Modern Wisdom - #188 - David Allen - The Art Of Stress-Free Productivity

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

David Allen is a productivity consultant and an author. Today I speak to the grandfather of the modern productivity movement. David is the creator of Getting Things Done - the most famous productivity system on the planet. Expect to learn David's 5-step process for organising your life, why your brain is a terrible library, what apps & systems David uses to enhance his own life, where he sees the future of productivity going and much more... Sponsor: Shop Tailored Athlete’s full range at https://link.tailoredathlete.co.uk/modernwisdom (FREE shipping automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Buy Getting Things Done - https://amzn.to/3hWk5Vh Check out David's Website - https://gettingthingsdone.com/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is the Grandfather of the modern productivity movement David Allen, the creator of the best selling productivity book in history, getting things done. The opportunity to speak to him about productivity is kind of like getting Floyd Mayweather to teach you how to jab. So get ready for today. Expect to learn David's five step process for organizing your life, why your brain is a terrible library, what apps and systems David uses to enhance his own life, where he sees the future of productivity going and much more. What you also need to listen out for is just how calm David is. Like he is the least rushed man in history. And that is obviously what happens when you have your entire

productivity system mastered. So the goal for today's episode is to reach at least in part the level of serenity that David enjoys every single day. In other news, I wanted to let you in on my plans for the development of modern wisdom to the next level. I want to release a Partner Service to the podcast. Modern Wisdom University is the working title at the moment, but it would be a subscription blog that allows you to access summaries of every single episode that we release.

So on the date and episode goes live, you will get in your email inbox and also on the member-only blog, a key point summary, 500 to 700 words, no fluff, just all of the main takeaways curated, nested within bullet points so that you never forget a podcast ever again. You listen to me and Greg McEwan talking about essentialism or me and David Allen talking about the art of stress-free Productivity, but in three months time you might not be able to remember what we said however, you will have the best podcast notes writers on the planet writing curated notes every single episode and you will have access to all Archived episode notes as well. I just think it's a really cool idea.

I don't know any of the podcasts that are doing it. I think it would add a ton of value. I know that even I forget the things that I learn and I'm the one that's having the conversation with these people, right? Like I would love that reference for myself and therefore it kind of makes sense that you might as well.

I keep getting messages from people saying that they're applying lessons, they learn from this podcast to their lives and it's making such a profound impact. So, how can we further enhance that? Right, how can we magnify that? The best way that I could think would be to create this kind of a service. So, let me know what you think at Chris will X or modern wisdom podcast at gmail.com. I'd love to hear your feedback. I'm thinking of a low ticket price for it, like maybe £10 a month and a discount if you buy a full years membership or whatever. It's still kind of early days, but I'm so excited about the prospect of this. And I hope

that you are too. So let me know what you think. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful David Allen. That looks like a particularly precarious single stack of books that you've got next to you. Okay, I always have to explain that. It happens to be a bookshelf you can get in the US from a company called Design Within Reach. It's a very well designed bookshelf that you can take a stack book up and it doesn't fall over. But these are, I'm not gonna read these.

These are the archive of all the books in all the different translated languages. We were going to throw them away when we moved from Santa Barbara Amsterdam six years ago. And there's this, oh, come on, we should keep at least one copy of each. So that's the archive and it provides podcasts, you know, back right. Yeah, why's the problem with having a book translated into 30 languages that you've got just in terms of size You know just sheer floor space. It's gonna take up a lot. I know and we live in apartment in Amsterdam So like smaller space best so anyway, and it does Create a topic for podcasts. So here we are. It looks like I'm not gonna like does look a little bit like a health hazard

But now that you've reassured me, that it's not gonna fall over and kill somebody, then. No. No, fine. I'm fine. We're cool. Yeah, exactly. So, you're a man who's been thinking

about the problem of productivity for 40 years. Have you worked out why it's so hard to get things done? Well, must people are okay. It's not hard to get things done. People wouldn't be listening to this if they didn't get things done. They're already getting things done. If you couldn't get anything done, you wouldn't get out of bed. So everybody's already getting things done.

So, you know, what you're alluding to is people going, how do I get more done with less effort? How do I leave work earlier? How do I not have quite so much stress on it? So, you know, productivity's got a little baggage crisis as a concept of what you think, that's work harder, but you're already being productive. You're already producing exactly what you're getting.

People say, be more productive productive what they mean is I want to be able to somehow get done what I get what I'm getting done right now with less effort. Leave work earlier, have more time with my kids, you know, whatever, or given the energy that I put in, I want to be able to produce more results, more money, more relaxation, more fun, more, you know, God does whatever people want. So yeah, so I understand the issue, you know, if you know what you're doing efficiency and doing it more effectively is the only improvement opportunity. If you don't know what you're doing, figuring out what you want to do is another, is a big

improvement opportunity. So either people know what they want, they just want to do it another is a big improvement opportunity. So either people know what they want, they just want to do it easier, better or not sure what they want. So clarifying that will, you know, be an increase in how they feel they're more productive or appropriately productive. Absolutely. It's a it's a two-step process. A lot of people don't know what they want to want and then upon deciding what they want to want, they then need to work out how to get the thing that they've now decided that they want. It doesn't surprise me that people kind of get lost and can sometimes struggle. Well, you know, here's in the last couple of years, Chris, you know, I've been doing this

for 35 years, but in the last couple of years, I've really sort of understood, I used to say the biggest problem was people feeling overwhelmed and not knowing or being able to do or being aware of what they need to do to get out from under the overwhelm. But I don't think that's the issue. The issue is not overwhelm. If you were actually overwhelmed, you'd figure it out. You'd be overwhelmed, Chris, if you're building caught on fire right now. But you would then handle that because you said, I'm going to survive. So I am going to get rid of the overwhelm feeling because overwhelm is not something that you can do. It just a very sustainable psychological event.

The biggest issue is ambient anxiety. Oh, we need cat food. Should I hire a vice president finance? Should we get divorced? Oh God. You know, it's all that stuff. And most people are willing to tolerate that. So it's the biggest issue out there is people's comfort and familiarity with the ambient anxiety that they live in. It's like the last thing a fish notices is water. And so the last thing a lot of people notice is the ambient anxiety that they've been in for years. Perhaps today we are going to open some people's eyes to the ambiance, ambience anxiety that they're swimming through.

