April 30, 2008

Taking some time to orient our new Dolan to this world

This is one of Maxwell's first photo-shoots. Spittin' image of me isn't he!? I'll be taking off a couple of months from blogging to take care of Maxwell.

Here's a bit that I wrote in the dizziness of the early hours of my wife's labor (and forgot to publish at the time):

Talk about open loops. The past few hours, as we work through these early contractions and watch them get more regular and frequent, has been like an open loop fest. Any uncollected (and many previously unconscious) things I've had my attention on have been bubbling up like bubbles in a champaign glass. Noticing my own psyche spin with excitement and wonder and nervousness as I cycle through my own anticipation and support AnneLise through her own journey and Max's transition to this world.

Can't wait to hold him in my hands.

Michael

Posted by mdolan at 09:14 PM | Comments (4)

April 04, 2008

GTD Live! CD set announced

I don't typically use this forum for marketing messages about our products and services. But today I'm bending the rules a bit. I'm told that today is the day that we are officially releasing our new "GTD Live!" CD set. This should be pretty exciting news for anyone who always wanted to go to a David Allen seminar but hasn't gotten the chance.

It's a well-produced, full recording of David delivering an entire 2-day seminar, and it's packed with insights, tips, and practical applications on GTD in a way that only David can tell you. And an added plus from a learning point of view is that with GTD Live! you can listen to David anywhere, anytime - even if you've fallen off the wagon and you just need a little shot in the arm to get you motivated to get back on.

Here's a summary of the content of the 10-CD set:

- Mastering the Five Stages of Workflow
- The Productive Experience
- Keys to Collecting and Processing your Stuff
- Project Thinking
- Organizing Email and Filing Systems
- Dealing with Procrastination and Setting Priorities
- Planning and the Power of Focus
- Establishing Your Ideal Scene, Successful Outcomes

It also comes with a bonus of several of our favorite "In Conversation" recordings of David speaking with high-profile GTD users, as well as a set of our GTD Templates, a learning tool to help you stay on your game.

At this link you''ll find more information about the product as well as four audio preview clips of the content.

Posted by mdolan at 10:33 AM | Comments (1)

March 29, 2008

How do YOU Procrastinate?

If you've ever procrastinated...

Um.. wait .. I've got to straighten up my desk first...

... then you'll love this great animated short by Johnny Kelly:

Posted by mdolan at 06:38 PM | Comments (4)

March 27, 2008

Horizons of Focus

One of our readers, Robert Brink, had this request:

"I'd love an article on the various horizons. I know it's important, but it's completely opaque to me. The metaphor only seems helpful at the first two levels. I can see the obvious difference between the tarmac (actions), and takeoff (projects). I can see it in my head and I can remember it because I've experienced the visual difference between taxi and take-off. One minute I'm looking in car windows, the next I'm looking at roofs. But the difference between 40k and 50k means next to nothing to me. (Oh look, everything got another fraction smaller. Great!)"

I can really appreciate this question, as the application of this tool will take literally as many forms as there are people applying it. This is a big topic, so I'll try to hit the most relevant points, as I see them.

Practicing GTD enables people and groups to manage their agreements with more integrity and peace of mind. David Allen's "Horizons of Focus" model is essentially a map of the six different types of agreements that you can have with yourself. They each have a different flavor, time horizon and impact. Clarifying what your agreements are at these levels and reviewing them as often as you need to will help you maintain a sense of perspective about all of the minute-by-minute choices you make about what to do and what to commit to. Here's a quick primer on what is meant by the six different levels of the Horizons of Focus:

On the Runway
These are the agreements you have with yourself about the actual physical and visible next actions you are committed to doing. For instance, "draft growth strategy presentation," is an example of this kind of agreement, and it would be organized on a next action list.

10,000 FT
What relatively near-term outcomes are you committed to for which you are taking many of the next actions on the runway? The answers to this question essentially create your project list, or 10,000 ft. "Growth strategy for 2009 presented to management team" could be the project for the previously mentioned next action. Projects are typically outcomes that can be completed within about a year.

