happening. Then in order to resolve that stress, I?m going to be moving toward some outcome called ?Live, don?t burn up.? You know? Therefore I?m going to start engaging adrenaline and all kinds of things are going to show up very appropriately. That?s as opposed to ?Well, gee I know that, but I want that, and I can?t do both of them. Oh gosh. I think I?ll sit here and do nothing. But, no, I should be doing something. Oh damn.? 

Jaime: Okay, that?s, let?s talk about that for just a minute because that?s the thing that we get. That?s the thing I hear too. A lot of people just want to veg out. They want to run away from all the crazy thoughts that they have in their heads instead of appropriately dealing with them. Right? So we?ll go and do something instead and that overwhelm sort of happens. Do you have advice? Like instead of vegging, we need to be paying attention in the now instead of paying attention to our thoughts, right? 

David: Yeah, just dump all the stuff out of your head. Go grab a pen and paper and just unload.

Jaime: Right now. Do it. 

David: Journaling is a way to do that on a more subtle level. 

Jaime: Okay.

David: Sometimes I?ll journal in the morning or before I meditate which is really nice. It?s another way to say ?Here?s a current reality.? I?ll just do kind of a core dump about what?s going on in my life from whatever, and I don?t pay much attention to it at all later on. I hardly ever go back and read it, but just the process itself of externalizing what you?re thinking about can produce a kind of relaxation. In a way that otherwise it keeps banging around in your psyche. 

Jaime: Yeah, and it might not even be that important. Okay. Tell me how often do you meditate. 

David: Daily, usually. 

Jaime: Yeah. Do you mind if I ask how long? 

David: Can be, well to some degree, I?ve been doing that for about forty-five years. You get to a point where you can stop and in two seconds you can do that. Oftentimes taking enough time to let the spin unravel and slow down can be twenty minutes, half an hour, forty-five minutes, depending. 

Jaime: I could chat with you for way too long. Okay, I need to start wrapping up and ask you the last question. I kind of have a feeling on what this already is going to be, but I?m going to ask it to you anyway. What?s one action that listeners can take this week to help them with their goal of a million? 

David: Imagine what your ideal life would look, sound, or feel like. What would a Sunday afternoon be? Give yourself permission to take an hour and truly write out the biggest fantasy about where you would like, what you would like to be doing, experiencing, having, being, or whatever. If you haven?t done that lately, and that will be the biggest driver for getting you where you want to go. If you want to get there, you need to define a there. Give yourself permission to not put that in concrete, but let that be a useful illusion right now because the future ideal scenes and goals, the future never happens really. It?s always today. It?s a handy illusion because what it will do, it will start to reframe your experience right now. You give yourself permission to go ideal scene, and that will start to change your perception and your performance right away. The power of focus, and that?s a lot of what GTD was about, and why I discovered it, and how I use it is to be able to keep myself as clear as I can so that in that space I have the ability to create as freely and as cool as I would like. To be able to have room to access that creativity from wherever that may be coming, but it?s really about the creative process more than anything else. I don?t get organized to be organized. I get organized to free space, so that I can then utilize the power of that focus. That?s, that?s if there were one thing to do, it?s keep a vision in your head and available to you. It?s a risk of a visionary, being able to hold a picture before you see how to get there. You won?t see how to do it until you see yourself doing it. 

Jaime: I love that. Huge benefits of GTD, definitely. I have one follow-up question for that too. Once we create that vision, what do we do with it? Should we read it often? It tends to get lost in places, even if we put it in our system, it tends to get lost. What should we do with it after? 

David: If I were you I?d put it in, those kinds of things for myself I drop it randomly in my tickler file. The one way to go absolutely numb and unconscious about inspiring things is to put it on your bulletin board. You really need to approach it with a fresh energy. When it?s there in my tickler file, they show up randomly. They land in my tickler file on some random basis, and when they do, then it?s ?Ah, let me pay attention for thirty seconds to this and actually make it an active process. 

Jaime: I love that. It?s funny; I?m thinking digitally how I can do that. I?m going to email it to myself a couple random times. That?s good to know. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. It?s been absolutely amazing. I really appreciate it. Where can we find more about you online?

David: David Co dot com. Lots of stuff there.

Jaime: Definitely. Everybody, if they haven?t yet, because I bet everybody in the world has probably read GTD, but if they haven?t yet, they should pick it up. I?ll definitely link to the book too. Highly recommend it. Thanks so much for coming on the show today.

David: Thanks, Jaime. It was fun. It was great. 

Jaime: Thanks for watching. I really hope you enjoyed that interview with David. I think he was hilarious. That does not come across in his books by the way. So I loved having him on. Now did you do what he said in the action item? Did we actually take an hour set aside? Did you put it in your calendar? Did you say that you?re going to do that right now? This comes up over and over and over and over again in my interviews. If you listen to any of them, talking about visioning what you truly, truly do want keeps coming up. If you?ve been ignoring every time before that it?s been said, please don?t ignore it right now. Make some time in your calendar to relax, sit down, think about what you want to experience, what you want to have, what you want to do, what you want to be. It?s fun, so don?t avoid this. I know people assume that this is not important or not urgent, but it totally is. Set aside some time this week. If you want any more wonderful millionaires like David Allen, sign up for Eventual Millionaire dot com, and you?ll get all that fun stuff. Have an amazing week. Really make it special. Take care. Bye-bye.

Tags: business action, David Allen, Focus, GTD workflow, millionaire interview, productivity

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Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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