The Tim Ferriss Show - #384: David Allen — The Art of Getting Things Done (GTD)

Episode Date: September 3, 2019

"Your head's for having ideas, not for holding them." — David AllenDavid Allen (@gtdguy) is one of the world's most influential thinkers on productivity, and his 35 years of experience as a management consultant and executive coach have earned him the titles of "personal productivity guru" by Fast Company, one of America's top five executive coaches by Forbes, and among The American Management Association's top 10 business leaders.David's bestselling book, the groundbreaking Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, has been published in thirty languages, and the "GTD" methodology it describes has become a global phenomenon, being taught by training companies in 60 countries. David, his company, and his partners are dedicated to teaching people how to stay relaxed and productive in our fast-paced world.This podcast is brought to you by 99designs, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together to create designs they love. Its creative process has become the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals, and I have used it for years to help with display advertising and illustrations and to rapid prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca. Whether your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99designs.You can work with multiple designers at once to get a bunch of different ideas, or hire the perfect designer for your project based based on their style and industry specialization. It's simple to review concepts and leave feedback so you'll end up with a design that you're happy with. Go to 99designs.com/tim and get $20 off plus a $99 upgrade.This episode is also brought to you by FreshBooks. I've been talking about FreshBooks — an all-in-one invoicing + payments + accounting solution — for years now. Many entrepreneurs, as well as the contractors and freelancers that I work with, use it all the time.FreshBooks makes it super easy to track things like expenses, project time, and client info, and then merge it all into great-looking invoices. FreshBooks can save users up to 200 hours a year on accounting and bookkeeping tasks. Right now FreshBooks is offering my listeners a free 30-day trial, and no credit card is required. Go to FreshBooks.com/tim and enter "Tim Ferriss" in the "How did you hear about us?" section!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. I've been talking about FreshBooks for years now, the all-in-one invoicing, payments, and accounting solution. Many entrepreneurs I know, as well as many contractors and freelancers I work with all the time, use it all the time. So I get to see FreshBooks on a weekly basis. FreshBooks makes it super easy to track things like expenses, project time, and client info,

and then merge it all into great-looking invoices. FreshBooks can save users up to 200 hours per year on accounting and bookkeeping tasks. I don't know about you, but I like to do as little of that as possible, so 200 hours is a lot of hours. FreshBooks is always releasing new features that make running your business easier, and here are just a few of the major upgrades they've made in the last 12 months alone. Number one, they've redesigned the time tracking feature to create a more intuitive time tracking experience. Number two, they know just how frustrating bank reconciliation can be. So they've automated bank reconciliation, removing the pain. Number three,

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About Us section. That's FreshBooks.com slash Tim and enter Tim Ferriss in the How Did You Hear About Us section. Check it out, FreshBooks.com slash Tim. Well, hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Good day, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you may be, my gorgeous little magui. My guest today is David Allen. You may know of him, the man, the legend. You may worship his systems, or you may not know who he is. So I will tell you who David is. One of the world's most influential thinkers on productivity, David's 35 years experience as a management consultant and executive coach have earned him the titles of Personal Productivity Guru by Fast Company

Magazine and one of America's top five executive coaches by Forbes Magazine. The American Management Association has ranked him among the top 10 business leaders full stop. His best-selling book, Getting Things Done, subtitled The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, has been published in 30 languages and the GTD methodology, as it's known, that it describes has become a global phenomenon, being taught by training companies in 60 countries, probably more at the time of this reading. David, his company, and his partners are dedicated to teaching people how to stay relaxed and productive in our fast-paced world. You can find him on Twitter at GTDGuy, G-T-D-Guy, G-U-Y, and at gettingthingsdone.com.

And without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging, very unexpected in some aspects, conversation with David Allen. David, welcome to the show. Tim, delighted to be here. Thanks for the invitation. My pleasure. And it has been a very, very long time since we've had any contact. I know we were chatting before we pressed record. It was probably just a few weeks, maybe a month after the 4-Hour Workweek came out in 2007, that I found myself being interviewed by someone alongside you virtually on the phone. And I was a nervous mess. I was very intimidated

because I felt like I was stepping sort of into the arena with the literal and metaphorical black belt in the productivity space. Because also at that time in 2007, GTD, Getting Things Done, was ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. I mean, it was the talk of the town and 43 Folders, Merlin Mann, and all of these other outlets, Lifehacker, seemed to talk about GTD every day. So it's nice to have a conversation where I feel more comfortable asking questions. Catching up. Well, you know, for folks like you and me, time is somewhat irrelevant. Well, that's what good friends are for, you know? It's like you show up and go, hey, what's new? Two years, 10 years, doesn't matter. Yeah, exactly. And I was thinking back to that time frame. 2007 was a very important inflection point for me, if I want to look at it that way.

And around the same time, somewhere between, I want to say 2007, 2009, a friend of mine actually interviewed you at South by Southwest in a format that is very difficult, I think, in some cases for both sides, inside a car. His name is Chase Jarvis. Oh, I remember that. That was such fun. He's a phenomenal guy, brilliant photographer.

And he was trying to do his best to squeeze out, and of course you're very good at providing this, but some type of nugget that he could extract in, say, a minute or two minutes or however many minutes it was. And I thought we'd begin there because the answer, as I remember it, was your mind is made for having ideas, not for holding ideas. And I think this is so important. I would love to hear you just expand on what that means. Well, your head's a crappy office. And, you know, most people are still using their head as their office. And your brain did not evolve to

remember, remind, prioritize, or manage relationships with more than four things. That's new cognitive science data, by the way. So, you know, how many people are trying to keep track of more than four things and manage the relationship between them and prioritize between them? It's like, excuse me, how about 10,000 or 1,400 or God knows how many. And, you know, I just sort of uncovered years ago, more practically and just on the street, how critical it was to empty your head. And, you know, what then the, you know, in the early days of the new cognitive science field, they called distributed cognition, called get it out of your head.

And so I discovered that and then discovered, not only just get it out of your head, but there are other things you need to do to clarify. Back to Peter Drucker, like define what the work is that you're getting out of your head and what your cognitive is to it. So, you know, I spent the last 35 years trying to figure out what that algorithm is and then spending thousands of hours, as you probably know, desk side with some of the best and brightest and busiest folks on the planet, actually implementing that process and watching this transformational stuff happen. You know, come on, you've done a ton of coaching and advising, I'm sure. And, you know, best advice is not to tell people what to do, but ask them the right questions. Right. And find out what's going on in their head

and help them frame that in a way that's useful. And so I just figured that out. And I don't know how long I'm going to be preaching this, Tim. Folks, your head is not, don't do that. Don't leave your stuff in your head. And it's such a huge habit. I think it's because people have this, I think it gives people a false sense of control to keep it in their head. And control is the master addiction.

So you've got to feel vulnerable enough to unload everything that has your attention and take a look at it. That's daunting, I guess, for most people. You mentioned coaching, so I'll jump to that next. I'd love to hear you describe what you do with a, say, corporate client, past, present, hypothetical. When you come in to meet with, say, executives, and they're individually very high-performing people, nonetheless carrying far more than four items in each of their heads. And you sit down. What are the first questions you ask or exercises you do

when you sit down with high-functioning but nonetheless overwhelmed people to work with them? What are some of the first things that you do with them? Well, aside from establishing rapport, which is, you know, hi, and why did you bring me in here? What is your presenting issue, as best you can describe it? And, you know, and here's a little bit about who I am and kind of what we're going to do. But, you know, ideally, and over the years, I discovered the less I tell people about what we're going to do, the better. Surprise. So if I just walked in cold, you know, the tabula rasa here is the first thing I would do, Tim, with you would be let's make sure you have an entry, a physical entry.