I have to say as well, I do agree. Anyone that knows what real, high pressure, stress, acute stress feels like, knows that it usually results in stuff being done. The student that stays up to do the all-nighter just before they hand the assignment in, hands the assignment in, you know? It's an ambient anxiety which has precluded the last like six weeks since they were given the assignment. That's what's caused the problem. Wait till you suggest, what do you tell if you got to write a book, right? All you need is a deadline that will create the overwhelm that you're going to then handle. But it's like, oh my God, the book is not the draft is not due for

three months. Oh, oh my God, I should be writing. I can just let myself bathe in this anxiety for a little bit longer. Yeah, well, you get it. I do indeed. So you mentioned it earlier on, the first edition of your book, Getting Things Don't Came Out, 2001, nearly 20 years ago. So why are we still here talking about it today? What makes GTD so special that it's continually getting, as I can see,

it more popular even 20 years later. Well, it works. But only works if you want to change your world. So that's why we're back to people's addiction to ambient anxiety. There's not like, oh, God, I need more ambient anxiety. Let me go shoot it up. It should you use to it. So you don't think there's a better game and you're okay with what it is. You bitch and moan about it, but you're okay with it. You're very familiar with it. I'm so busy.

I'm so busy. Yeah, well, that gives you a mirrored badge called, well, I'm such a successful person that I'm so busy that I can complain about it and feel good. And that's, I'm sorry, most people just live in a life that's okay with them, okay enough, but in a strange way. So once you're, you know, again, addiction just means you're used to something. So you're not aware that there's another game, there's another world you could

live in. Once you taste that, or taste that enough, some part of you will go, oh my God, you know, there's something on my mind right now. I've got to do something about it. I got to write it down. I've got to decide the next action. I have to organize it appropriately so that my brain is back to present and clear again. So, you know, what I discovered was how do you get present and clear in a very, very busy world? And that's my marketing issue. I try to sell people something they don't even know they need. I'm trying to sell people something they don't even know they need. I'm laughing because Steve Jobs sold you something you didn't know you needed until you caught it.

There's something with a product rather than a system. There's something a lot more tacit about that, right? There's something that's quite visceral about it. Being there, you see it. These are the objective changes you can make. You see the person who has the iPod. What you got in your hands, you go, oh my God, look, I can do this. The things I can do, exactly.

Yeah, of course. You don't see the GTD master walking down the street and have this externalized, so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so- over the years we've sort of designed okay you want to call yourself a white belt yellow belt green belt brown belt black belt here's if it relative to GTD here's where you are and what you're doing if you're at that level of games so we've defined it but it's not obvious. Yeah I get it. I get it. To your point yeah. Yeah for sure. Have you seen how heated some of the debates on the GTD Reddit get? No, you are not really interested. Anybody who says this doesn't work, it's just they just not aware of it or they're just not old enough. Oh no, no, no, this is less to do with GTD doesn't work. Everyone on the GTD Reddit agrees that GTD works or at least almost everybody does. What they argue over are the finest,

most fine points about whether or not you can schedule a next action for tomorrow. Can I actually add it to my calendar? Know that should be nested within your projects. And OmniFocus is better than things three and blah, blah, blah. It's a, it's a wall zone in there. It's a wall zone. What a great audience argument to have. Yeah. I'm just, I, I, I, I don't need to be bothered by it. It's called we, we laid out the game.

How people play the game, whether they want to play on third base or first base, whether they like to throw, you know, come on. How you play the game is whether they want to play on third base or first base, whether they like to throw, you know, come on. How you play the game is very much up to you. So it's fascinating, Chris, to come up with a model that gave you the total freedom for how you implement it, but without violating what the basic principles are. You can get stuff out of your head, however you want, right it on your butt. You know, I have higher 12 people to follow you around and give it to them to make sure that they trust,

they feed it back to you when you need to see it. You know, so the model doesn't care how you capture or how you review what it is or what you put the results of your thinking about what you need to do about it. That's all up to you, but the principles are in violent. I think that the freedom within the system is precisely where these debates can come in. No, sure. Because it's not just not quite prescriptive enough for someone to be able to say, no, you're wrong and you're right. There's almost like a biblical interpretation that needs to be done.

You need to get a pastor in. Can we get the pastor in, please? Well said. Well said. Yeah. Okay, so what is the principle insight of GTD? Your head's a crappy office. So you need to get it out of your head. You need to clarify what it means, put the results in some trusted system externally, so that your brain is freed up to make a strategic and intuitive and intelligent decisions about what to do. But your head can't do that.

Your brain did not evolve to remember, remind, head can't do that. You know, your brain, your, your brain did not evolve to remember, remind, prioritize, or manage relationships with more than four things now. That's the new data. Really? Yeah, see you have more than four things on your head that you're trying, and that's the only place you're trying to manage them. You're going to be driven by latest and modest, not strategic intuitive intelligence. But that's just data. Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just letting you know, now I discovered that 35 years ago on the street, I couldn't

have told you that exactly, but the last 10 years, the cognitive scientist have basically validated and proved that. So that's a lot of what it is is called, don't use your head as your office guys. It's a shitty office. So you know, you get this stuff out of your head. So that's a lot of what the basics of this is. There's a lot more to it than that in terms of how do you truly, once you get it out of your head, a lot of people make lists, but they still don't manage the list appropriately. So there's several steps to being able to truly externalize your own commitments. So this is a lot about clarifying your agreements with

yourself. That's a big game. You know, Chris, very few people have truly identified all their agreements with themselves. Oh, should I give my kids karate lessons or not? Oh, should a higher-mice president of research? Should I get divorced? Should I should I manage the, you know, most people just got an awful lot going around, banging around in their head. They have not identified, clarified, objectified, and organized the results of their thinking about that and the decision making about that. And that's what's creating the ambient anxiety, which once it mounts up,

