Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - David Allen: Getting Sh*t Done & Improving Your Productivity | Productivity | E5

Episode Date: August 21, 2018

Hear best practices from the GOAT of productivity, David Allen, best-selling author and inventor of the famed Getting Things Done system. David’s framework helps you keep track of tasks, ideas and projects, and focuses on getting this type of information out of your head and into an external system. In this episode, Hala uncovers how to feel less bogged down by the never-ending list of things you have to do—allowing yourself to be engaged and super productive in the moment. Now, go get sh*t done!   Young and Profiting podcast is brought to you by audible. Get your FREE audiobook here: www.audibletrial.com/YAP Want to connect with other YAP listeners? Join the YAP Society on Slack: http://bit.ly/yapsociety Follow YAP on IG @youngandprofiting and Twitter @YAP_Podcast Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com

You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and grow. I'm Halitaha, and joining us today is a very special guest, David Allen, bestselling author and inventor of the famed GTT or Getting Things Done System. His framework helps you keep track of tasks, ideas, projects, and focuses on getting this type of information out of your head and into an external system. so you can feel less bogged down by the never-ending list of things you have and want to do and essentially allow yourself to be in a clear space where you can be present, engaged, and super productive in the moment. Hi, David. Thanks for joining us today. Hala, thanks for the invitation. Delighted to be here. We really appreciate you taking the time to get out with us.

And before we get started, I just want to introduce you to our producer, Timothy Tan, who's on the line and a longtime fan of your work. Oh, my gosh. Did it hurt Tim? No, not at all. Hi, David. It's really nice meeting you. Thanks. Like I mentioned, we're really excited to have you on the show. And you are what my generation would call the goat of productivity. Are you familiar with that saying? No, I'm not.

But I love it. I'm going to steal that. Yeah, it means you're the greatest of all time. That's what goat stands for. Well, I love goat milk. I grew up drinking goat milk because I was allergic to cow's milk as a kid. So I love goats. They're great.

Perfect. So it's a perfect match. So for our listeners, who might be new to you and your sister, How would you describe yourself and the expertise in the area of productivity and your contributions to time management and things like that? I'm the laziest guy you ever met and I love having absolutely a clear head with nothing distracting you. I'm a Mr. Freedom guy. It's like, hey, don't distract me. Let me just stay focused on whatever I'm going to focus on and not be bothered by anything else. So over these last 36 years, being 72 right now, I spent a whole lot of the last half of my life trying to figure out how do I stay clear and still have a nice profitable fun, highly engaged professional life and personal life as well, and not have that distract me

and still be able to make that a sustainable thing to do. So I just figured out the best practices about how to do that. And do you think it's harder to be focused and productive in today's digital world as compared to like 20 or 30 years ago when things were more paper-based? Yes. Can you talk about that a little bit? Absolutely. Well, come on. It's just it's a matter of input. It's the stress of opportunity. I mean, how many things could you or I right now, if we weren't talking, be surfing the web about, be punching in to see the latest Instagram and to see who's following us. The distractibility of today's world is huge.

And it all comes down to kind of the good news about that is it forces everybody to really decide, wait a minute, what really matters to you. So it's almost like the more distractions you have, the more important it becomes to figure out, okay, wait a minute, what matters to me right now? And is this how I want to be spending my time? If you're in a crisis, you don't have that because the crisis defines your work for you, defines your world for you. So as you move into a more unstructured world with lots of opportunities, the ability to be

distracted and to run down rabbit trails or rabbit holes that are not necessarily where you ought or want or need to be is huge. And I know the outcome of the GDT system is stress-free productivity. Can you talk about what that means to you? Actually, stress is good. You need to stress your puppies when you're raising them. You need to stress kids so that they feel comfortable going up escalators. If you didn't have any stress, you'd never expand or express or really grow in terms of what you're doing.

What you don't want is negative stress. See, if I want to be out of the room and I'm not out of the room, I've created, in a sense, a kind of stress or what they call cognitive dissonance. So now I want to be out of the room. I'm not there. Oh, my gosh. How do I get there? And that creates the impetus for me to get up, get out of my chair and get out of the room. So that's actually a good thing.