We have some place to throw stuff until we can make decisions about what it means and what you're going to do about it. But we need to collect a bunch of stuff first. So that's what we're going to do first is get some sort of a material version of collection or capturing stuff that has people's attention. So we just get a big stack of printer paper, a favorite pen or pencil, sit them down and say, okay, what's on your mind? What has your attention? Oh, I need cat food. Oh, I need a life. Oh, I need to do vice president marketing. Oh, our next vacation is coming up. Oh, God, my cell phone just crapped out. The printer broke. Daddy, Eddie, and we literally start writing. They write each one of those items that has

their attention on a separate piece of paper, and they toss that into their in-tray. You'd be surprised, by the way, first of all, how many people don't have an in-tray, or if they do have one, it's petrified because it's just been sitting there with crap in it for weeks. We need to have some sort of clear space to just collect all that stuff to begin with. That process, Tim, takes usually, in my experience over all these years, for the mid to senior level professional that we actually coach with this process, it takes one to six hours just to capture what has their attention. Not to

organize it, not to prioritize it, not to make decisions about it, just to identify it. Yeah, it's so impressive and horrifying at the same time. And I was doing prep for this conversation. I found one paragraph that struck me as important that's related to this, I think, in some capacity. This is from an older piece in Wired, but it reads as the following. So, at a seminar, Alan asked the audience to try to capture all their stuff by writing a list. And at the end of a few minutes, he tells us to look at the list and think about the way it makes us feel. He guesses that our feelings include, and feel free to fact check any of this, by the way, a mixture of grief and relief. The relief he suggests comes from the simple fact of making the list, but where does the grief come

from? And this is the quote that really caught my attention. These items represent agreements you haven't kept with yourself, Allen says. What happens when you break an agreement with yourself is that your self-esteem plummets. Could you speak to this a bit? Because I would imagine a lot of folks would say, I feel guilt, perhaps, about all the things I haven't done for myself or for other people. But this grief and agreements that you haven't kept with yourself struck me as important, at least got my attention. Could you speak to that? Well, I'm going to reverse engineer it a little bit and come back to the fact that

you're breaking the agreement is because you're keeping track of it in your head, and where you keep track of that has no sense of past or future. So, that part of you, that little subliminal part of you, thinks you should be buying cat food 24 hours a day, Vice President 24 hours a day. That's why it wakes you up at 3 o'clock in the morning. Oh, shit, cat food. Oh, my God. What am I going to do? Because that thing has no sense of past or future. So because it doesn't, you can't do it all. You can't do more than one thing at a time. And so there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing all of that all the time. So talk about a ton of broken agreements.

But you don't have to finish the thing to keep your agreement. You do need to get it out of your head. See, agreements, and this is one of the things I learned back in the old personal growth days, there's an automatic price you pay when you break an agreement is you disintegrate trust, either with other people or with yourself or both. So if you don't want to have a broken agreement, you have three options. One is don't make the agreement. Call no.

I'm not going to do that. Move it to someday maybe or something. Keep the agreement. Go buy the cat food. Go hire the VP. Go finish the thing. Or most importantly for most people is renegotiate the agreement. Go buy the cat food. Go hire the VP. Go finish the thing. Or, most importantly for most people, is renegotiate the agreement. If I made an appointment today, for instance, Tim, as people may hear ambient noise

out there, there's construction going on. If that was too loud, I would probably have to try to renegotiate and reschedule this talk with you. And then I don't have a broken agreement if I don't do it because we renegotiated it. But you can only feel good about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing. So most people have just made so many more agreements than they're aware of.

So all we do in our coaching is get people aware of what are all the agreements you've made. What are all the would, could, should, need tos, ought tos? And that's one of the reasons people feel good when they make a list is they look at it and go, well, gee, I can't do all this right now. No kidding. Right. And so, you know, that's the, that's the, it comes back to externalizing the stuff out of your head. That's why it's so critical to do that. And most people, I don't think have really understood or certainly managed themselves with an understanding of that dynamic.

I'd love to underscore and maybe dig into a word that you used that I'm certainly in my own life trying to pay more and more attention you use yourself for renegotiating when need be? What do you say to someone, whether via email or otherwise, when you need to remove a commitment, whether it's forever or simply for another time? Do you have any particular suggestions or thoughts related to that? Well, I could probably think of a dozen, but one of the most interesting ones and useful ones sometimes is to make it really politically correct. It's like, wow, what you're asking me to do or what I've committed to do is going to require so much more attention than I have the bandwidth to actually give it the attention it deserves right now. Can we renegotiate that in terms of when it's due or how we're going to make it happen or if I even need to do it at all?

So that's one way to do it. To just say, hey, that's a cool thing. I don't mean this is not bad about you. It's not even bad about me. Life changes. And sometimes we just have to renegotiate stuff in that way. I think it's important to tell yourself. As I say, you can only feel good about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing. That's why in order for me to be on the call with you and be present here, Tim,

not long ago I looked at every single thing I might, could, would, should be ought to do today and say, no, this is it. Maybe I made a mistake. We'll find out. But at least for now, this is the coolest thing to do. It's the best thing to do. It's the only thing to do right now. But I just looked at everything else. But it's hard to do if you haven't seen everything else because you don't know what everything else includes.

And so you're not quite sure what you're not doing. And so most people then can't truly renegotiate with themselves because they're not sure what are all the things that they would, could, should, ought to do. That's why, Tim, I mean, to another point, but it ties very closely to it. When I'm not doing anything else, I'm cleaning up my backlog to zero because there's a surprise coming toward me I can't see. And when that surprise hits, and that could be good, bad, or indifferent, but when that thing hits, if I've got a big backlog of unclarified, uncaptured, unorganized stuff, I'm going to be disturbed by any input, even if it's good, because I don't know what else I'm missing that if I decide

to put my attention on that new thing, what's going to be missed? What's going to fall through a crack somewhere? So that's why keeping it clean, keeping the backlog as minimal as possible, is just a fabulous way to just make sure that you're clear about what are all the agreements that you have renegotiated with yourself. Yeah, that makes very good sense. On whether this will turn out to be the best use of your time, give me perhaps another half hour to disappoint. We'll see how it turns out.

On the backlog, as minimal as it may be, where does that physically live for you currently? What is the holding pen for that? Primarily two and a half places. One is obviously email. Right now, just because of some other stuff that's going on, I have about a screen and a half full of email, which is a little too much for my comfort zone, but that's okay.

I'll clean it up sooner than later. My physical in-tray that I'm staring at right now, which happens to be empty, you know, while I was waiting for the construction site to slow down a little bit out there, I was processing a bunch of receipts that, you know, my wife and I collected the last 24 hours, putting them into Quicken. So that's all zeroed out right now. And the other half place is my little note-ticker wallet that I carry around with me that has one note in it that says chiropractor. Okay, so I'm just throwing that into my entry right now. So those are the places I capture, really. I don't capture

much digitally. I do have an iPhone digital capture called Brain Toss, a great little program that two GTDers in Amsterdam actually built. Because what it does is it doesn't put it into the black hole of my iPhone. It automatically transfers it to my email. So if I care to digitalize anything that I'm capturing, some thought, some idea, whatever picture I want to take or something,

whatever, it automatically goes to email, which then I clean up like I clean up my email regularly. But those are the main places. What are the benefits of minimizing the digitizing, so to speak? Are there benefits? Is it simply a habit that

you have continued over time since that's where it started? Or are there features to using physical paper? Well, yeah. There's two sides to the coin of the digital world. First of all, it's a great time to be alive if you know what you're doing and you've got a little discipline. If you don't, it's a black hole.

And you're likely to throw stuff in that you uncovered a month later. Oh my god, I should handle that. Do you put it in Dropbox? Do you stick it in Evernote? Do you want to put it in Outlook? Do you want to put it in WhatsApp? Where are you going to stick this stuff? So the plethora of options has made it almost more work. Come on. I don't know if you've seen all the studies that say that basically productivity hasn't gone up at all, though technology has gone through the roof. And a lot of that is because the technology hasn't necessarily improved productivity.

It's actually complicated people's lives a lot. I know a bunch of high-tech people that are going back to paper planners, especially the ADD and ADHD type because there are too many clicks. And out of sight, out of mind, I've got a Thunderbolt screen, especially the ADD and ADHD type because there are too many clicks. And out of sight, out of mind, I've got a Thunderbolt screen, but I still don't have the real estate on there that I used to have with my time design paper planner. You can't beat it because you can see all of that sort of a relationship to each other much easier. There are no clicks. There's no battery, no Wi-Fi required. It has all the downside. I mean, I'm kind of a high-tech end user anyway.

I like all that stuff because of connectivity and so forth. But you really need to know what you're doing. Otherwise, the tech world can really be quite overwhelming. And I think what I'd love to do is rewind the clock a bit to get a better understanding of how you became the current version of David Allen. Could you describe where you were in high school, what you were focused on at the time, if anything, and what you wanted to be, what you thought you would be when you grew up or what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yeah, well, I have to rewind and take quite a bit. Let's see, high school. Well, first of all,

I was an actor as a kid, way before high school. When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I took acting lessons and actually became sort of the child star in Shreveport, Louisiana, where I pretty much spent most of my growing up years. And so that was always kind of a love, was that. Then in high school, I became a debater, and state champion debater, regional champion debater, whatever. So I enjoyed, I loved debating. That was fun, standing up and trying to make it up, you know, kind of while you're on your feet.

And I thought I was, you know, come on, we're talking the 50s and early 60s, and in Shreveport, Louisiana, if you had any brains at all, you were either a lawyer, a doctor, or a teacher. You know, if you weren't necessarily, you know, in that line of things, you either sold cars or insurance or something like that, That was pretty much it. There weren't a whole lot of other options.

Consultant, what's that? Actor, no, go get a degree so that you can have a job. So there weren't a whole lot of options, basically, in my head. It turns out I actually had the opportunity. We had an exchange student at our high school that I was going to from Germany. And that was of interest to me. And so I actually applied to the American Field Service, AFS, and back then there were not many Americans that foreign families or international families would actually take an American for a whole year. Usually the Americans went for the summer.