And that's what's creating the ambient anxiety, which once it melts up, starts to become this sort of source of just basic stress that's killing people. It makes for an arduous life to have to assess each decision individually, each time it occurs and comes up, right? And also I have to be able to remember it, recall it, remember how it relates to all of the other interlocking things that you need to do. Well, once knowledge work showed up, you know, the great late Peter Drucker, he identified knowledge work where you actually have to think to figure out what to do, as opposed to having itself evident when it shows up in terms of what your work is. But I don't know, Chris, the last time you went to your physical mailbox, did the mail identify itself

as junk mail or not? No, you had to figure that out, right? But the last time you opened your email and looked at it, did any of those say, this is junk mail, read it if you dare or care. No, it forced you, you had to actually think about things you've you've have you know implicitly allowed into your ecosystem. Like I don't I don't care about what you is in your email Chris. You don't care what's in mind. You care what's in yours because you've now allowed

that into your world. So now that you've allowed input into your world that is potentially meaningful to you. But you don't know yet what exactly it does mean to you. That's where this methodology that I uncovered, discovered, codified, comes into play. You want to get that off your mind? You can go back to survival mode. If you're in a crisis, you actually relax because it gets rid of all those decisions. If you're not in a physical crisis, your building is not on fire, then there's a bigger crisis. All the demons of the gate are allowed to rush through. Chris, what could you be doing instead of

talking to David right now? You could be doing this, but oh my god. And what do you do? Come on, come on. The stress of opportunity is what's killing a lot of people these days. That's where the technology and the change in the technology has made a difference. Nothing really, technology has really made a huge difference in productivity after word processes and spreadsheets. They changed the world. But since then, primarily, the only big change has been connectivity, volume, and speed of input.

That's what your technology has allowed. So now you've got a whole lot more stuff coming at you that you have to decide about. That you have to make a decision about how valuable is it, how do I engage with it, what do I do with that? But come on, what I was 14, 60 years ago, I spent two hours on the phone with my girlfriend. Right, what's the difference between that and layers of dark around with

Facebook or Instagram or whatever? That's a human experience. Right. So the issue is that you may have 16 girlfriends now and have 16 different channels that you could use to interact with. David is not referring to me to the people who are listening. That's obviously someone with followers more than I do. That makes sense, Chris. Absolutely. There's the implicit questions people have, you know, like a what's changed. That's what's changed. Okay, it's further down. What has changed since you first wrote GTD, you're reading my a what's changed? That's what's changed. Okay, it's further down what what has changed since you first wrote GTD. You're reading my notes here, but I totally get it. The I think this answers the question of why people are

still talking about GTD. Why is it a system that people are still interested in, which is that the principles scale, the scale across technology, the scale across technology the scale across volume across intensity. And what we've seen if there was going to be a stress test. For your system it would be the smartphone with social media and always on communication. Sure. Yeah, no, no, I still have to grapple with that. How much time do I want to spend on Instagram and you know, I wake up in the morning and they all along with my, you know, French press coffee and You know, I then the New York Times front page. I would see a buy at that. I play a few games of Instagram

You know of words with friends across the point and Still check out on Instagram to see but you know a few friends of mine are seeing you know looking around in their world And see what they're doing. You know, why not? You on. It's like a, it's like, but to me, social media is like a cocktail party. You don't want to spend your life in a cocktail party, you know, unless, of course, you can afford to do that and like to do that. That's fine. Or just to what degree is that fun to keep you inspired, keep you engaged, keep you connected to the world, to what degree is that fun to keep you inspired, keep you engaged, keep you connected to the world to what degree is that distraction from what you need to be doing in your life. But that's not designed, that's not decided by the technology

that's produced as a challenge and a choice you have to make, given the given the opportunity you have. I really like the idea of the fact that the number of opportunities we have has up-regulated this ambient anxiety. I recently had Greg McEwan, author of Essentialism on, and he says something very similar, that success breeds options and opportunities, and those options and opportunities undermine the things which often led to success in the first place. Sure. Well, come on. Hi, Chris. Go be innovative. I'm trying. I'm trying. I'm going right now.

Go be innovative. I'm trying. Innovation doesn't happen by people who would not to be innovative. It happened because of people figured would not to be innovative. It happened because of people figured out how to get what you're drinking in that kind of can. It came about by people trying to figure out, okay, here's an issue, here's an opportunity, here's something we need to have and we don't have those things to do that. So it then challenges and then triggers the creative thinking in your brain

to produce some sort of a new result or some sort of a different way to do that. So yeah, the whole idea of innovation and change shows up because of needs, not because of somebody wants to just be different. Hmm, I get that. So I want to get into the process of how we can get things done. But first, can you explain to us what is mind like water? Your psyche is not over or under reacting to anything. It's totally present with no distractions, with full capability to be aware and engage all of your resources for whatever's present that has your attention at the moment. And that is enabled by getting things out of your head into a system that you choose.

Yeah, enabled by getting rid of anything that's that's distract, potentially distracting to you or sucking wind out of your sales psychologically. So yes, you know, if four people jump in a dark alley, you do not want to have two thousand unprocessed emails hanging around your head. No, you don't. I had Paul Bloom, psychologist at Yale on and he's writing a new book about why people enjoy pain. And he interviewed a dominatrix who said nothing captures attention like a whip. And he relates it to the same reason that people do base jumping and why people like doing things with such scaled up, highly regulated, highly up-regulated levels of sensory input, because it forces them into the present. The 2000 unread emails, they got to go because you've just been hit in the face with a whip. And that reminds me right back to the first thing he said at the very beginning, which is this change from overwhelm to ambient anxiety. And I really, considering I've never heard

it before, I think you might be onto something there. Well, just talk to my dermatologist. The reason you'd like to scratch an itch is because itches come from a different part of your brain than pain does. And when you scratch it, it creates more pain than the itch created and it allows you to get temporary relief from the itch. Because then your brain gets to engage with how do I deal with pain. But then when you stop scratching at a certain point of time, the itch comes back because that didn't handle it.

So if you want a micro example, just physiologically, would you just say, there it is? I like it. Okay. So the process, how can we get things done? Well, first of all, you have to define what done means. It's a silly question to ask if you don't know what done means. How do we get what done? If you're thinking about a divorce potentially, right? What does done mean?

Divorced. Not necessarily. It may mean clarification or resolution of this issue between me and my life partner. Right. So there's a there's a challenge to define what done means. What does done mean if you're thinking, oh god, any kind of issues relative to your profession, your business, or whatever. And many times, done means just getting resolution about whether or not this is something to do. So done oftentimes is just a research project.