That's actually how you produce things. Anytime you have a vision or a goal that is not true yet, you've created essentially a kind of a stress in your life that you start to move toward it in order to relieve that stress. So that's actually a good thing. The negative stress says, I want to be out of the room. Yeah, but no, I want to sit here. But no, I want to be out of the room, but I want to sit here.

Oh, my gosh. Now I'm in conflict, and that's ulcer production. So now I'm in conflict about my stuff, and that's the kind of stress you want to get rid of. The problem is, is most people are keeping their, life in their head, which is an absolutely crappy office. And the problem is that when you're keeping track of stuff, you need what might, wood, good should ought to be doing or handling or dealing with or whatever, you're keeping that in your head. That part of you has no sense of past or future,

so it thinks you should be doing all of that all the time. And you can't do that. That's what's creating a lot of the stress, is the fact that people are using the wrong place, the wrong tool, to manage the wrong kind of stuff. So that's why a lot of my system has a lot to do with external the brain. In other words, build the external system to get all that stuff out of your head so you can take a look at it and go, no, I'm going to go party or I'm going to go do Facebook right now, or I just want to take a nap or have a beer. And making that decision, that's either an avoidance decision because you're not sure all the other stuff to do and you're in stress, or that's the decision you make because that's the thing to do. So it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to change your

behaviors. It means you're going to feel a lot more comfortable about what you decide to do. This is a good intro to your getting things done system. Do you want to just talk about what exactly that is? Sure. Well, I give you the two-minute version of it anyway. Basically, you need to take anything that's got your attention. Wow, my mom's birthday's coming up. Wow, I've got this party I need to handle or deal with.

Oh, I've got this test I'm going to take on this certification that I need to get. Oh, I think I'm going to buy a house or should we have a kid? Do I need to get divorced? Do I need to get married? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how many things are on people's mind? all of those things actually need to be captured. That's step one.

So there's five steps to this. It's capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. So the capture step is to just identify and grab some sort of a placeholder for that outside your head. Write it down, in other words, or record it or something. But write it down is usually the best way to do that first step. And so let me make a list of all the things I've got my attention on, little big, personal, professional, or whatever.

That could take you, you know, a good hour, just for most people, if not more. to just get all that stuff out of their head to begin with. Step two is to then take those things. Okay, you just wrote down house. You know, what is that? Is that something you intend to move on right now or not? So you need to then move to the Clarify step, which is, okay, what are these things that have my attention?

Are they actionable? Yes or no? If not, then they're either reference or, you know, incubate, remind me later or just trash. or if they are actionable, what's the very next action I need to take on this? If I had nothing else to do but research buying a house, what would I do next? What's the first thing I would do? And then will that one action finish this? No, of course not.

I've got a project, at least research, whether or not a house is what we want to buy right now. So now I've got an action and a project outcome and action. And so the step two is really a very important step. And that just requires thinking. you have to take the stuff that has your attention and then get more discreet about what exactly does that mean to you? Is it actionable? Yes or no?

And if it is, what's the next action? And if one action won't finish it, what's your project? And once you've then clarified that, now you have the content to move to stage three to organize. Here's the phone calls I need to make. Here are the errands I need to run. Here are the things I need to talk to my life partner about right now. Here's the stuff I need to buy at the hardware store.

So essentially then your organization just becomes how do I then keep track of these things? I can't finish the moment I think of them, but I still need to do them. And so I need to keep an inventory of those possible things and options of ways to spend my attention and my actions out there in life. And hopefully a trusted system.

If you trust your calendar, for instance, you're not worried about where you need to be two weeks from Wednesday. You just need to trust that you have the right data on there and then you'll look at your calendar at the right time. This is just the expanded way to take that principle and say, okay, apply that to your whole life so that you don't have to be bothered about

any of this. It's just you don't only need to think about your errands when you're going out for them and then see the six things you've already come up with that you need to go pick up. So that's the organization step is having a trusted system that keeps track of these agreements and commitments and feeds them back to you as you might want them. Step four would then be to reflect on the content. If you're going out for errands, look at your list. Going to the store, look at your list. If you're going to have a business of life conversation with your life partner, look at your list. So you need to then engage with that. And then at these higher horizons of things, all the projects you have, and I would