But I applied for the whole year. I said, what the heck? And it turns out I was able to, I got chosen by a family in Zurich, Switzerland. I went and lived with the Swiss family for a whole year. And that was eye-opening. How old were you at the time? 17 and 18. Wow. Actually, 63, 64.

I was over there when Kennedy was shot, which was quite traumatic for most of the Europeans, anyway, when that happened. But I went to basically the high school that the boy in the family went to. It wasn't an academic program. It was more social. Live with the family and see how they live and so forth. So I went to Real Gymnasium Zürichberg, which happened to be a block up from the Kunsthaus in Zurich that had Monet, Waterlilies, all over the walls. And I was three blocks from the Odeon Cafe, which is where Dadaism started, where Jung and all kinds of, you know.

So I was thrust into the middle of European history and culture just by being there. And that kind of opened my eyes a good bit. Also, it turns out I had a half-sister, much older than me, who had wound up marrying one of the intellectual chroniclers of the Beat Generation, a man named John Cullen Holmes. If you ever looked up John Holmes, John Cullen Holmes, you know, he wrote some very interesting books. And they lived in Connecticut. They were very, very hip. My dad died when I was really young. And my mom, when I was nine, took me to visit Shirley and John, her husband. And so I got introduced to probably the hippest of the hip in terms of intellectual culture, New York City, Manhattan, beat. Matter of fact, my brother-in-law, John and Kerouac coined the term beat together, watching somebody beat themselves down Central Park.

Anyway, so I got introduced early on to a whole new, different world of sophistication and culture really back then. I wasn't kind of blindsided by the fact that the world was a lot bigger than my world I was growing up in in Louisiana. So I kind of wanted to get out of there as soon as I could. Nothing against that. I still love Louisiana. I'm still going back and, you know, sort of seeing the culture and the food and the bayous and so forth and all that.

But certainly my world had expanded by that point, and I was interested in pursuing that. So I thought law maybe to begin with, but then after being in Switzerland, being around all that culture, then the interest in the liberal arts, philosophy, and so forth was more interesting to me. So when I got into college, that was my focus. For those of you who aren't familiar with the career path, so to speak, what did that look like? Well, it was a crazy little college in Florida that would design your own education, no grades, independent study, called New College. And got bored by the philosophers. They wound up proving their original hypothesis using their original hypothesis. That's kind of a circle thing. But what was more interesting was the philosophers themselves.

And I had a great friend. He was my academic advisor. Turned out to be a good friend who was an intellectual historian, history of thought. So he turned me on to history of culture, history of thought. And I thought that was really cool. And we didn't even use the word paradigm back then, but that's what I got introduced to. I read Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, which is one of the earliest books, you know, over 100 years ago, talking about cultures having their own psyche, their own

geist, and how that affected art, philosophy, math, science, medicine, you know, and everything, because there was kind of a thumbprint or a signature in the various cultures that you could see through all of those things. So I was fascinated by that. So I guess that was kind of the early stages of me being interested in models. You know, understanding a model, if we could understand a model that could help the world make a lot more sense, I've always been somewhat attracted to that. Always also been attracted by how the invisible affects the visible. So if you look back at my career,

you know, my first job was a magician at age five on the sidewalks of Palestine, Texas. I charged five cents for my magic show. So you could trace it, if you kind of stretch a little bit, but you could trace it all the way back to there. I've always been fascinated by how if we could understand what's going on invisibly that's affecting everybody and get a hold of it, that could make a huge difference in how you manage your life. And it seems like you tried your hand at many different types of jobs. And we certainly don't have to trace through all of them. But how did you end up teaching, say, corporations or productivity? And that may not be the... Yeah.

How would you... Well, I'll make a very long story very short. You know, I got I got into graduate school in American intellectual history. Now again, this is Berkeley, 1968. They say if you can remember being in Berkeley in 1968, you probably weren't there. So, but that was heady times to be there.

And then, you know, at some point I realized, wait a minute, I really wanted to get my own enlightenment instead of just study people who had theirs. So I just figured that academia was not the place for it. And so I jumped ship, you know, left that, said, okay. And then I went on my own personal exploration path. You know, lots of things, you know, lots of drugs, but also martial arts, spiritual stuff. You know, come on, this is the 60s, this is Berkeley, you know, early 70s. So as I studied all of that, I was more interested in finding out who I was and finding out about God, truth, and the universe than having a job.

But, of course, Rice Bowl and Cave wasn't my style. So I said, okay, I've got to pay the rent. So how do I do that? Well, I had several friends who themselves kind of knew what they wanted to do and they were starting their own businesses and running small businesses. And so I wound up being a good number two guy. So just to have a good job, I helped two guys start a New Orleans-style restaurant in L.A. I helped a friend run a landscape company in San Fernando Valley. I sold mopeds. You could read the list on Wikipedia. It's a lot of stuff that

I did. But basically, I would go in and see, well, how can I help them do what they're doing? And how much easier can we make this? Because I'm just a lazy guy. Then I'd help improve their, now we call that process improvement, but I was just trying to not have to work so hard. And then I went fix it, and then I get bored. So then I go find another job. And then I discovered one day they call those people something, they pay them, they call consultant. So in 1981, hung out my shingle, Allen Associates. Couldn't spell it.

Now I R1. So then I said, okay, well, let me see if I can sort of just throw myself out there project by project with people and make that work. But then, again, because I didn't want to have to work so hard, I thought, well, I'm really interested in models that would work. In case I can't see, you know, obviously how to help somebody in their process, it would be nice if I had a model in my back pocket to pull out and be able to help them. That would somehow improve their condition. So I got very hungry for those models. Also, because of my meditation, spiritual work, martial arts work,

I really loved the idea of being clear in my head. You know, I'd sort of been, you know, I had a lot of training in the martial arts about how do you clear your head, you know, so you can fight appropriately. But then my life got more complex, and I said, well, that's kind of screwing up my clear head. So both my interest in keeping a clear head as well as, you know, good models to help people had me start to get attracted to and pull in piece by piece, you know, and fast forward all the stuff that became ultimately GTD and getting things done, you know, 20 years later.

But there was no grand epiphany. There were just little small epiphanets along the way that I began to cobble together in a system, in a systematic approach. And, you know, I found some stuff that worked for me. You know, I had a couple of mentors teach me some of the key elements of these things. And I went, God, that's really cool. And then I turned around and used those techniques with my own clients, and it produced the same result, more clarity, more focus, more meaningful space in their head. And I thought, well, that's cool. So that became a key part of my own consulting. We didn't call it coaching back then.

It was just consulting. And then a head of HR in a big corporation saw what I was doing and said, wow, we need that in our whole company, David. Can you design a training program with this methodology so we can reach a lot of people with this stuff? So I spent a couple of months and designed a two-and-a-half-day personal productivity training, and we did a pilot program for 1,000 executives and managers at Lockheed in 1983 and 1984.

And that worked. It hit a nerve. And I found myself thrust into the corporate training world. Could have fooled me. If you'd told me as an American intellectual history major in Berkeley in 1968 that I'd be in the corporate training world, I'd say, what do you smoke? Are you kidding? But it turned out that it happened to be the audience that was most attracted to what I had found out. Because the world, you know, the mid to senior level

professionals were just starting to get hit with stuff like email and the tsunami of stuff that was starting to hit the corporate world. And they were also the clients that were interested in actually paying for training and coaching and so forth that would assist people in those roles. So that's a very short version of a very long story. I appreciate the background. I would love to hear a bit more about your mentors. Are there any particular mentors who were particularly important to the formation of GTD? There were two, and I just had them on stage with me in Amsterdam because I invited them to,

you know, we just did the GTD Global Summit. And I wanted people to sort of hear some of the original DNA of where GTD started. One was Dean Acheson, the other was Russell Bishop. And Dean had been a 25-year consultant in executive consulting in organizational change. He had uncovered the techniques that were critical to be able to loosen people up so they were able to make change instead of having a lot of old business prevent them from being able to do that. So the whole idea of a mind sweep, getting stuff out of your head, I learned from Dean. He had figured that out, that that was absolutely critical for executives, particularly because if they had all this old business spinning around in their head, for them to buy into some new goal and vision was like swimming in quicksand. So he discovered that getting that stuff out of their head and having them make next action decisions, the very specific next action. So I learned the mind sweep and the next actions from

Dean. And those are still core, core elements that anybody needs, you know, to get clarity, you know, get your head clear, your head clear in terms of your commitments. And Russell Bishop was the co-founder of Insight Seminars, which was the sort of personal growth self-development thing that I got involved in in 78. And I loved that. I loved that training. And a large part of that training was about commitments. So I learned about commitments there and how powerful that was. And it was a transformative experience for me. And then I actually became a trainer for Insight

Seminars working with Russell. And we were designing some sort of personal productivity workshops and we were being brought into the corporate world. Back in the 70s, late 70s, early 80s, a lot of the corporate world was starting to be interested in sort of what the personal growth had to offer. Actualizations, Lifespring, Insight, you know, things like that were suddenly being brought into the corporate world. It was a little dangerous because, you know, you had to be a little vulnerable. You know, most corporate cultures were not, you know, not that open for all of that kind of stuff. But it was an interesting experiment and foray into that world. And so I worked with Russell. We created the Insight Consulting Group,

and we started to do what I had learned both from Dean and my own work. We started to do versions of this stuff in the corporate world, and that's where Russell was my partner for many years. That's where a lot of that started. I'd love to dig into next action decisions. This is a really powerful concept and a really important distinction that many people do not have a whole lot of clarity on. Could you talk about next action decisions and how they perhaps differ from what a lot of people put on their to-do lists? Sure. Well, when we talk about next actions, that means as granular as where physically, visibly are you going to go to do what to move the needle on this

thing, on this commitment? Is that at your computer to write an email? Is that at your computer to surf a website? Is that at the hardware store to buy nails? Is that at your life partner to have a conversation? What is the very, very next thing you need to do to get clarity on mom's birthday or increasing your bank credit line or hiring a vice president or getting a life. The very next action, if you had nothing else to do but that, what would you go do? People avoid that decision like the plague. They do.