I need to figure out whether we should hire a consultant to lead us through this whole organizational change. I need to look into whether or not, you know, I should merge with this business as a get made. It's an offer that I don't think is quite, you know, rich enough. Right? And most people don't really identify those kind of things as projects. So what has done me? And most people are banging, you know, got all kinds of stuff banging around their head. You know, Johnny, my kid wants to take karate lessons. I don't know, should I give him,

he's only eight years old, should I give him a karate? You know, what has done me resolve that question? Right? Is there a process for resolving the question? Absolutely. What's the next action? What would you need to first of all, you need to define, okay, I need to get clear about whether to give Johnny Corregal lessons or not. That's my outcome, right? And you could decide not to give Johnny Corregal lessons and check that office done. The result. So the equivalent for the divorce would be spend sufficient time with my wife that we no longer

need to get divorced resolution. Well, that would be the action step you might want to take or the things you might need to do to get to that resolution. But the resolution would be, cruise control in my relationship with Susan, with Johnny, with whatever. So I want to put this onto cruise control. So if you and your listeners or people are watching this, if you understand what cruise control means, I mean, this thing is on automatic. I don't need to have my attention on this anymore because I'm trusting what's going on in the process going on out there right now. You know, you're pumping your blood, Chris, and your breathing is on cruise control. You're not worried about whether you're going to breathe or not. I mean, you could be if you give another stuff going on, but right now that's all fine.

So what's not on cruise control? Well, you don't have to go very far, call what's popped into your head while we've been talking, that has nothing to do with what we've been talking about. So anybody listening to this, wherever your head's gone, you know, they mention this, but I need to do that. I need to do that. Not yet on cruise control. As soon as you think I need cat food twice, you're not appropriately engaged with your cat.

You and cat are not on cruise control yet. As soon as anything pops into your head, unless you just like the thought, and many times I'm just thinking about stuff because I like thinking about them, just kind of grazing and just looking around my life. But anything keeps popping my head. I should. I need to that light bulb is changing. That thing needs to be doing, oh my God, you know, what am I going to do about the X, Y, Z. Those are the things that are not on cruise control yet. And that's what you need to identify if you wanted to start to get really clear. Because what's in the way of clear are those things for which the

right decisions are not been made and the right content has not been parked in the appropriate places. So your brain can let it go. I'm just going to let the listeners pause on that for a second, because the first time that I heard the concept that the only thought that you should ever have more than once, a thought that you choose to think, that you want to think, that in itself is a ground shaking insight. It may not be for you as the 12th Dan Black Belt Brazilian Jiu Jitsu GTD Master David Allen, but for 24-year-old me swimming in the advent of a fresh Instagram launch and 140 character Twitter and all this sort of stuff. I was like, hang on a second, I think things multiple times per second that I don't want

to think. But I'll get a thought, get rid of it and get it again within the space of minutes. And to hear that that's not just part of the course, that's not just standard operating procedure, was a very, very big insight. And to everyone that's listening, think about how many of the thoughts you have per day that you don't want to have that you have multiple times. It's okay as long as you get into the zin of okay, that's okay that I don't do anything about that. I'll let that keep popping in and just kind of enjoy the process.

And then see whether it actually emerges into something real or not. You will speed up the process if you sort of apply this principle of externalizing that. So that some part of you trust, oh, I'll be reminded of that cool joke I might want to use somewhere else. Or I'll be reminded of that thing I might want to do at some point, but I parked it in an appropriate place so that my brain goes, ah, okay, I know when I walk through the door in the morning, it's in the front of the door, the thing I need to take them or office tomorrow. So when you're smart and have creative thinking and creative thoughts that might be appropriate and productive for your life. You know, if you're really cool, you park those in some appropriate place so that when

you're not so smart, you kind of don't think, you actually do smart things. So that was another thing I discovered over all these years is like you're not the really smart and sophisticated people just realize they're not smart and sophisticated all the time. I actually had very rare moments. But when you're smart and sophisticated, you capture the results of that thinking and then park the results someplace so that when you kind of thick and dumb, which we are most of the time, you actually do smart stuff. Right? No. I hope you people can play that back and listen to that about

45. 45. David, I think this is one of those constant replay. If you're listening on Apple podcasts or Spotify, there's a little button just to the left of the play button, which rewinds by 15 to 30 seconds. And if you just or if you're on Siri, you can say, Hey, Siri, please go back by 60 seconds. This is how I skipped through Ben Shapiro's ads on his podcast book for this one. You may need to go back a couple of times. So, okay, we know that our mind is built for having thoughts and not holding thoughts. We know that we need to. No, you do not know. You know, we say we know that. Oh, come on. We in the listeners now know you are slowly redpilling us all as this podcast goes on, David,

okay? This is the, sorry, the insight that you have given us is that our mind is built for having thoughts, not all of them. We need to define what Dunn would look like. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Where are we next? Well, if you had nothing else to do,

but move toward that DUN, where would you go right now? And what would you do physically, visibly? The very next thing. Well, I think we might need to get divorced. Ah, okay. Designed outcome. Clarify relationship with life partner. Okay.

What's the very next thing you would need to do if you had nothing else to do? I'm going to pay you a million pounds or a million dollars or a million euros or whatever. Just start moving on that. Right now, nothing else. What would you do? Would you go to him or her and have a conversation? Would you call your attorney? Would you surf the web and see what I'm going to do about this? Would you say, I need to give myself two hours of a blocked out time to just meditate about this issue, about what I'm going to do? So you need to decide what's the very next thing

you would need to do to move the needle toward that outcome, what's the next action? So Chris and listeners, come on guys, the zeroes and ones of productivity, outcome and action. What do you want as a final outcome as either a material outcome or an experience that you want. And what's the very next physical, visible action or activity or focus you need to have

in order to move the needle toward that. And those two things are the things most sophisticated people listen to this are avoiding like the plague about all kinds of stuff in their head. I just discovered the algorithm, outcome and action. So what's the outcome of potential divorce? What's the action step you need to take? What's the outcome of cat needs food? What's the action somebody needs to take?