20,000 FT
This level represents the the agreements you have with yourself about your responsibilities, interests and areas of focus. You can think of it as the job description for your life and work. Typically this list is about 7-10 areas. Your commitments at 20,000 ft tend to change when your life or job changes in some meaningful way. "Responsible for leading company strategy" might be the 20,000 ft component in our running example.

30,000 FT
These are the specific and measurable medium-term goals and objectives to which you are committed. I think about this level as the uber-projects. In other words, you're probably going to need the completion of a whole bunch of smaller and shorter projects at 10,000 ft to actually get to the goal at 30,000 ft. The time horizon here tends to be about 1-2 years and it helps if the agreements at this level are as specific and measurable as possible. For instance, "Sales volume increased by 23% by June 2010" could be the 30,000 ft agreement in our example.

40,000 FT
As you get higher in the altitude of your agreements, your longer-term aspirational agreements start showing up. 40,000 ft is all about articulating your vision. This is where you get to invent what the ideal scenes of your work and life will look like, sound like, and feel like. More than the previous levels, you want to stretch yourself here toward visions that will make all the work worthwhile. You probably want to reach out at least three years if not more for these. In our running example, creating the strategy for growth could be about eventually getting to a vision that sounds like "Our company is recognized consistently as the leader in the field, known for innovation and breakthrough strategy."

50,000 FT
50,000 ft represents your ultimate purpose and core values, either as an individual, or as a group. It typically takes some time and serious introspection to arrive at a clear statement of purpose and/or core values. Let's say the company in our running example were a medical device company. The purpose could be something like "To improve the quality and duration of life for people with diabetes." Purposes and core values tend to not change very often, but you can always revisit it if need be.

In these examples I've shown a one-to-one link between all of the elements at the different levels - and that's the point. If you're agreements are not aligned up to the top, you may be spending your energy on project and actions that really don't matter according to your higher horizons of agreements.

Consider that energy follows attention. So if you clearly articulate your agreements at these levels and give them the appropriate amount of attention, you'll likely find that you're using your energy on the right things.

We recommend holding this model lightly as the various horizons are meant to be general guidelines, not a rule-book. For instance, if for you, 30K and 40K feel like almost the same thing - great. Success here is more about the intention of actually articulating and review your higher agreements - not necessarily the exact form they take.

If you're hungry for more information or inspiration about this topic, the good news is that David is now in the process of writing his third book, which will likely include a deeper conversation about this topic.

Posted by mdolan at 06:51 PM | Comments (6)

February 27, 2008

Getting the Gunk Out

About half of the clients I work with fall into the category of people who have implemented the practices of GTD on their own, using Getting Things Done, by David Allen as their guide, but have realized that its not yet quite working as smoothly or as effortlessly as they would like. They've likely already had big breakthroughs in some area of productivity, but still have some key missing links to get to the next level. Most of my work as a coach in these situations is to uncover where the "gunk" is in my clients' systems. Usually, somewhere somehow there are elements of their GTD practice that are misfiring and dragging down the positive effects of the rest of their system.

Here are my top ten examples of gunk, with the most pernicious last, which when ungunked tend to unlock the power of David Allen's GTD:

10. No Trusted Place for Reference
For those of you who seem to always have piles and piles of stuff covering all of the surfaces of your office, pay heed. Sometimes the biggest impediment to seeing the surface of your desk is that you just plain don't have a simple, trusted landing place to put papers, documents and materials that qualify as reference. Make sure you've got at least a couple of filing cabinets with ample room for the reference materials you haven't yet filed. Clean out the old files about once a year to keep your files fresh and clear of junk. Try to make it as easy as physically possible to create a new file and get it into into your reference system.

9. Too Many or Not Enough Due Dates
The rule of thumb here is to be selective about which actions and projects actually deserve due dates and which don't. If you give everything a due date, you may not be clear while reviewing your system which ones where the hard due dates and which were just "wanna due" dates. If you give nothing a due date, you may be missing the boat on some critical work. Find the right balance for yourself.