Could have fooled me. But when we coach people, it takes one to six hours for them to identify all the stuff they have attention on and then the rest of the day or two to go through each one of those and say, okay, what's the next thing you need to do about cat food, about vice president, about get a life, about should you get divorced or not? You know, what's the next thing? And, you know, and it takes, people actually have to think to make those decisions. It's not hard.

There are actually two aspects of getting clarity that, that, you know, that I have to tie together is what's the very next action and if one action won't complete whatever this commitment is, what's the project? If you look at most people's to-do lists, you see things like mom in bank. I'm sure you had a mom, so why is it on the list? Well, her birthday's coming. What are you going to do about her birthday? I don't know. It's just coming.

Yeah, right. So taking something like that and then, well, you captured the idea. Great. So that's step one. But then step two is you need to then clarify what exactly you're going to do about that. And what's the final outcome? So give mom a birthday party, goes on my project list and call my sis to see what she thinks we ought to do for mom's birthday as the next action. As simple as that sounds, outcome and action are the zeros and ones of productivity,

but most people have not actually identified the outcomes and the specific actions of the things that have their attention. Could have fooled me. But there are very few people that are exceptions to that. And most people have tons of stuff. Anybody listening to this right now, just pull out your to-do list, and I'll show you what I'm talking about. And most of the things on your to-do list are not the very next action you need to take about those.

And probably the things on your to-do list are not the complete outcome that you're trying to achieve by whatever action you need to take. So it's funny that zeros, ones, or productivity people are avoiding. I mean, getting things done, you need to know what done means. You get to mark it off as complete when what's true, and what does doing look like and where does it happen? Oh, that's a phone call, or that's a thing to buy buy at the store or that's a conversation i need to have with somebody so i know it's kind of a duh jim but it's uh it's something that most people are need to train a cognitive muscle to answer those questions about stuff because it requires thinking. Thinking's hard. It also requires a sort of a reframe as to what an effective to-do list

or next action list looks like, even the label itself. Should I be using the term to refer to mom, bank, et cetera, as a to-do list? What does that actually mean when applied to bank in all caps? In our case, it would just be your capture list. You've captured those. Good. Great. Then you need to throw those in your entry and then go through this decision-making process. Is it actionable? Yes or no? If no, it's either reference or trash or incubate. If yes, then it is. is okay so what's the next action

and if one action won't complete it what's the project so as simple as those questions are that's how you get your in basket empty not by finishing everything yeah anything you can do in two minutes you should finish right then that's the two minute rule but uh but otherwise you just need to clarify it and then you know step three would be organize the reminders in some appropriate place i would love to talk about uh and and please feel free to to rephrase this or take a different angle if better but sort of top down versus bottom up uh systems and specifically I looked at a number of listener questions that were posed, and one was related to after doing a mind sweep and sorting the results into do it, discard it,

delegate it, defer it, some people still having an extremely large list after discarding aggressively and not being sure of how to then eliminate more if there are tasks or items that they can simply discard, things that are not worth doing. I was just going to say how you help people to, if they say, I don't know what is important, or I'm not sure how to prioritize things, if you have any advice or thoughts for those people? Sure. I got a bunch. One way to think about it is, is from a hierarchical standpoint of priorities.

You know, one of the things that, that, you know, I uncovered over all these years is the six horizons that we actually have commitments and they're at different levels with different content. The top horizon would be what's your life purpose or what's the purpose of your... Now you can do this iterated on your company or any enterprise you want,

but let's talk about personal. So why are you on the planet? What are you here to do? What's your purpose? Obviously that's going to set your priorities, right? You don't want to be off purpose, so that's the top level. Of course knowing your purpose is not going to help you decide which email to write first. A little bit. But then the next level operationally, and I say down, not as less. It just means it's more operational, would be what's the vision of your purpose being fulfilled successfully? Five years from now, Tim, where do you want to be?

What does your lifestyle look like? I'm sure living in New York as opposed to Silicon Valley was some part of a vision that you had as opposed to just day-to-day. So you had some sort of a picture about, hey, if I really want to do kind of what I want to do, here's what it would look, sound, and feel like. So that's the vision level that people have in companies. That'd be three-, four-, five-year long-term plan or vision in terms of where does the company want to be. Now, knowing the vision that you have in terms of life and career and lifestyle, is that going to help you decide which email is most important? Yeah, a little bit more. Then there's a next level operationally, which is down from that,

which is goals and objectives. So if you wanted that vision to actually come true, what do you need to accomplish over the next three to 24 months? That'd be usually what people talk about in terms of annual plans and so forth. Yeah, well, I need to make sure my kids get into college. I need to make sure that we set up this new division. I want to publish the book, whatever those things are. Those would be goals that emerge as a way to get to your vision. So purpose would be horizon five,

horizon four would be vision, horizon three would be goals and objectives. Horizon two, importantly, is all the things that you need to maintain that are important to you to maintain so that you get there, that you're balanced and you're moving in the right direction. So personally, this would be how's your health, how's your finances, how's your relationships, how's your spiritual life,

how's your dog, how's your fun factor, whatever all those things are that you say, I need to maintain these. You don't finish that. You just need to make sure that they're up to par in terms of getting you where you want to go. So that's horizon two. In your organizations, that would be your job description.

What are the things you're accountable to do well? Asset management, staff development, customer service, project design, yada, yada. So that would be looking at those levels there and saying, okay, well, once you defined your job description or once you looked at your aspects of your life, that's going to help you decide a little bit more about what's the most important email you need to send. Then you get more operational and say, well, what are all the things you need to finish about any of those things above projects?

And most people have between 30 and 100. Get tires on your car, handle the next vacation, hire the person, get a dog, research whether I can give my kids karate lessons or not. Yada, yada. Then that's the project level. That's horizon one. Then the ground level. We use ground and then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, like elevators in Europe as opposed to the U.S. since we're so international now, so we had to change.

In the first book, I called 5,000, 50,000 feet and 40,000 and so forth, but they don't use feet in Europe. And so anyway, so then the ground level is what all the things you need to do. That's the actions you need to take. And most people have 100 to 200 of those emails to send, stuff to buy at the store, stuff to talk to people about, etc. So when you say, how do I set my priorities? I say, well, which one of those horizons is not clear enough to you, needs more work? Or which one do you need to refer back to to then decide what's most important on your list? So that's a big conversation, as you can imagine, for most people to try to figure that out. I tried to get it as simple as I could, but I can't lie to anybody.

That's the truth. Those are all things that are either conscious or not. They're still at effect for everybody. And so being aware of what your content is on all those different levels is going to help a lot, help a ton. On a more simple, practical level, I just set priorities. They say, what's most got my attention? What's most got my attention right now? What most do I need to handle so I get to clear space again? And, you know, so at this point in my life, I got that kind of simplified. Let's talk about location for a second, because is this is something that uh i'm certainly very curious about uh and think about a fair amount i'm in new york right now for writing because i

have a very set writing routine here in new york and it's i'm also pretty isolated in rural new york uh the the move that i made from silicon valley to austin, Texas, was certainly dependent on my answers and descriptions to those higher levels that you described. And I'm sure this is written somewhere, but I didn't want to try to research everything before the conversation. Amsterdam. Why did you move to Amsterdam? What were the drivers or the reasons behind that? Well, there's kind of a perfect storm of a lot of factors. One is we wanted to get out of the U.S. We were a bit tired of U.S. centricity in terms of thinking.

And we thought about, we love Kyoto, we love other places, but Europe seemed to be the place to go. Catherine, my wife and I don't have kids, so we're a little freer to do that. My work was becoming much more virtual and actually much more global. Amsterdam is much more the center of my world these days than Santa Barbara was. We'd been to the city a couple of times and fell in love with it. We loved the city. It's an eye-candy city, and it's just gorgeous. It's lovely.