suggest most millennials probably have somewhere between 30 and 50 projects, you know, taking a broad definition, get tires on my car, handle the next holiday, you know, man, it's this big party I want to give, you know, whatever they are. If you actually add all that up, that's a great list to have, but you need to reflect on that on some regular basis. So building in some sort of a review, more an executive time with yourself, reflection and review of all your content and catch up. You know, everybody listening to this right now at some point has had a bunch of stuff show up in the last few days that they haven't had time to identify that they've got to do something about it, but they know they do. And so stopping and reflecting on your life and what are all the

things that are showing up in my life, that's stage four, and then take a look at the inventory. stage five is then engage. Okay, given all of that, if I look at all my lists, my projects, my errands, my stuff to talk to people about, what do I want to do right now? And then that essentially you're making a trusted choice, assuming you've done steps one through four, then you're making trusted choices about what to do. If you haven't done steps one through four, you're making a hope choice. I hope this is what I want to do. And you tend to be driven by latest and loudest. So there's a two-minute or three-minute version of what the getting things done method obvious. Yeah, that was. fantastic. You know, it seems so intuitive to do this and it's just so nice to have it laid out. I'm actually really excited to get started with the GTD system. Well, it's interesting. It's how you get control of anything. If you walk into your kitchen, if you ever had your cooking area out of control and you walk in and you, but you've got guests coming in a night. The first thing you do is you notice what's off. That's the capture section. Okay, wait a minute. What's got my attention about my kitchen or kitchen area right now? And then step two is what is that? Oh, that's a dirty dish. Oh,

Oh, that's a clean dish. Oh, that's a spice. Oh, that's good food. Oh, that's bad food. So you make a clarification step about what these things are that are not where they need to be the way they need to be. And then step three, what do you do? You put spices back where they go. You put your dirty dishes in the dishwasher.

You put the good food back in the fridge. You organize based upon that clarification process. And then what do you do? You step back. You look at the whole kitchen area. You think about what you're going to cook. You look at the time. And then you open the fridge, step five, and engage.

You pull out butter and melt it. So I didn't make it. this up. I just identified those stages that we do. But most people haven't really either understood what those discrete activities were or applied that to the more complex, sophisticated aspects of our lives that we're all living in. Speaking of that, I know that many people organize their professional tasks. They're used to writing project plans and to do lists when it comes to work. But why is it important to both merge our personal and professional actions? Well, because your head doesn't make a distinction.

You can be as bothered by stuff at home while you're at work as you can be bothered by stuff at work while you're at home. There's no fence inside your head. A lot of people try to silo themselves. When I leave work, I truly leave work and I don't think about it. Oh, come on, give me a break. Get real. Grow up. You wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and go, oh, God, I forgot to it or I need to or whatever.

You're still thinking about stuff in that game. So the whole idea here is, look, just be present about whatever you're doing. So what you don't want to do is be distracted by anything other than what you're doing. So the big key here is getting things done is not so much about getting things done. It's really about being appropriately engaged with all the levels of commitment in your life so you're fully present with whatever you're doing. Whether that's writing a business plan or cooking spaghetti or watching your kid play soccer or whatever the heck you're doing, you just want to be there for them and not be distracted and have your psyche being pulled in 64 different directions. So that's what this is about.

And so you can't really distinguish between personal and professional. I haven't for 40 years. So I'll just say, what's next? See, even in my personal life, while I'm playing with my dog, I don't want to be thinking about my stove that needs fixed. I need to already handle that. So I can play with my dog and be there as opposed to having my brain go somewhere else,

even if it's personal about something else personal. I just want to be present with whatever I'm doing. So I need to be accountable to myself to have captured, clarified, and organized anything, no matter where it shows up about anything I have any commitment to do or handle or deal with or decide about. And then I think my next question is on step three, which is to organize. So as we're captured all of this information, how do we categorize these tasks so that we can clearly evaluate them and see them clearly? Well, you could keep one list of all the things you need to do.

Here's what I need to talk to my partner about. Here's what I need to buy the hardware store. here's what I need to draft on my computer. You could keep all that on one list, which is most people probably have more than 100 of those. And so that'd be a little daunting and overwhelming if you saw all 100 on one list. You go out, you got your smartphone.