And so the clarification step, so as you know, Chris, you know, that I just identified, I didn't make it up, I just identified the five steps we need to do to get anything under control. You need to capture what's got your attention, what's not on control, identify what that is, and then clarify step two. What do I need to do about it? Is it actionable and is there some outcome or action I need to identify about that? Step three is organize reminders of bad if you can't finish them in the moment. Step four is to make sure you've got that some in some sort of trusted external system that you can reflect on and review when it's time to run errands,

when it's time to just sit down and talk to whoever you talked about or sit down. You computer what are all things that I might Should would ought to do step five is then You know make choices about all that given that you've done step one through four so You know That was that was a longer answer than what you ask about but that was it that was a longer answer than what you asked about, but that was it. I mean, that's basically the getting things done process, capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. Because that's how you get your kitchen under control, so you get your consciousness under control.

But mostly people will do that for the kitchen, but they haven't done it for their consciousness yet. that for the kitchen, but they haven't done it with their consciousness yet. In the GTD framework from those five steps, where do people tend to find the most challenge? All the way across. Just across the board. There's no peaks and troughs. Across the board. The first challenge is people don't get stuff all get everything out of their head. So they don't trust anything. They don't trust their actual brain. They don't trust their list because

they know there's no stuff other than that. So first stuff. It's a pot list. Yeah, it's a... Most people have some stuff out of their head. They've been some sort of a to-do list, but they got a whole lot of other stuff they haven't written down so they don't trust either place, you don't trust your head or your list, right? So then you grapple around and just fumble around and deal with latest and lowest. So that's the first place people fall off. Second place is even people make lists, everybody listening to this has some sort version of a to-do list, but they haven't decided what to do about the stuff on the to-do list. They've got mom or bank or VP of finance or whatever. If they've captured all the stuff to begin with, good for them, they haven't decided, okay, so now what? What's the outcome, what's the action stuff you need to take about that, if any?

So the second thing people fall off is they haven't determined what to do, about to do. Most people to do this create as much stress as they were leave. Because when they look at it, they go, oh God, there's thinking and decisions about Moms, but they are the bank in inventory or, you know, whatever. And they haven't decided about it. So they, I don't want, they don't want to look at it, just remind them they're overwhelmed. Third step is people have made this, I need to call my sister about Maz birthday, but they didn't park that somewhere. They'll trust they'll see it the right time. So now it's parked back up in their head, which has no sense of past or future. This creating the ambience and anxiety of, oh my god, this stuff I didn't do about Maz birthday. I think I decided to call my god, this stuff I didn't do about my mom's birthday.

I think I decided to call my sister, or wake them up at three o'clock the morning, oh, don't leave me to call my sister, oh my gosh. So, you know, they can fall off there too. And then they can fall off, even if they've done all that, and you'll find a few people that've done it, but even people who've captured everything,

clarified everything, organized everything, then they don't look at their external brain system, wherever that is, some sort of a list manager, wherever they're managing all that. And they're still driven off latest and modest. So they're not actually engaging with their thing. It's a strange paradox. You actually have to use your mind to empty your mind. So in order to be present, you need to look at everything you've thought about, everything you've decided about, and see that as an external inventory, and to go, no, I'm going to have a beer.

And no, I'm going to take a nap. Oh no, I'm not going to do any of that. I need to sit down and design a new business plan. So, you know, and then people fall off there, they don't actually use their system as an external brain. Your external brain only worked if it actually is an external brain, not just some externalized dump thing that you've stuck stuff in that you're not engaging with appropriately. I guess I could go on and on, but those are the main reasons that people may not stick with this as a black belt. So they find particular obstacles each stage along the way. I really find it so hilarious and very true that a un clarified

unreviewed and organized to-do list just becomes kind of like a monument to all of the ambient anxiety. Exactly. You've created this sculpture out of all of the things that were causing you anxiety in your head. And now look at them. They're coming.

We're all there. Well said, yeah. Indeed. Okay, so I think hopefully the audience will be getting it into their heads that it is better for us to have the things we need to do out of our heads and down somewhere. That something needs to be clarified, that clarification, they need to be organized, the organizing step, from clarifying something to organizing. How can someone go about that? Don't think unless you have a system's mentality, I don't think that's a supernatural way to put things

together. Well, anybody who's ever made a list of stuff to buy at the store who's already doing this. Anybody who has a calendar is already doing this. So people complain about all the list, I suggest they go, well, then throw away your calendar or your diary. They don't be intellectually dishonest. If you think your head can do it all, let your head do it all. Oh, you're maintaining a diary or a calendar? Why? Well, because I don't want to miss that opponent. No kidding. I understand. So the specifics of categorizing anything, you don't put the plans for your divorce on the shopping list to go to the shop. Of course not. You just need to decide what the next action is to make a decision about whether to get divorced or not. In some place, you'll see it the right time and place.

What about if I've got tons of next actions? I got a million different projects going on. You don't have a million. You have 3,200. Okay. What if I got 30 next actions? And I'm looking at them all. And I think, well, I need to sort this divorce out, but the cat, the cat starving, but

oh, I haven't done this. I haven't sort this divorce out, but the cat, the cat starving, but I haven't done this, I haven't done this. How do I prioritize? Pray. Trust your inner voice. It says, no, I'm not sure what to do. Let me pick an easy one to do. So I still stay in the saddle of my life, as opposed to being the victim of it.

Or let me chew the tough one to deal with that ugly email that I've been avoiding trying to respond to so that I can then snack on email the rest of the day as a reward. Either one. take your pick. I do either or buy, do both of those. So you have to have the interest or intuition about which thing would potentially create the most value or get me back onto my appropriate, in the saddle of my life again, most appropriately. And it could be the hardest, it could be the easiest. Many times I flip between both of those. So I have no formula for that.

I like the, again, these degrees of freedom, I think, are the flexibility that GTD has, which obviously is fuel for the Reddit discussions. But it also does make it scalable, it does make it flexible, it would allow it to work for somebody that's house, mum, at home versus guy that needs VP thing, doing needs blah, blah. Okay, so we've got ourselves into it being organized now. We have organized the things that are out of our heads that we have clarified. We have them into different sections, different sub-project, the divorce

project, which sounds terrible. That sounds like a really bad TV show, doesn't it? The different project? I've been through three, so I know them well. So that could be the next business. Coach, it GTD method for a divorce. Number four, what's where do we go? We have organized. What are we doing? Reflect and review the contents. So your brain can only relax about what's out of your head when you look at what you got out of your head on some consistent basis.