And we kind of naively thought, well, let's spend three months there and six months in Milan and six months in whatever. Because now that my work was becoming so virtual, we had the ability to be able to do that. Of course, once we found out what it takes to be legal and get legal residency in any place, you know, there's a lot of hoops to jump through. And it turns out that, and we just kind of threw a dart and said Amsterdam, it was warmer and not quite as dark as Copenhagen or Stockholm. A little more foreign, you know, and adventurous than London. And everybody here speaks English, so, you know, that was easy. And, you know, once we were here, the quality of life here is just so wonderful. And we just fell in love with the city even more so and still are five years later. So we intend to stay. As a matter of fact,

we want to immigrate. So, you know, going to be, we love the Dutch, we love the country. Now, golly, it's just an oasis of global thinking and openness or whatever. That's kind of rare in the world these days. It is definitely one of my favorite cities in the world. You mentioned a lot of wonderful places, but Amsterdam really does check so many boxes. It's a marvel of a city. It really is. It really is.

And it works. We haven't had a car in five years. It just works. And Catherine and I both have two bikes apiece. We walk. Gorgeous parks. It's a very dog-friendly city. Our favorite restaurants allow dogs. That's worth moving to Amsterdam just for that. How have you found your state of being, whether it's your emotional state, mental state, if it differs at all to differ being, say, in Amsterdam after a number of years versus being

in California? Not really that much. Come on, Santa Barbara's a gorgeous place. I mean, it's not exactly right. You know, come on. Actually, we lived in Ojai. The hard streets of Ojai, yeah. Yeah, for 22 years.

And we loved that. We thought we were going to be there permanently. It was a beautiful place, wonderful place, great people, a great style of sort of a country place to live and and so it kind of surprised us that all of a sudden We just felt like we were done You know, I call it Dharma Karma destiny, whatever it is. It's like somehow just you know There are times in our lives when just things just are over And so we haven't missed anything at all. it didn't really change quality of life here is just so nice i mean that's nice to do it i mean there are no straight people and no straight dogs

here as opposed to california did so what was it a a a lingering desire over time maybe we should move maybe we should move or was there an event or a day or a conversation where you just said, this is it, we're done? It kind of was a four or five year move from sort of someday maybe to, yeah, let's kind of start to see if we can get real about it. We had built our own little sort of jewel box office building in Ojai. Uh, so we needed to kind of unhook from that. Our house that we bought in 1992 was so gorgeous. It was like a little acre out on the east end of Ojai. It was just a beautiful little property.

It had old oaks in it. But it was kind of a tear-down house to begin with. We just couldn't afford to tear it down and rebuild. And we discovered the termites don't move that fast. So basically, we just built a huge garden around it. We had one acre, and we just built an outdoor fireplace. We had a stunning garden. We had a fabulous friend who was a landscape gardener. So we just had a great time. We just lived outdoors.

So that was wonderful. Then the termites started to win. And we said, you know, with Catherine and my style and our inclinations, we would have rebuilt it with glass and concrete and iron in that environment. It would have been just gorgeous there. But we didn't have the money to do that. So we said, you know, let's just put a price on the house. And the market was crap at the time. We said, you know, probably nobody is going to show up. But, you know, come on, let's just put a price on it.

What the heck? You know, it would be an emotional buy anyway. And we figured, maybe one or two years from now. And two weeks later, somebody walked on and said, I want it right for that price. I went, oh, this might be a sign. So we got out from under the house and we said, but we weren't quite ready to move to Europe at the time. There was still more work I needed to do sort of there and locally with the business. And so we said, well, let's

kind of get trainer wheels. So we then got a townhouse in Santa Barbara that we were at for three years. And, you know, know, we, we sort of got trainer wheels from Europe. We got Dutch bikes and we lived in a townhouse close to town. We could walk into town and so forth. So, you know, that was kind of our transition move there. And then at a certain point we said, okay, let's throw the dart time to go. And that's what we did. Off you went. Yeah, it is, uh, it, it it it seems to be landing on the radar of more and more of my american friends as a as a possible uh home base it's it's it really is a wonderful choice it's a terrible place you never want to come it's full it's full. It's full. They hate dogs, stray people everywhere. many things that come thereafter. I'd love to ask you, what is one of the most worthwhile or the

best personal investments you've ever made? And I'll explain what I mean. That could be money, time, energy, anything else. So for instance, if I asked Tony Robbins that, he would point to a Jim Rohn seminar that he paid for at the time when he was working as a janitor. If I talked to Amelia Boone, who's a four-time world champion in obstacle course racing, she'd say the first time she sort of cobbled together the fees to pay for one of the larger competitions, which then ended up showcasing how well built and designed she was for this sport. Does anything come to mind as a particularly important investment that you made that had long standing ripple effects? You know, yeah, I mean, there are probably a dozen. But I'll tell you one that comes to mind. I don't think I've shared this with many people. But as you mentioned it, what pops to mind is I had a guy that became a very good friend of mine and a mentor of mine many, many years ago that I met in Berkeley. And he was the guy who offered to teach me karate. And he was quite an interesting guy. He was an Olympic fencer. He was a formula racer. He had a black belt in

karate. He was just a fascinating guy. He was also psychic. He was studied by the University of Pennsylvania just because of experiences that he had and things that he saw and things that he knew. And back in the early days when universities were starting to study this psychic phenomenon and where it came from. And Michael became a very close friend of mine. And as he started to teach me karate, I found my life started to change. And I suddenly, I'd kind of been doing all the things that were cool to do and that sort of were expected of me to do. You know, I'd been a straight-A student. I'd gone to a very hip and cool college.

Obviously, I got into graduate school, you know, had good grades, married a, you know, beautiful woman, got a house in Berkeley. I mean, this was, you know, as cool a life as one could have. And then one day I woke up and realized this wasn't the life I wanted, that there was adventure that I, that I was holding myself back from, that there were things I wanted to explore and expand and so forth that I wanted to do. And that sort of changed me. You know, one day I just decided to not go back to school. And I have no idea what kind of records the University of California,

Berkeley has of me, but I just didn't go back. I said, not for me. So I left my marriage, left my life, left all of that, and then embarked on an inner and outer adventure that was quite adventurous. You know, I ran into, you know, you can read a lot of stuff about me out there. I ran into a lot of false starts and a lot of things that didn't work very well, but that was all in my exploration. It wasn't really escape. I was just looking and exploring an awful lot of things and then found more and more stable ways and more inner ways with much more consciousness and stability than kind of random and ad hoc. So I kind of grew up from that, you know, over the years.

And sort of my outer life became a lot quieter, even though my inner life was still quite rich. So I suppose that was a hallmark event, you know, was for me to make that decision to sort of leave what people would probably consider one of the best and coolest kind of lifestyles you would have and go on my own trip. Was that a difficult decision? I mean, and I hate to sound like a broken record, but was this a kind of one day I'm done or was it something that developed over time? I mean, a lot of people don't leave situations that they feel they should. I can't remember exactly whether it was days or weeks or months, but it was certainly wasn't, I don't think it was months. I think it was probably weeks that I had that thought,

but you know, I'm, I'm Mr. Approval Sucker. You know, I like people's approval. I don't, you know, I don't, I don't like being the rebel and being out. I like people to like me. And so that was tough to give all that up. What was the conversation like with your wife, with your partner at the time? Not fun. Yeah. I mean, was it just short, like I'm leaving today? Or was it more of a lead time, more lead time than that?

Yeah. Yeah. No, it was short. I didn't know, I just, I didn't know, I didn't understand myself well enough, you know, not comfortable enough in my own skin to know how to engage with that. So it was kind of a, you know, a radical, you know, God bless her. She, she, she endured it as well as anybody could, I suppose. Uh, but it, you know, I was not a class act in terms of how I did that, in other words. The mentor that you mentioned, the University of Pennsylvania.

Did you observe, were you able to observe any of this? Or to, what types of things did you observe? Well, he would see certain things. In other words, he would have a vision of something and say, by the way, I know this person did X, Y, and Z. And they, indeed, that's exactly what they did, or what they were going to do. So he just had an extrasensory perception ability for that. In his own story, he's now dead, but if he told the story, he was quite depressed as a kid and didn't know, he just was so sensitive and didn't understand where people were doing what they were doing.