Hey, I could make calls, but I've got three phone calls, but they're in this list of 120 things. That's not going to be very functional. So we found it once you actually identify all the actions you need to take about all of your commitments, that keeping reminders of them based upon a context for that. When I'm not at home, I don't need to see my stuff I told myself I have to be at home to do. So I have an at home list. There's no need to even see that unless I'm at home because I can't do them until I'm there.

I have a list of things to do for errands. I don't need to see that unless I feel like I have time and want to go out for errands. And then it's nice to pull that list up. So I don't need to see that when I review all the other stuff. So organizing your action reminders by the context. And oftentimes that's what's the tool or the location required. So people often organize then their actions by, here's the stuff I need to do when I'm at the office. Here's the stuff I need to do when I'm at home. Here's the stuff I need to do when I'm out and about for errands. Here's the stuff I need to do when I'm at my computer. And then it's a very good idea if you're engaged with other people, which most people are, certainly professionally.

My assistant, my boss, my partner at work, my life partner, it's good to keep track of stuff. When you come up with what's the next step, many times the next step is something you need to talk to one of those people. about. So you just keep a list of agendas. Here's all the stuff that I'm keeping track of. I need to talk to my partner about next time I see him or her. And so organizing these by the context that you need to be in in order to do that action makes us a lot simpler and a lot more functional. And as we have a list or however we choose to organize our tasks based on what they are, how do we decide what action we should take next? Well, why are you on the planet? What's your life purpose?

What are you trying to accomplish? What's your vision of wild success? Five years or now? Where do you want to be? What are the things you need to accomplish over the next year or two in order to be able to make your vision show up? What are all the other things you need to maintain so that you can get there,

like your finances and your health and your relationships and your spiritual life? What are all the projects you have about any of that in order to move those things forward? And by the way, what are all the action steps that you need to take about all those open loops that might be moving in that? So those are the six horizons

you've got commitments. So if you ask me, what's your priority? I say, well, which one of those horizons do you think you need to review? Which thing to do after you get off the phone with me right now? It's going to be the most important thing to do that'll relieve the most pressure that'll move you more forward toward the things that are meaningful to you. So you can't get away from the complexities of who we are, why we're here, what we need to do. I couldn't get it any simpler than that. You could say, what are your priorities in life? Well, when I get sleepy and I need to take a nap, that's my priority. I don't want to make that some ABC or whatever. That's just the thing to do right now, given all the other stuff I need to do. So there's a whole lot of sophistication that actually

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Yeah. So you just mentioned open loops, and I think this is a really interesting concept. it would be great if you could explain that concept to our listeners and why it's important to get these things out of our mind and into an external system. Well, as soon as you make a commitment, you can't finish in the moment. You've opened a loop. You've created a spin internally inside of you. And that could be as simple as I need cat food to I need a life and anything in between. So as soon as you make some sort of commitment that something needs to happen or change or be

different than it is, you've now opened something that's starting to spin. and recognizing what are those spinning things I've got is just recognizing what the open loops are. The problem is most people don't realize how much of your energy that's taking up without making any progress on progressing about any of these things. So if you keep this stuff in your head, your head has no sense of past or future. It thinks you should be doing all those all the time psychologically, which you can't do. So again, that's a lot of the source of the stress. You'll wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning call, oh my God, I need cat food.

but there's no store open. You could go buy cat food. So totally unworthy thought to have. All it's going to do is stretch you out, drain your energy. So you want to be able to identify what are these loops that I've opened and keep some reminder of those things

and an inventory of those external so that then it clears up your head to do what it does best, which is making choices out of the options, not trying to remember the options. That was a great explanation. So, Tim, I know that you have a deeper dive question, on step number four to reflect a review. Do you want to talk to that a little?

Yeah, sure. So when I'm doing the weekly review, sometimes it can take a little bit over three hours to complete. And that might be not so practical for most people. Do you have any advice for people to get the most bang for their buck in the weekly review? Well, Tim, do you like sports at all? Do you like to follow sports teams at all? Yeah. Like soccer, baseball, football, but... Yeah, basketball. Yeah.

How much time during the week do you think those guys spend getting ready for the game? A lot of time. Three hours? I don't think so. Try 80% of their work life is getting ready for their work. Right. And you're complaining about spending three hours a week to get ready for your work. Give me a break.