You can only feel comfortable about the errands you need to run if you look at a list of errands you've come up with over the last week or two. All right, you can only feel comfortable about what you need to talk to your boss or your business partner or your life partner about. If you look at what you've come up with over the last week or two, did you need to talk to him or her about? The alternative would be the equivalent of writing the things you need to do in a glass bottle, caulking it, putting it in the sea. But actually, that's okay.

As long as some part of you says, I don't have to or need to see that and would be loved to see that whenever that bottle shows up on some beach. Okay, so you can potentially create a GTD system, someone out there will be able to program this. They're probably well after this podcast, whereby it's a little bit like a quote of the day or a vocabulary builder thing, where you just put in 365 random tasks and it just issues you one of these random tasks a day. And you're like, look at this. Today, today, I'm getting divorced. Like, who in you?

Not like that. Yeah, you know, my ultimate GQD digital, you know, high tech system would be you walking the room because, oh, Chris, it's Friday afternoon, 3 o'clock. Here's what you usually do at Friday afternoons at 3 o'clock. You know, hear your options. You know, pick one and then you walk up to the hologram, pick that. And then all of a sudden, that shows up with all the context around those kinds of things.

Well, Friday afternoons, I usually think about my family. Great, you hit that. You suddenly see a hologram all your family just around you, right there. Oh, Susan punch on Susan Susan's birthday her favorite colors what she likes to do. Whatever. So you want to know a real review process or reflection process. Their technology is not even close yet. Ah, slash computer science. Are you listening to David Allen? This is a semi-formal request from the modern wisdom podcast for you to get this system created. Okay, but do you get that, Chris?

I say that and I go and people go because people go, what's the ultimate system? I say that would be the ultimate system. So your mind doesn't have to think about what it needs to think about. You've already programmed what you want to think about when you want to think about it, and it built in a system that then makes you not have to worry about what you need to think about when you need to think about it. You've already decided that. And you built that in. That's something that I've never thought about before, but genuinely for knowledge work would be a phase shift. It would be a complete, because I don't think that the vast majority of knowledge workers struggle at doing things. They struggle at knowing what they need to do.

When there's a task in front of you, we identified it earlier on that the very peak end of Parkinson's law, just the night before the the dissertation that's worth 50% of the 50,000 pound degree that you've paid for is due in. You got no problem right in the words. The words are coming as easy as hell then. But it's the choosing when to do it. What exactly is the next action that I need to do? Do I need, I should speak to them, I got this other thing to do, etc, etc. That would be... But the reminder to do that thought process at the right time,

that's your meta process. When should I be reminded to do that kind of thinking? And then you control that, as opposed to having it not see where or whatever, the forces you have to think about this, whatever. No, you design your own program. Believe me, I've worked with some of the smartest and brightest on the planet to try to figure out, could we do that software-wise? Could you? No. No, didn't work. There was no minimal viable product we could produce, given the market that was going on in the interest of the market that would make it worthwhile to invest all the resources

to actually make something like that happen. That's a shame, because that would be. Yeah, very cool, very, very, very, very cool. Okay. So yeah, so if you have a, if you have a tech audience listening to this, I go, okay, guys, I gave it up. I've tried twice the design, stuff that would optimize your thinking process and neither work. They all had all these, they understood these principles, but the market wasn't ready, the

technology wasn't ready to do it. If you said, gee, I need to call David by Friday, where would you put that right now? Things three. You need to call David by Friday. And where would you put that? Yeah, that's the problem. You don't have anything right now at hand. I do. Right? But that's because I got a friend that designed an overlay to do a little of the stotes years

ago that I still use. I just go call David, it'd be in my calls list, by Friday, there'd be a due date on that. And so Friday would be so Friday would automatically show up that if I hadn't done it by Friday, that'd be a little ding. I just ended up in my ping. Yeah. So what do you need to do to organize the thought process,

the knowledge of work, thinking, and decision making you need to do, and technology's way behind. There are a lot of tools that are out there. I know a lot of people have used the Excel or Word or you know the 300 or plus apps that have been designed around GTD and they're all list managers So you could do versions of that you could you could kind of create some workarounds. They could make that happen But nothing that's really slick That full frictionless thing.

The full frictionless thing. Yeah. Yeah, that would be so cool. I can't, so that's the sort of thing that I liked it. That is a thought which I want to have more than once a day. That's one of the, you know, just thinking about that world, thinking about walking in and the call being do you want to be able to see, you know, what David has done, you know, since you talked to him the last that might be out there in

Instagram or. So we're going to aggregate the social feeds. Has the book shelf fallen over and killed somebody has. And, you know, God bless. There are actually any one of these little parcels that we're talking about. People have actually done versions of that. But you've got somebody on your calendar and they automatically sort of curate whatever's out there in the social media or whatever about them.

And so, you know, any of these, so if you had $6 gazillion, the technology is there right now. You could sit down and design exactly what we're talking about. Just the market, the car market's going, who the frig cares. Me. Right. Me. I do. You have a market of at least one. I can promise you. You're not in enough pain yet Chris. That is a pain. You don't know what I've been through, David. You don't know where I've, you don't know the pain and the overwhelm and the ambience anxiety.

Ah, so all you need to do is get really uncomfortable with your ambience anxiety and that will give you sufficient motivation. Of course. Okay, so how often should we review? How often should we reflect on the organized, clarified list? As often as you need to, to make sure you're present with whatever you're doing. Is there a typical cadence to that?

Yeah, typical cadence. We talk about the week you review. Once a week you need to kind of bring up the rear guard, circle wagons and say, okay, what's happened? Or my list current is my external brain, you know, current enough. So I can trust it. So yeah, there is kind of a seven-day cycle about sort of regrouping things we've just seen. Annic, totally, but I read several years ago that after about seven to eight days, your brain dumps a lot of context. So if you've tried to recreate what happened

in the meeting five days ago, you can probably pretty much do that pretty well. 15 days ago, you're dead. Can't do it. Which actually means that you then need to create more thorough. You need to add context into the things that you're taking out of your brain if your review process is more than seven days. Yeah, because your ability to understand what you're talking about has gone.