And so he did all kinds of things to try to compensate for that, you know, all these sports things that he was extremely good at. And then one day he went to sleep and was taken out of his body and, you know, was shown other levels of why he'd been going through all the experiences he had and who was going to be coming toward him and that he would have this job essentially the karma of being able to share what he had learned with them because he owed him so uh it turned out i was one of those people at least according to him so that's you know that's kind of in woo-woo land but you know there may be some people listening to this

that know what I'm talking about. Yeah. No, I appreciate you sharing the story. Yeah, this is something we could talk a lot much longer about, but I will try to sort of keep the thread of the last question in the sense that many of the listeners who asked questions they would hope I would explore with you asked something along the lines of what Nick Dobos asked, which is, how does he deal with things like mental fatigue, motivation, and moods, role, and productivity? I'm going to approach that

from a sideways angle and kind of relate it to my last question which is could you describe a particularly difficult period that you face because it's it's very you've done a lot of incredible things you have gtd being taught as i understand it in 60 plus countries probably at this point massive success on so many objective levels. I really like to humanize guests by asking about tougher times and how they got through it or found their way through it. Would you be open to describing any particular tough or dark period that you went through and how you made your way through it?

Sure. Well, back in my early Berkeley days, I had a really interesting time where I was having my own kind of sort of psychic or spiritual experiences and didn't understand where they came from and didn't understand why other people didn't understand them. And so, you know, though I'd been sort of Mr. Nice Guy, suddenly I found myself outcast. And that was, you know, quite painful. So I wound up, you know, involved in sort of aberrated behavior out of my frustration of all that. And they put me away in a mental institution, which I thought was kind of interesting, because at the time, I could see as much

about what was going on with the people who put me there as anybody in there. And I thought was kind of interesting because at the time I could see as much about what was going on with the people who put me there as anybody in there. And I thought, well, that's kind of fascinating just to be able to see all that. And I'd read much of the literature about is crazy really crazy or are you tapped into something very different. So I knew I was tapped into something very different but couldn't get anybody to understand that. And it became quite painful. And at a certain point, I said, well, you know, this is too painful. I think I'm going to decide to cooperate instead of rail against these people that can't see what's going on. So as I say, I never really got cured. You're just looking at a high state of cooperation.

So I managed to get, and it wasn't very long, but it was, you know. How long were you in? Oh, a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks. If I could interrupt for just a second, what were the behaviors that led you to end up there, and how did you end up there? I mean, was it family, friends?

No, I got really pissed off at my mentor friend. And he knew that I had kind of gone off the rails. And I threw a brick through his window. And so he called the cops, and the cops put me away. Anyway, it's a much longer, more intricate story than that. But that's the simple version. And so you decided to cooperate, and you get released. What did your life look like for the weeks following that experience? Well, I got a job, and sort of straightened myself up and started to cooperate with the world. And then that's when I discovered a whole lot of

I wasn't sure what had happened to me, but I was walking down the street in Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and walked into a store called Shambhala Bookstore. And I walked in, I don't know why, just intuitively, and I looked around and I looked down on the shelf and I saw this book that said The Gateways to Spiritual Science by Rudolf Steiner. I said, oh, I wonder if there are people who actually know what all this stuff is really about. And so I spent the next, oh, three or four or five months exploring huge amounts of the esoteric literature of the occult and the white brotherhood and all kinds of stuff that I didn't know anything about. But there's a whole body of literature, the theosophists to begin with in the late 1800s,

early 1900s in Europe, that were sort of studying the science of spirituality, essentially. And dug into that like crazy. I said, oh my God, I'm not so crazy. I tapped into something that there was something to tap into. So then started to go on an exploration to see if I could find somebody who knew a lot more about that than I did. And that's when I discovered a guy named John Roger, who then wound up being my spiritual coach. I said, so I hung out with him and said, well, I'll see how much I can learn from him. And that was, you know, 45 years.

And he was just further down the path than I was, but had a lot of that information. So that's when my life, sort of my outer life got much simpler and much more calm and traditional. My inner life got quite rich at that point. What does the word spiritual mean to you in this context? Or for people who are... Yeah, stuff you can't see that's affecting us. And we all exist on many different levels. You can't see your mental, you can't see your thoughts, you can't see your emotions. I mean, yeah, there are people who can sort of see your energy field around that, but there's

a lot of stuff you can't see that's affecting us. And I use spiritual with a small S. There's a lot of worlds out there, and of stuff you can't see that's affecting us. And I use spiritual with a small s. There's a lot of worlds out there, and it's possible to experience those worlds if you meditate, if you practice certain practices, you can quiet yourself enough to be able to tap into a lot of the other levels that we actually exist on. So this level is just a school room, but we are much bigger than all that. So you can call it whatever you want,

your soul, your spirit, your intuition, your gut, whatever you want to call it. There's still a small voice, essentially, inside of all of us that's tapped into all of this, and it is part of it. So that's a huge universe. What does your meditation practice look like these days? Or for people who want to develop a meditation practice but don't have one,

what do you recommend? Maybe those are two different things. Well, it's a good, you know, I don't know that I have a recommendation other than follow your intuition. I think there's perfect timing for all that for everybody. Everybody's on a spiritual path, whether they know it or not. Everybody's, you know, doing what they're doing, you know, as a way doing as a way to fulfill something that they're trying to complete here on the planet. And it's all around. It's in everything. So whatever is going to allow you to be quieter and listen

to, as I say, the universe is always on. So meditation is not like stopping the universe or stopping anything. It's just quieting this sort of material, loud world out here so you can pay attention to the more subtle voices. What have you taken from that, if anything, from that initial experience that landed you in hospital? As you said, you weren't cured, but you just became more cooperative as a strategy that has informed what you've done later or even what you do today? I mean, were there particular insights or realizations that have translated? Not really. More just the strength to get through all that and to come out the other side

and make life work in the way that it works for me. I don't know that there was any other particular aha that happened other than well, I think I will change my attitude and shift my approach so that it's much more effective. And, uh, yeah, so that, that, that helped. I mean, having gone through that, there's not a lot, there's not a whole lot that scares me out here. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Uh, I mean, once you've, yeah, that's particularly true, I find, with people who have been taken to task in the sense of dealing with all that is in here in addition to all that is out there, if that makes any sense.

Oh, sure. Do you ever feel overwhelmed or unfocused? And if so, what do you do when you feel either of those things? Daily. Okay, okay. Are you kidding? I just don't want to make assumptions. I fall off my own leg regularly.

Yeah, okay. Oh, come on, it's not always. Every vision you have, every creative thought you have, everything you decide to do is going to throw you out of your comfort zone because you're going to have to undo what you were doing before and reconfigure everything for the new game. So it's not like I'm totally feeling overwhelmed. I just don't let myself go very long before I fix it.

But as soon as I, you know, this huge project I'd had, the GTD Summit was quite, you know, there were many times that I felt somewhat overwhelmed because I wasn't quite sure what was going to happen over a lot of unknowns and so forth that I didn't feel like I could control that well. But I eat my own dog food as we say. Sit down, write it down, make next action decisions. Say, what can I handle? What can I not handle? It's like surfers. You're always going to fall off.

You just want an ankle tether on so you can get back on real quick and it allows you to surf bigger waves. Are there any new beliefs or behaviors or habits that have materially improved your life in the last handful of years? Any that come to mind? Nothing comes to mind except just our wonderful dog that we had to put down a few months ago that we're going to need to get another, you know, walking your dog and just being quiet, you know,

very cool. Uh, I'm actually reading, I'm reading a brand new book right now that I was getting, um, I was getting shiatsu, uh, at,

at, um, a spa and, my shiatsu master who was working on me said by the way you know because I went to sleep and I said by the by the way you have a little bit of sleep apnea he said you must read this book so I am halfway through this book called the oxygen advantage the oxygen advantage I had no idea how critical it is to do nasal breathing instead of mouth breathing it is amazing stuff anyway so yeah there's there's a new habit the oxygen sleeping with you know actually he he suggests um going

and getting adhesive uh cloth tape a four-inch piece, and putting it over your mouth when you go to sleep so that you train yourself and you build the practice of actually sleeping with nasal breathing. Fascinating stuff. The oxygen advantage. Yep. So you mentioned it. That's a brand new habit I just started 48 hours ago.

Are there any particular books that you have, outside of your own, that you have gifted or recommended often to other people? Yes. One of the latest ones is called The Antidote. Oliver Berkman. Fabulous book. Totally fun. it's happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking oh you'd love it you'd love it tim it's great uh it's the the content is is a good bit more serious than what the title sounds like

he's really into uh kind of poo-pooing the people that just say, oh, don't have any negative thoughts, just go think positive thoughts, and not accepting reality. And so he goes into quite a bit of exploration of Stoicism, and I couldn't agree more with actually his hypothesis and his thinking. Anyway, it's a fun book. My wife just broke out laughing regularly if she was reading the book. It's very well written. So that's one of my latest recommendations, for sure. The Antidote. Yep.

All right, note taken. What is your, do you have a consistent, say, morning routine of the first hour or two of your day? When you are outside of a gigantic event like the summit that you just completed, but when you're in the sort of in-between spaces around those larger commitments? You know, Tim, what I do regularly is the night before. I look at my calendar for the next day or two and see what my hard landscape is,

meaning what are the things I've got to do. You know, no choice in terms of commitments that I've got. So I know how long to sleep. I'm a huge fan of sleep. I used to think I was just lazy, but now, given the new cognitive science, I'm just smart. We all need eight to nine hours of sleep a night, unless you're really an exceptional person. So I love sleep. So that's my first thing is the night before, just to see how long I can sleep.