If you just spent seven hours of your eight-hour day getting ready for the last hour, that last hour is going to be hot. Really cool. Right? Yeah, I totally understand that it's a concept of working smarter as opposed to working harder. Yeah, but how to work smarter. That's why the weekly review is so powerful is because it actually gives you a very functional way to do that. As you're sitting down and reviewing all of your stuff, thinking about backwards and forwards in terms of your time frame and your chronologies and your due dates coming toward you and all the commitments you've got at multiple levels in your life, there's no way on God's rene earth you can do that in your head.

and however long that takes you once it's out of your head to review it again to feel comfortable about how you're going to spend the rest of the next week is however long it takes. I can do mine sometimes in 15 minutes, a short version of it. And sometimes I'm like you. It's going to take three hours or four hours, but that's a very rich four hours that I'm taking to make myself feel comfortable. A lot of it depends on how crazy the week was that I just finished. And how much time do I need to regroup, recalibrate it,

refocus. You just need to do as much as you need to do. Yeah, that makes sense. And it really depends on the case. Sure. And most people feel best about their work a week before they go on a big holiday. It's actually not about the holiday. They think it is. What it really is what you're doing a week before you go on a holiday is you're clarifying, cleaning up, renegotiating, organizing, getting everything set up so that you can just be on the beach or on the golf course or skiing down the slope or whatever the heck you're doing without anything on your mind. But you had to do what you needed to do to make sure you were free to do that. I just suggest people do it weekly, not yearly. Yeah, that makes sense. It makes sense because you're able to be more productive,

even though you're taking the time on the onset to kind of plan your week, at least you know what you're doing, and then you can be more productive and be focused all week. Yeah, and it's not so much plan your week. I'm not a big fan of planning anything you don't have to. I plan as little as I can get by with, but I need to look at the week. I need to see what the commitments are that I've got, and I need to look at all the other options. And then I let myself just make good intuitive choices about what I do. But I can only do that if I'm doing some version of a weekly review weekly that I can sort of trust my intuitive judgment.

See, guys, you don't have time to think. You need to have already thought. Your life is going to be too busy, too crazy. You're going to be the fire hose of life is going to be in your face as soon as you get off the line with me. And you don't have time to think. You need to make sure you've already thought so that you can then trust your intuitive, quick in the moment decisions

about what you're doing. But most people are doing that just based upon latest and loudness as opposed to, wait a minute, you know, I just took a look on what's really coming up and what's really kind of critical and important. So I think I'm going to park that over here and still work on this other thing right now. And that's the kind of smarts that, you know, that smart people do. But that doesn't happen by itself. It really needs to happen, especially with the complexity of people's lives these days, with, you know, a good review externally of all your commitments. So changing the way we fundamentally think about how we go about our day-to-day actions, for some millennials, it might seem like a daunting or intimidating tasks. So do you have any advice on how to take baby steps or wean yourself into this system?

Well, anything helps. This is not running with scissors, guys. Come on. If you just write a few more things down than you have before, you'll feel better. If you just make a next action decision about something you wrote down ahead of time instead of when the thing is in your face. you'll feel better. So anything you do, clean up,

just clean the area of your desk that's been piling up over there. Just go through that and clean it up. You'll feel better. You'll more in control and more focused. It's like, you know, hey, go get your car cleaned, clean up the trunk of your car,

and it'll drive better. So if nothing else, clean a drawer. When in doubt, clean a drawer. Come on. So none of this hurts. You know, any of this stuff is going to help in that way.

If you're talking about getting to a place where you truly have nothing on your mind except whatever you want on your mind, that requires the rigor of actually going through this process in some detail. Yeah, write more things down, decide next actions and outcomes about this stuff and have a better trusted organization system. Any of that stuff is going to work. Any of that stuff will help. But come on, we're teaching this to seven, eight, nine-year-olds now. So don't tell me a millennial can't do this. No, I think millennials definitely can do this. And I'm so excited to get started. I feel like naturally I do this type of stuff anyway,

that just getting something with more rigor is exciting to me. Well, the funny, the paradox is the people who need this the least are the people most interested in it. It's the most productive people who are most interested in what I do and what this methodology is. Because they're actually the ones that have thrown themselves out of their own comfort zone because of their own creativity and aspirations and success. They haven't matured their systems to actually keep up with all that