Right. Well, my someday maybe last, I probably don't need to see every seven days, probably every, you know, two or three or four weeks. I need to review the stuff. I think I might want to do but not now. So whatever the, whatever your commitment is about whatever the content is, that that's going to define your recursion of review. How often do you need to review what you're doing with your life with you and any life partner you have if you have one? How often do you need to review the purpose of your company and what you're doing with your life with you and any life partner you have if you have one. How often do you need to review the purpose of your company and what you're doing? How often do you need to review? So all these reviews, as you probably know, I identified the six horizons we have commitments.

There's purpose, there's vision, there's goals and objectives, there's areas of accountability, there's projects, there's actions. So those are different content, there are different horizons that you actually need to identify what are the ingredients of all those different levels we have commitments with ourselves and then review those as often as you need to. How often do you need to look at your calendar? Probably every depends on how intricate your calendar is or how many content, how much content you have in it. Sometimes I need to look at it several times a day, sometimes once every two days. Depends. Now with the pandemic going on, I'm only going to look

by calendar once a day and kind of say, oh yeah, I got this one. I got this podcast with Chris coming up. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's cool. Hi, Light of the day, obviously. Of course, couldn't wait. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So we've realized that we need to review a typical cadence of being around about once a week appears to tally up with a little bit of neuroscience and is probably a good way. It's certainly something I've leveraged with this show. When I first started it, I wanted to always release it the same day at the same time. I wanted it to be ready for people to wake up on a Monday morning so that it would become a part of their week so that I

could automate their habit of listening to this show as much as I could. And potentially if a Monday morning or if a Sunday evening or wherever it is, I would caveat that actually, and I would say that Friday afternoon tends to be a bad time to try and do a review. I don't think that that would be a particularly effective time to do. It's actually probably a good effective time for a lot of people early Friday have to do, not late. Yep. Right. So you get to kind of debrief your week, you know, and get ready for the weekend and not have anything sort of hanging on, you know, so you can enjoy some relaxed time. But I've had people do weekly reviews Sunday night, some of some people do Monday morning, some people do Thursday night. So that they sort of clean everything up so that the Friday and the weekend are highly

effective and so it doesn't matter. But you have to decide what do you need to do and how often do you need to see what in terms of content, how often. It's that simple. How often do you need to see your calendar, How often do you need to look at your goals for your company? How often should you look at what you're doing in your life in terms of your health, how's your vitality, how's your relationships, how's your fun factor, how's your dog, how's your relationship?

As soon as those things start popping to you had sort of regularly, you know, gee, I should be doing something about that. You might want to have some sort of a checklist. Checklists are the key to life, you know, in a way. One of the things that I've smart enough to figure out, one of the things I need to think about, what I go do a heart surgery, or, you know, when we're going on a vacation. But I need to look at it so I don't have to keep rethinking about that.

So a lot of it is just building in the extra brain. And the extra brain just needs to be built in with enough content. And then the extra brain will only bring the value of the extra brain if you engage with the extra brain appropriately. the external brain if you engage with the external brain appropriately. I like the analogy between control and spontaneity that is given by having

things out of your brain, because to someone who maybe hasn't fully swallowed the GTD red pill yet, the idea of having a checklist for everything. You saying the words like checklists a life might sound well, that doesn't sound very fun or creative or spontaneous. That just sounds like a life where I've got to write lists all the time. Right. So anybody listening to this, who's ever looked at a recipe and said, oh, I'm glad to have the recipe. But here's what I want, I want to add a little extra pepper to that. I want to add, I think we should add a little more soy to that recipe. So we're talking about. But if you didn't have the recipe, you wouldn't do that.

You've just got pepper or soy in a pan. And he wants to eat that. No one wants to eat that, David. Okay, so the final number five, how can we then move ourselves past just reviewing? Trust your gut or your spirit or the still small voice inside of you or your liver or whatever you trust when you look at it, go, I'm going to do that, not that. I do think I'll use intuition as probably the most generically consumable, digestible term about what I just said. I do think that there is a lot of modern hyper rationalization about things that can be fixed with good instinct. Tim Ferris has this concept that he talks about for a note taking process that he used to

be very, very into. So he would read a lot of books and he wouldn't want to forget the things that he read. And then after a long time of consuming information and as he called it, I think ruthlessly indexing, he came up with a rule and the rule was the good shit sticks. And that is intuition, right? That is good instinct. That is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, good. As long as you've matured your, your, your digestible prostit, your, your digestion process of what that was and how real it was. And so matured, meaning I've looked at it, I've seen how it could apply to me. I'm letting that sort of incorporate internally.

And then you allow that to then kind of rule or run what you notice or what you consider important later on. So there's a very simple formula for that, Chris, to make sure that that works. It's called get older. That was what I was going to say. There is a base level of context that you need to have in order to frame new wisdom that you then add into it. Exactly. Well said.

Thank you. I tried. I tried to say things well as much as I can. Okay. So you've taken us through it. Obviously, there is so much to go through and we couldn't have gone through a full thing in just an hour long podcast, but I've got a couple more questions to wrap up.

This is from Johnny, who's one of the co-hosts of the show and is transitioning into full GTD mode. And he says, what is your morning startup process? You sit down to work, how do you decide what you're working? I sit down to work. I sit down to drink my lemon water to begin with the cleanser system and my French press coffee to just,

you sort of kickstart my brain a little bit. I play a little bit of words with friends around the world. You know, to kickstart my brain, I read the front page of New York Times on my iPad and take the dog out for what she needs to do. And then I sit down and go, What is the best thing to do right now? And then I just engage in a reflection of all the stuff that's out there in terms of my commitments and all the multiple commitments I have and interest that I have. And then I make a spontaneous decision about what to do. That's cool. Johnny. Actually, actually, let me answer that. then I make a spontaneous decision about what to do. That's cool. Johnny, actually, let me answer that.