And when I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is a glass of lemon water, cleanse the system, French press, a cup of coffee, sooner or later a protein drink. If we have a dog, the dog goes out. I read the New York Times on my iPad, European version. And I'll probably play a game or two of Words with Friends because I like to get my brain sort of going by just doing scramble with people around the world. And then whatever I feel like doing next. Take a long bicycle ride by those canals in amsterdam usually i go out catherine i usually go for we have a beautiful park about an eight minute walk from where we are

that we love to just walk around you know just there's a nice thing way to clear your head even when we don't have a dog we you know get out get outside and it's such a beautiful place here that helps too. What do you wish GTD adherents or people who have read your books once through each would pay more attention to? Are there any particular aspects or concepts

or details that you wish more people would pay attention to? Well, I'm not into having anybody change any of the behavior they don't want to change. My job was just to give people information whether they want it or not. I'm not going to beat anybody up about it or I'm not even going to proselytize about it very much.

I just say, look, you want a clear head? Here's how you get it. And you can do it or not. I'm not going to beat anybody up about it or I'm not even going to proselytize about it very much. I just say, look, you want a clear head? Here's how you get it. And you can do it or not. I don't care. Well, I care. Otherwise I wouldn't share this information because it's potentially transformational and life-changing for people when they actually get this methodology and capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage with their stuff. You know, if they do that, but people can fall off on any one of those. A lot of people just don't write everything down, so they don't trust their head or their lists. A lot of people don't decide next actions and outcomes for stuff, and so their lists are, you know, when they look at them, creating as much stress as they relieve.

And a lot of people don't have a trusted organization system that they trust, that their head can absolutely let it go, knowing that they're going to see the right thing at the right time, be reminded of the right stuff. An awful lot of people don't step back and reflect what we call the weekly review or any kind of a regular reflection review where you step back and take an hour or two at least once a week and bring up the rear guard and get current, get clean again. Because life's like that. And those are all the steps that people don't take.

So I'd say, hey, guys, read the book again. Somebody read the book 20 times. He says it's a different book every time he read it, because you're ready for a different cut on the stuff when you read it again. So it sounds like it's pretty simple, but it's quite a habit for most people to change. The weekly review, I'd love to spend just a few minutes on that. Could you describe what the weekly review might look like for someone? What are the steps of the weekly review?

Well, first of all, let's step back a second and say, if you haven't captured, clarified, organized, and reviewed most of the stuff review? Well, first of all, let's step back a second and say if you haven't captured, clarified, organized, and reviewed most of the stuff of your life, you don't have the whole thing to review yet. The weekly review, the ideal weekly review, means that your system is relatively current. At least it's only a week old in terms of maybe stuff that you haven't brought current yet. Then again, even if you haven't set up a system, just to take an hour a week and step back and look at your life and say, hey, what's happened in the last week? What do I need

to do about that? Just any kind of a thinking in a more reflective process is going to help anybody at any time. And not just go zone out or drink or even just meditate, but to really focus on the work of your life. You know, it's a different focus. We're thinking about, well, what did I commit to? What's new? What do I need to be aware of? If nothing else, just look at your calendar for coming up the next two or three weeks. You know, everybody's going to go, oh, that reminds me. Yeah, no kidding. You know, so any of that kind of stuff, and again, the, that reminds me. Yeah, no kidding. You know, so any of that kind of stuff. And again, the more that you have externalized your life and your work, the more valuable this review is going to be.

When do you tend to do your weekly reviews? Hmm. You don't have a standard time? No, I don't really. Just when sort of ambient anxiety sort of creeps up on me. But it's usually about every seven days. You know, years ago I actually read somewhere, Tim, that – because we've always said – we always knew just practically anyway that a weekly review was really kind of critical to keep your system current and alive and well. And then it grows.

If you don't do that, it gets out of date. You'll fall off the wagon pretty fast and pretty coherently. But then I read somewhere that your's like, you're trying to recreate something that happened two weeks ago. It's like, can't find it. What? Where? So there seems to be some sort of a natural cycle of a seven-day cycle in that kind of thinking. So it's probably one of the most challenging habits to set up, but certainly the most rewarding

if you do. Do you have any rules or commandments for yourself for types of things that you categorically say no to? And the reason I ask this is that I, at least in my own life, have really tried and found quite valuable figuring out, trying to figure out the single decisions that remove many, many, many decisions. So, for instance, no to all speaking engagements outside of Austin for X period of time, whether it's six months or 12 months, whatever it might be. Are there certain categories of things that you simply say no to as a default? Not really, except unpleasant people. That's about it. I don't know. I suppose this will change, but still at 73, I still take advantage of every,

I think there's probably two or three or maybe five interviews or podcasts that we've refused because the sleaze factor was just too high. But I've done 2,000 since Getting Things Done was published in 2001. I say, hey, anybody who is interested in this, sure, I'm here to share it with the world. Here we go. And I don't have really that deep a pocket. I haven't been that entrepreneurial or aspirational to go build this huge fortune. And so I still take advantage of work that shows up. And if it seems interesting, it seems like something that people are interested in me doing, I go, yeah, my price has gone up, so I'm not doing as much.

But that's okay. Let's return to the unpleasant people for a second um what if there is feeling gives you an indicator that someone is a person you want to avoid or is it more looking at them online doing a little due diligence and deciding this is not the tone of person I want to interact with. How do you vet and filter those people out? You know, I don't have to do much of that these days, Tim. I mean, I guess given where I am in my life, people usually don't contact me unless they're nice, you know, or at least fun to, you know, and I have a little bit of the, of the, what's his name? I never met a guy that I didn't like, you know, Will Rogers.

You know, I have a little bit of that in me. And I think most people are good people to begin with. And most people just don't come to me with negative stuff. You know, I guess maybe in the old days, a little bit. But I kind of just made a joke. I don't like unpleasant people, but I have a blessed life and I have nothing but, you know, pretty much pleasant people around me. I'd like to read a short quote and ask you to elaborate if you're able,

because it seems to allude to something very important. And this is from a Fast Company piece some time ago. This is a quote of yours that they may have gotten wrong, so you can correct it if need be. People assume that I am a hard-working, left-brained, results-oriented, OCD, anal-retentive kind of guy, he says with a laugh. In fact, the reason that I was attracted to this work

was that it allowed me to be more creative, more spontaneous, freer. I'm a freedom guy. Could you explain what you mean by that? It's self-explanatory. I'm not sure what else I can say. Well, in the sense that why does, at face value, someone might say that there are a lot of rules. This doesn't, and this is what some people ask.

Well, it seems like GTD is very rigid and has a lot of rules. This doesn't, and this is what some people ask, like, well, it seems like GTD is very rigid and has a lot of process. I want to be able to use my intuition and creativity. So it may be self-explanatory, but I'd like you to explain it anyway because it doesn't seem totally obvious to everybody. Yeah, well, I think it was Fulbert that said to be steady and well-ordered in your life

so you can be crazy and spontaneous in your work. That was 120 years ago that he said that. It's funny, people say, I don't want to be so structured. I say, what do you think about the middle line in the road out there? It's a constraint. It's a limitation. No, the center line is great. It lets me think about other things while I'm driving

as opposed to someone who's going to hit me. So just enough structure to give you the freedom. So I don't structure anything more than I need. But you do need a certain rigorous structure. Well, throw away your calendar if you don't like lists. Come on. It's just the price of missing an appointment is emotionally pretty high. That's why people maintain that structure pretty well.

Right? So you just need as much structure as you need. Ask anybody out there. Was it Picasso that said inspiration is for amateurs? It could have been. It sounds like Picasso. It sounds like him. Yeah, I think that was him.

It's like, as opposed, no, butt in chair, paintbrush, paint the canvas, stare at it, you know, discipline yourself. Anyway, so I think there is a degree to which that, well, I don't know. That just seems so self-evident. Most of the people that basically that I know, some of the most creative people I know, one of the most creative guys I know, and he just spoke at the summit, by the way. He sent in a video, so I know since he was public about it, I can make him public. Probably one of the most successful entrepreneurs. He just won, actually, the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year for 2019.

Brad Keywell and Breds. He's on five boards. He teaches entrepreneurialism at the University of Chicago. He built Groupon and sold it. That's why he has his own jet. His new startup, now it's four years old, but even two years in, had a $2 billion market cap. This guy is so smart, so creative. He collects modern art. He runs the Chicago Ideas Week. He started it.