and to support it. So that's the good news about my life at the last 35 years of my life I've spent hanging out with some of the best, brightest and busy people on the planet, because they're the ones that have come to us that are attracted to this work. So the fact that you are already productive, I'm sure how you already know there is a value to a system, there's already value to having a list, there's already value to doing the right thinking about stuff. So if you're already in that space, you're ready for taking this to a whole new chapter or a new game. Yeah, I totally agree. There's so much value to the system. You mentioned something that I thought was

really interesting in your book. It's the two-minute rule. So when processing information, you recommend to do any action that takes two minutes or less on the spot. And like I mentioned, everything that you say in your book is pretty much intuitive. Like, I think a lot of us do two-minute tasks on the spot, but often we do five-minute or ten-minute tasks on the spot, too, which I think you could run into some trouble doing that. So can you explain that two-minute rule? Well, most people actually avoid doing two-minute things that would only take two minutes because they think it's going to take a lot longer than that. The two-minute rule, believe me, I've had hundreds of executives that I've coached 101, just tell me just the two-minute rule was worth its weight and gold.

Just that, if they hadn't had that habit already. Simply because oftentimes, the more senior you get and the more sophisticated life gets, oftentimes you can avoid making the next action decision. Well, what's the next step on this? And you can't do the two-minute rule unless you actually make a next action decision. So the next action decision is the most important thing to begin with. But once you decide that, hey, the next step I need to do is to email my assistant about XYZ, or the next step on this thing is I need to email or text my partner and get their input on this. So the next step I need to do is just check the website to see if they've got a phone number I could use or whatever. That's the kind of thing that you want to be able to do right then,

because it would take you longer to stack it, track it, remind yourself of it later on that it would be actually finish it right then. And that's usually surprising to a lot of people how many two-minute things there are. Actually, wherever you live will improve if you apply the two-minute rule. Just walk through your apartment or house or wherever you live right now and just notice things that are off. Is that light bulb out? How long would that take you to go get a light bulb and stick it in there? Oh, my God, come on that. That screw is loose. How long would it take you go get a screwdriver and fix that? And so you'd be amazed how many things just right around you. It will improve if you apply that principle. And it's simply the efficiency principle. First of all, don't don't keep track

of it in your head because you'll keep being reminded I should change that light bulb 65 times today. But once you decide that's all I need to do and it would take less than two minutes, you don't want to have to write it down because it would take you more time to write it down and look at it again than to finish it right then. So it's just a purely practical, intuitive thing to do. I was wondering, as someone who receives a lot of sporadic work that takes under two minutes, I find that a two-minute rule can sometimes result in more work instead of less work over time, in the sense that important work can sometimes get interrupted. Do you have any suggestions for people with the majority of their tasks taking under two minutes to complete?

Well, the two minute rule really only applies when you're processing new inputs. Well, first of all, you should not have any backlog of two-minute stuff. They should all be done. And if things are coming at you, and if you need to handle them, it takes less than two minutes to do, if that's part of your job and your commitments and your responsibilities, yes, do it. Absolutely. What are you going to do? Write it down, look at it later.

When are you going to do it? If somebody comes in that something would take less than two minutes to do, first of all, I may not even let into my office, or I say, hey, could just send me an email about that. Thank you. And I go back to whatever I'm doing and then let them give me some input that I can deal with later on. The problem is a lot of people get inputs, ad hoc inputs, as you're talking about. And because you don't trust your system to keep track of it, they let themselves run down that rabbit hole and then bitch about it because something interrupted their work, as opposed to, to writing a note throwing their own in basket. I'll get to that later when I've got better time to do it because right now I'm engaged in something. So there are no interruptions. There's only

mismanaged inputs. So if the ad hoc stuff, is that your job? Yes or no? If yes, that's what you deal with. There's an organization out there that never has fires and crises and interruptions. It's called the fire department because they just organized for that. If they're not dealing with a fire, they're getting ready for the next one. They don't complain about those, even though 95% are false alarms. Talk about a reason to complain. Come on. That's just the nature of their game. So if you haven't acknowledged the nature of your work

that requires you to then engage with the ad hoc stuff, and if those things can be dealt with, first of all, if you're even getting the ad hoc stuff, they're walking into your office, why? Yeah, I don't mean to say that I'm complaining about that. The main thing is that I get a lot of emails throughout the day, a couple hundred, and I'm managing a lot of relationships with clients and things of that nature.