My day starts the night before. The night before I look at my calendars, they say, okay, what's the hard landscape? Mainly because I like to sleep as long as I can. I'm a big sleep then. So the night before I look at the next day or two, to get a sense of what are my external commitments that I actually need to keep up with, to make sure that that's true,

that that gives me the relaxation, then that night to be able to say how I can sleep or whatever. And also let's me kind of, especially if it's a busy week, these days with the pandemic, I don't have that much going on, you know, two or three or four things a day that are committed already, terms of time. But I need to look at that and then relax that, okay, that's cool. Understand what the hard landscape is. So then the morning when I go through my little rituals

with all what I've been interventions, this is part of me that says, okay, so here's where I need to be now and here's how I manage that. So I'm usually kind of a 24 hour head looking at just describing the landscape to myself. So I think internally, you know, my hypothesis and a lot of good data showing up lately with the cognitive scientists is sleeping on things is a really good idea. So, if you are able to look ahead to the next one, two, three, four days or a week ahead in your mind before you go to sleep, there's a part of you that doesn't feel surprised by those things because they're showing up and has already accumulated whatever unconscious stuff we accumulate in the sleep state, which they've discovered is a lot that helps a lot.

I really like the idea of liberating yourself from the surprise of things happening that you've planned, even stuff that you've planned, especially as a good example with this podcast, it involves a lot of scheduling. I've got a Julia Cameron, a lady that wrote the artist's way. I've got her on the show, and that's been booked in for two and a half months. Like two and a half months for something, and you think like if I hadn't checked the calendar, I would have just woken up on Friday. I've been like, speaking to a lady that sold like four million books on Friday, like I've got to do a thing, like I've got to try and think of a thing for her. So yeah, that is liberating to have that and the day, the night before thing, I think, is a good way to do it. It reminds you, it gives you context,

right? More acute context. How's my day going to fit together? Can I actually train first thing in the morning or would it be a little bit of a better idea for me to, you know, when you wake up in that way? So, final question, I'm gonna guess that you get asked this all the time. Are you rolling? Wait a minute.

I've never had anybody ask a final question, was there a final question? So, I'm curious. Do you think this really is? Final question is probably going to be where can people follow you online? But that's a footnote. That's in the appendix. So this is the final question of the chapter, okay? I'll try and make it the final. Okay, and if it's not this isn't this is my rules. Welcome to my world, David. Yeah, exactly. I do. I don't want to. Are you, are you rolling with some custom coded crazy David Allen made by

Silicon Valley direct app across all of your devices for you to have your productivity system embedded to manage all of your tasks. No. What are you using? I use, we still use what was the old Lotus Notes that became IBM Notes as now. HCM Notes, I still use a group app that we use our small little company.

And a friend of mine who is my CTO for 10 years built an overlay of that called eProtectivity that makes my task management within that system more sort of GTDSK. So that's what I use for my reminder system. It's a sophisticated version of what if you were using Outlook or anything that had just a task management function. So I use that. And then I use all the standard stuff. I use Stagget to grab screenshots.

I use Evernote for a lot of just random email stuff. I use Word, I use Excel for all kinds of stuff. And I use the, I use Excel for all kinds of stuff. I use my organized computerized inventory of those things, how those are structured within that context. I use the brain, which is fascinating. It's more of an informal thing that I used for making random connections with things. What's that? The brain.

The brain. Yeah. Just look at the brain, the THE, BRAN.com. And the Harla is a friend of mine and knows my stuff. It's a great way to sort of build a software that sort of connected, oh, eggs, what does it remind me of? Oh, it reminds me of Susan who cooks eggs. That reminds me, by the way, of a source for eggs

and you're able to connect all those things and see them however you want to see them. So, you know, it's sort of a connectivity tool. And there's several out there that you could probably use in that regard. What else are you using? Those are the main tools they use. There you go.

The internet has its answer. And I'm sorry. Capture. Pen and paper. Go. These are new things nobody's ever heard about. But there's a pin that actually holds information. It holds data that you can then actually put onto this thing

called paper. Most of you have never seen this before. It's actually, oh my God, I can actually externalize this stuff into a physical thing. Tell Chris, his podcast was fantastic. Number one, just write that in big capital, that is at the top, David. Is that one of those fancy pens

that writes upside down? No. One of those space pens, and the Russians, the Russians were just like, I will just make a pen. It's one that will be ten years to discover the best pen to sign my books in terms of autographs. Oh, I will have some authors from America listening. What is that? It's a... Oh, in BIS, it's an on-biss.

It's a. I'll send you a link to it. Coal. Link will be authors. People who need to sign things. Link will be in the show notes below. Is that covers only or inside pages on paper? Inside pages where. If it's a paperback. A lot of the other pins to people give people the author's to sign books with are either too big or too small.

They either bleed all over the page or they're too tiny, you need to make a little more of an impact on that. So this is a, what do they call it? Sorry, it's scacing right now, but it's one of those things that it's just the right amount of that. Of thickness, and it's not the same as if you had like a sharpie market pen, but also not quite as thin as if it was

a ball-pointy type thing. Exactly. So if I write on this, I can see, it comes out just the right kind of width to it. Nice amount of weight that really makes you know that was David Allen that signed this book. David Allen, that's right. That's the signature of a man done one handed facing a camera who has signed an awful lot of his name on things. Many more of them. But lovely, got what a great problem had to book the same.

Man, look David, I could go on, I could go on all day, but thank you so much. My final, final, final question is I told you. Look, this is the appendix. This is the, you're not, this isn't part of that. This is outside of the rules. Where should people go? They think this GCD thinks sounds good. I liked this really, really charming fellow that Chris brought on the podcast. Where did they go? They find out more. Well, that be the debit getting things done.com. You'll see an overview of what we've created as a company right now after all these years. We're mostly supporting our partners around the world that are delivering. You know, public seminars as well as, you know, a lot of business to business, you know, seminars inside of businesses where they're,

you know, teaching and training and coaching this methodology. So you'll see that on our website. You can, you can, you know, teaching and training and coaching this methodology. So you'll see that on our website. You can, you can, you know, surf around that. We've got a free newsletter. You can set up for, um, and of course, you know, you could always go get the book, getting things done. We just produce the getting things done workbook. It's also available in bookstores around the world

in the UK as well. That's kind of the easy way to get involved with this methodology if you're not already there. So just go take a look. Link will be in the show notes below the updated version of Getting Things Done, which was done 2015, I think, and then getting things done workbook, plus getting things done.com and at GTDGuy on Twitter. Yep. GTDGuy on Twitter. And the Alan 45 on Instagram, if you want to see it below my personal life.

I love it. Pictures. Everything will be linked in the show, and it's well, David, man, it's been, this has been wonderful. Thank you for your time. Hey Chris, this is really fun. Yeah, thanks.