So this is probably one of the most creative people you would ever meet certainly one of the most productive people you'd ever meet and i spent a year with him people say well why would he bring why would he do gtd i said well his presenting issue with david i'm just up to here he's he was 27 he said i'm just just getting my traction but i i wake up with million dollar ideas but i don't know what to do with them or where to put them or who to get them to. So he just needed more room. So what GTD does is it provides space. Invariably, if you capture, clarify, organize, and reflect on all the things that have your attention, it will give you more room.

What you do with that room is unique to you. Some people use it to be more creative. Some people use it to be more strategic. Some people to be more innovative. Some people to be just present with whatever they're doing. One of my biggest champions, a guy named Howard Stern, you can't find a more creative guy than Howard. He'd tell you it changed his life.

It gave him the time to learn to paint, which you always wanted to do, as well as keep serious radio going. So, you know, are people like Will Smith or Robert Downey Jr., they're big champions of my stuff. I could say their names because they were public about that. So, you know, if people think that creative people, you know, can't use GTD, I'd say, hmm, there are a few people you ought to meet. A nitty-gritty question about the weekly review, as a few people ask this, and I'm curious as well, is the weekly review inherently a solo process, or do you ever involve your staff in weekly reviews? Well, I know people that would do weekly reviews with their families.

Very cool to do. I think you need to do your own private one at any case, no matter what. But then if you have groups of people to say, what are the things that we are all interested in as a group that we can share and update each other with? So absolutely. It's a great time to do that. Probably wouldn't necessarily frame it so much as a weekly review, so much as let's review all the things that have our attention as a team, as a group, as a family, as a couple. Do you manage your email in a task manager or is it its own system? Is it simply the email client that you happen to be using? Could you describe the tools you use for processing email? Well, I still use IBM Notes, the old Lotus Notes. We still use that in our company.

And I actually had my CTO for, let's see, 15 years, Eric Mack built an app that sits on top of or within notes that lets me use email as my task manager. But you'd have to be using notes to use it. So it's not publicly available unless you want to, it's publicly available if you wanted to set up Lotus Notes or IBM Notes and then get e-productivity stick on it. But that's, you know, basically, as I look at my screen, for instance, I have navigator bars on the left-hand side, and they have my action list. There's one of them says projects, one of them says agendas, one of them says calls, one of them says computer, one of them says creative writing, one of them says errands, one of them says home, one of them says online, one of them says someday maybe, and then waiting for.

And so I can actually drag an email into any one of those and it becomes that. Or I can just open that folder and then add anything to that folder that I want. So it's both an email manager as well as a task manager at the same time. Do you use any particular app or program for pulling material like articles or references off of web browsing into a system of any type? No, not really. I use Evernote, and I've used the Evernote little function. The web clipper.

The web clipper. But I still don't use it that much. I don't have that much stuff that I want to do about that. The problem with things like Evernote, somebody described it as write-only. In other words,

they spend all their time adding stuff in there and don't even go in and look at what they've got. Yeah. It's a risk with a lot of digital technology right only you know yeah addition uh addition and not uh sufficiently uh well at least subtraction from an attentional perspective uh any of those things that work you know all you

need are lists basically and you just need something to be able to cut and paste reference material in. I've got reference material all over Lotus Notes. I've got reference material all over Evernote. I have reference material just in Word files all over. I don't have any particular template or any particular suggestion other than probably not a bad idea to every once in a while, maybe yearly, curate all of that stuff so you don't have a lot of old dead wood in there. You've mentioned quite a few quotes. You seem to have a good memory for quotes of various types in this conversation so far.

Are there any quotes that you would consider you try to live your life by or think of often as a as a mantra slash reminder of sorts are there any quotes that come to mind uh as being particularly important to you well my screensaver just says let go let go yeah control is the master addiction so not it's always a good idea to say hey drop it drop it. Let life just be what it is. I often ask people if you could have one gigantic billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a message out to billions of people. It could be a question, it could be a quote, it could be a word.

Would that be let go, or would it possibly be something else for you? I don't know. You'd have to give me that opportunity. Let me see what shows up, because I need to let go to be able to see what showed up, as opposed to try to preconceive that. I mean, your head's for having ideas, not for holding them. It's not a bad one.

Just a practical GTD-esque quote. I was reading a piece in the atlantic um uh which which which which i found some of it very fascinating and this was before you had applied the new labels to the uh various vantage points so this was back when you were using the uh,000-foot view and so on. But you mentioned at one point in this, and again, feel free to fact-check. Is this Jim Fallows' article? I think it is. He talks about meeting you for dinner after a seminar in Washington. And there's a portion here that says,

back in the old days, this is quoting you, I had this naive idea that people would see this cool tool we're offering and say, okay, what else? We'd have this great big Trojan horse that would march into state corporate world and let us find people who were interested in how life was really lived. And they'd say, hey, let's go discover X, Y, and Z truth reality that sits behind all this stuff. But of course, that never happened.

Do you still have that hope that people will do something with the space that is created related to bigger questions? No, it's not really hope. You know, come on, after all these years, I go, you know, I'm not a proselytizer. I'm really not. I just think, you know, what I've, you know, I've had the good fortune to uncover something that allows people to create more space. And again, what they do with that space is up to them, whether they want to use it to be able to do their spiritual practices.

People often say, is this a spiritual thing? I go, well, I guess everything is. But no, but if you're into practicing spiritual practices, this gives you a lot more space to be able to do that in a quieter way. But again, people will do whatever they do. The people are already spiritual. They just may not be that aware of it. But I don't have any – I'm not out trying to get people to be something that they're not or to uncover something that they're not. And again, I've been doing this for 35 years, you know, so at a

certain point you go, you know, people just do what they do. Let me just do the best work I can do. And, you know, just with what's in front of me, complete it with as much elegance and excellence as I can. And then the next thing is going to show up. You know, that was a big freeway aha moment I had years ago when I was agonizing about what I should do with my life. This little still small voice inside of me said,

David, don't worry. You have created so much in this life and probably many others. You don't have to worry about that. Just complete whatever is right in front of you with as much excellence as you can and the next thing will automatically show up. And I haven't turned back from that. That's constantly been what's happened.

Well, David, I appreciate you making space for this conversation. We're many, many time zones apart, and I don't want to consume too much of your finite time, but I very much appreciate you making space for having this conversation. Oh, this was fun. Nice to chat with you, Tim. And connect again after all this time. After all this time.

It's been a while. Let's not wait so long for the next one. No, I'll let you know when I'm headed to Amsterdam, because I do absolutely love that city. And people can find you, of course, on Twitter at GTDGuy, at gettingthingsone.com. Is there anything else that you would like to say or share or mention to people as we wrap up? It's really worth reading, I think. I've updated a bunch of stuff and sort of tweaked the languaging a good bit. A lot of people really appreciated that. And read it a second time if you haven't read it but once.

Believe me, it'll be a whole different book. And we're coming out with a GTD workbook in September. Penguin's doing that. It's kind of the 10 moves to stress-free productivity. Because getting things done can be quite daunting for people. They pick up the book and look at it and go, oh my God, too much to do. So kind of in the genre of the workbook for The Seven Habits that was written and the workbook for some of the other business guru books. I don't know, Tim, have you written workbooks for the four-hour workbook?

I haven't, but workbooks are really, really helpful. And so I think that will really aid a lot of people. And I've certainly found the Morning Pages workbook and other things like that to be personally very helpful. So I will definitely check out the GTD workbook. And you said that's coming out in September? Yep. Perfect.

Any other closing comments or recommendations for people, David? No, I would say if there's one thing most people could probably do more of, it's relax. Relax. Enjoy life. Very little downside to at least physically relaxing. Let it go. Is it let go or let it go that's on your screensaver?

Let go. Let it go. Is it let go or let it go that's on your screensaver? Let go. Let go. Good advice. Everybody listening, I will have links to everything that we've spoken about in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog forward slash podcast. So to everybody out there, thank you for listening. And David, once again, I really appreciate the time. This has been a real pleasure. And I have a whole extra set of notes here to follow up on myself and really appreciate it. Thanks, Tim. My pleasure. All right. Until next time. Thanks. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to

get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance.

And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. I've been talking about FreshBooks for years now, the all-in-one invoicing payments and accounting solution. Many entrepreneurs I know, as well as many contractors and freelancers I work with all the time, use it all the time. So I get to see

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the business as opposed to running the business and the admin stuff. They have plans to match your needs, no matter the size of your business, from the basic to comprehensive, from small to big. And it all starts at just $15 per month. Right now, they're offering my listeners, that's you guys, a free 30-day trial of FreshBooks. You can try it out with no credit card. No credit card is required. Just go to freshbooks.com slash Tim and enter Tim Ferriss, that's two R's, two S's, in the How Did You Hear About Us section. That's freshbooks.com slash Tim and enter Tim Ferriss. It's two R's, two S's in the How Did You Hear About Us section. That's FreshBooks.com slash Tim and enter Tim Ferriss in the How Did You Hear About Us section. Check it out. FreshBooks.com slash Tim. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a global creative platform that makes it easy for you to find an amazing designer

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