So it can be very ad hoc at times. And that is the nature of the position. And that's something I've come to terms with. Young and profitors. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work,

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today. at Shopify.com slash profiting. Go to Shopify.com slash profiting. That's Shopify.com slash profiting. Yeah, fam, hear your first. This new year was Shopify by your side. Yeah, but if there's stuff that requires an hour or two of your discretionary time that's uninterrupted, you don't have to get involved in that.

Assuming you're zeroing out all that stuff by the end of the day, why should you? See, most people live in sort of the ad hoc latest and loudest environment out there. That's why everybody's always checking their smartphones. They're always checking their email. Sometimes I do, just because nothing else is going on. Let me look and see what's going on. But if I want to write an article, that's going to take me four hours, that's what I do.

Because the rest of the stuff will wait. If it's an emergency, some lights will flash or somebody will reach me in some way. But I don't need to let myself be distracted by that. So what you're talking about is not an issue unless it is. Yeah, it's almost like the two-minute rule should apply when you allow it. to apply. For example, I work a full-time job and I'm in corporate, you know, moving up the corporate ladder. And when I'm in a meeting with executives, they give me a task. I can't do it right then and there. But, you know, you've got to organize and when you have time to do it, you do it. But if I'm

sitting on my computer and not needing to do something for an hour straight, then if a two-minute task comes my way, then I'll just knock it out. If you're ever going to do it at all, right? If you're not, delete it. If you are, do it then. So like you said, the two-minute rule is worth its waiting, goal. Do you have any other simple tips or tricks that you can share? Just get more stuff out of your head. Write stuff down, folks. Keep a pad and pin with you wherever you go. Because the older you get, the more mature and sophisticated you get, it's not simility. It is sophistication. The more material you get, the more good ideas will not happen where you're going to implement that idea. You'll be buying bread at the store thinking something to bring up at the marketing meeting.

And you'll be in the marketing meeting, remembering you need bread. right so if you don't have some sort of a tool to capture that thought as it occurs to you while you're buying bread or while you're in the meeting you're going to have that thought more than once huge waste of time and a suck in your energy stop so if you get nothing else just keep stuff out of your head and make next action decisions on the things that are actionable but that's sort of the core behaviors here and what do you think are some common pitfalls that people face when they first start implementing this methodology Well, of the first four steps of the five steps, any one of them you could fall off.

First of all, people don't write everything down. So they don't trust any system because they know they're still banging around their head. They don't trust their head, nor do they trust their list. So there's problem one. Problem two, even if they'd write it down, they're sitting there staring at mom or bank on a list and haven't decided what the next action is. So their lists are creating as much stress as they relieve. Problem two.

They don't clarify the stuff that they may have their attention on it. been captured. Step three, they decide that's a phone call to make, and they think their head can remind them to do that, and then two minutes later they forgot, and they don't have a trusted system to park that in. So problem three, they don't organize the appropriate contents of stuff in a trusted place. Step four, they may have captured, clarified, and organized, but they don't look at their list. So they're still making sort of ad hoc latest and loudest decision making about their attention and their activities. So any one of those four could be where you fall off this wagon. And I know you just launched a new book called Getting Things Done for Teens.

Can you speak to what that's about? Yeah. I mean, for 35 years, I've had people come up to me and say, oh my God, I wish I'd have learned this when I was 12. Or, oh, my God, I've got a 12-year-old. I wish he or she could learn this right now because they're getting overwhelmed and swamped. So I don't have kids, and I also don't know how to really address that market. So I've avoided this for years. I knew there was a huge demand for it, especially as getting things done in the book, sort of took off out there in the world. But then I ran across two guys. One was my CEO for several years, a public school teacher in Minneapolis. They both had kids and were working a lot with kids, and they were doing this work. And so we co-authored the book. And so they did the heavy lifting,