8. Not Enough Doing Time
Often I see folks who are ravenous about defining their work and processing their stuff, but they have a difficult time actually getting their important work done when it really needs to get done. If this sounds familiar, take control of your own calendared commitments and set aside regular blocks of DOING time. It isn't going to happen on it's own.

7. Mixing up Reference with Action
Make sure to keep your action lists about just that and only that - Action. I see so many lists that are basically a mix between reference, notes, and actions. If you're committed to taking an action, great! Put it on an action list. If what you've got is information that is interesting and may be useful down the line, organize it with other similar reference and keep it from gunking-up your action lists. For instance, if you're on Outlook, use the Notes part of the software for your reference. If you're on Lotus Notes, pull up the Personal Journal database and do the same.

6. Doing GTD Half-Way
I often see GTD systems that are essentially used as backup to-do lists. In other words, if you find yourself keeping the really important next actions in your head, or you carry around that set of 4-5 post-it note reminders and refuse to actually process them into your main lists, you suffer from this form of gunk. You don't yet fully trust your GTD lists, so you use other means to track the real meaty stuff. As David so appropriately puts it, "the bad news is that GTD is fundamentally an all or nothing game." Either everything is in there and your trust it, or its not and you don't.

5. Not Enough Processing Time
The refrain I often hear from folks who fall into this category is that "I don't have time to do all that processing." Remember, defining your work IS work too - maybe the most important work. You're going to have to eventually decide what to do about that stack of papers or those 120 emails, why not make the time to process and decide about it earlier rather than later so that you can do it with grace and ease, not when it's blowing up in your face.

4. The "Everything is Important" Syndrome
You cannot do everything. Period. Learning when and how to say no with clarity and certainty is a competence that happens on the way to GTD blackbelt. In order to do so, it's very helpful to clarify and regularly review all of the higher horizons of focus within which you have agreements with yourself and other people. For example, if you are really clear what your job description is and isn't, you'll have a much easier time gracefully declining all of those "interesting but not relevant" opportunities that come up. Get clear about your higher-level agreements and learn to say no to things that aren't aligned.

3. Next Actions That Aren't Physical and Visible
This type of gunk is hard to see if you're in it. An action like, "fix kitchen cabinet" may seem really clear and actionable to you. But if the actual physical next action to get that done is actually "go to hardware store to pick out new hardware for cabinet," than I dare say you'll probably be rather unsuccessful at fixing it unless you have a stroke of amazing intuition next time you're driving past the hardware store. The point here is to always make sure that the actions on your list are clear, unambiguous, doable, next physical, visible actions. When defining your next actions, keep asking yourself "how?" until you identify the real physical next action. If your lists are filled with actual next actions, your poor psyche won't have to essentially reprocess everything every time you review your lists. All you'll have to do is choose.

2. No Project List
Even if you're great at identifying and organizing next actions, if you don't have a robust and working project list you will likely drop some big balls along the way. The project list is meant to be the place where you track all of those outcomes to which you are committed which will take more than one next action to accomplish. Every project should have at least one next action or calendared action - or else it's not in motion. And the weekly review is the time to review and take care of the project list.

1. Non-Existent Weekly Reviews
This is the gunkiest gunk of them all. So gunky that the less you do your weekly reviews, the more gunky your system gets. If you have found that your weekly reviews are turning into monthly or quarterly reviews, get back on that wagon and revive this healthy habit. Give yourself the gift of a regular, holistic review of all of your commitments, projects, and actions. There's no better way to keep yourself in control and in perspective. And the kicker is that if you actually do them about once a week, you can zip through them much more quickly and painlessly than if you wait weeks and weeks.

What's your experience of "gunk" in your own practices of GTD? What breakthroughs have you had in ungunking your system? What did I miss? Please join in the conversation. The more, the merrier.

Posted by mdolan at 02:46 PM | Comments (7)