really, of writing this. We've already had early returns from parents or teachers that have read this. Oh, my God, I need to learn this myself because they didn't step down the methodology and all. It's just how do you apply it? For instance, the capture function. A CEO needs to make sure when they come back from the board meeting, they emptied their briefcase of all the notes they took and the business cards they collected and whatever, and then deal with them and process them. You know, a 12-year-old needs to empty his or her pack at the end of the day or the end of the week. What are all the notes that your teacher needs your parents to sign that you've stuck in some little pocket over there along with the gum? So same principle, just different situation to apply

it, but it's the same thing going on. So the book was kind of a reframe of the getting things done methodology for kids. Part of the context is, are you ready? Are you ready for graduation? Are you ready for the prom? Are you ready for the test? Are you ready for college? Are you ready? As opposed to last minute, oh my God, scrambled yada, yada, yada, yada. And see, as kids grow up, at a certain point, you couldn't feed yourself. You had to be said. You couldn't clean yourself. You had to be cleaned. At a certain point, that's yours. You now deal with that. At a certain point, you had to have help at homework. At a certain point, it's yours. So over time, you graduated, as opposed to having the external world structure me. I now have to have my own structure for that.

But kids have not been trained, how to do that. And so, man, especially when they graduate from high school and step into the fire hose of reality, mom is no longer a trusted system. Oh, my God. How are you going to manage laundry, how you're going to manage buying your food, how you're going to manage your finances, how are you going to manage that stuff? And there's not been much education about that. So that's what we wanted to get into this book. It's pretty deep, actually. It's quite sophisticated in terms of what's in that book. It's not an elementary version of it. It's a sophisticated version of getting things done for a younger set. Yeah, I wish I had that book. Imagine the habits that you would develop as a young person and bringing that into college and your professional career. That

That would be amazing. Oh, it's incredible. You know, now, given that I've been doing this work for decades, I've actually had parents who got onto the GDD process and then had kids, a good friend of mine, who was my CTO, my chief tech guy for many years, raised his five daughters that he homeschooled them. And they all grew up with this methodology,

and they just wrote their own ticket. They won robotics competitions at age 12. They went to college, and then it turns out they wound up being hired to manage. their college website. They just say, oh, why would you ever keep anything in your head? And what are we trying to accomplish? And what's the next action?

They just built this in to their thought process. So that was always our hope. Look, if we really wanted to change the planet, so there are no problems. They're only projects. Let's get the kids first. Because they can easily be trained. This is the way to think.

Yeah, that's amazing. So all you listeners out there with younger brothers and sisters, make sure you tell them about getting things done for teens. Just read it for yourselves. Believe me, if you haven't read it, getting things done, at least the new edition of it, and taken to it yourself, you're going to find even the getting things done for teens will work for you at age 30. Yeah, I think either one is good. Either one is a good start, right? Oh, wherever, yeah. And for those listeners interested in taking the

next step with the GTD system, where would you recommend that they learn more? Well, it kind of depends of what you want to do. Obviously, the getting things done book, which is really, it could be quite daunting because I just wrote the whole manual about all of this that I've learned in 30 years. Though it's an easy read, essentially, you can just pick it up and just scan through it and see what sort of rings your bell about it. But that's available, and that's certainly a way to at least see what this whole blueprint of this methodology really is and how to implement it if you're interested in it. Our website, getting things done.com, has lots of resources. Free newsletter you can get into. We do a lot of podcasts.

There's a GTT Connect, which is our subscription membership site. that has a lot of deep dive into this with lots of folks around the world who are sharing best practices in this and kind of in our club. We've got partners around the world delivering public seminars around this. So if you're in the U.S. or Canada,

Vital Smart's great company has our exclusive rights to deliver our trainings. They're doing a lot of public trainings around getting things done. So if you go to our site and look at our global partners, wherever you are in the world, you'll see we're in 60 countries now,

at least officially, where we've got licensees in French, izees that we've certified them to do the trainings around this. So go to the site, you know, surf around, see what might ring your bell. Yeah. And you're also on Twitter at GtD Guy, right? Right. 1.3 million followers. So make sure you go follow him on Twitter as well. David, it was so nice to have you on the show. We really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. Follow you up on Instagram at Young and

Profiting and Twitter at Yapp underscore podcast and check us out at young and profiting.com. Kudos to our amazing team, Timothy Tan, Daniel McFatter, Bobby Hughes, John Sparks, and AK. Subscribe to Yap on your favorite platform to always keep up with us. Until next time, this is Hala.