Today I had the pleasure of spending some time with David Allen and some of our other team members as David was the opening keynote speaker at Office 2.0, a conference dedicated to exploring how technology and next-generation web applications are changing the way we work and collaborate.

Office 2.0 is all about exploring and discovering the future of online productivity & collaboration. Imagine a future where all of the applications, data, and collaboration lives in "the cloud," a metaphor for the increasingly ubiquitous web. In the future, instead of using your computer to get to the web, you'll be using the web to get to your computer. Considering that most of the coaching that I do now is for clients who are on either Outlook, Lotus Notes, or Entourage, I felt a bit like a technology dinosaur at this event. It's not clear to me exactly what directions this kind of technology will take the implementation of GTD - but the possibilities are exciting.

Here are a couple interesting links if you want to explore more about what the future of "office" might be for you.

Here's a great little article with seven key definitions of Enterprise 2.0 concepts from E20portal.com, a great source for information and research about this area.

Google, with their Google Apps continues to roll-out new user-friendly applications that reside in the cloud, thereby helping you share, collaborate, and access all of the things you are working on. Here's a posting from InfoWorld with more perspective on how far they've brought us in being able to do our essential work through web applications.

Cool stuff.

If you know anything about practicing GTD you know that a part of the process involves creating various lists for yourself so that you can easily add to, review, and retrieve information about all of the commitments you've made in your world. In his book, Getting Things Done, David Allen recommends creating various action lists, a "waiting for" list and a project list.

Here's a simple but useful trick that I often share with my clients: When you're in the midst of processing your inbox, defining your actions and projects, pretend that you're writing them for a kindergartener. In other words define them so clearly that a 5-year-old could understand what you mean. Include all the meaning you need to include so that later on - a week or a month later - you don't have to spend any mental energy decoding your own list.

This may seem like overkill to some. But you'd be surprised how many clients I've seen add actions to their lists like "draft memo for meeting" only to be completely befuddled a few days later when they have to try to remember "what meeting? what memo?" as they review that task among a list of 60 other similarly-worded actions.

I've also seen another form of this lack of clarity occur when a client assumes that, in service of efficiency, they should only define an action using keywords without context or action verbs. For instance, "Memo - department meeting - code 902." This, of course, can be equally befuddling later on when reviewing the list.

This omission of clarity happens because in the moment of processing your stuff it can seem totally obvious what the next action is, so the temptation of leaving out meaningful context or explanation is quite strong, especially if you're moving quickly. Just remember that you're not that smart. You can't remember everything. In a way, that's the point of GTD: get it out of your head into your trusted system.

So, for instance, that vague "memo" action above might be better articulated as "draft policy memo for Aug 1st staff meeting," and might further include a few keywords in the notes area of the task (in Outlook, for example) to remind you about topics that you want to include in that memo.

Remember, the reason you keep lists is to capture your thinking so that you don't have to think so much later. Just slow down a little bit while you're processing so that you can speed up when you're reviewing and choosing things to do from your lists.

If you've read the book or been to a seminar, you know that the first phase of successfully managing your workflow is to collect whatever you've got your attention on. The basic principle of collecting is that you'll have a heck of an easier time managing an action or project to completion if you get it out of your head and into an objective trusted system outside of yourself. Otherwise, the thought or promise or commitment will just keep spinning inside your psyche, yelling for attention and draining your energy. If you've ever watched a GTD aficionado in action you've probably noticed them jotting occasional notes to themselves in the middle of meetings or in the middle of nowhere. Then, when they have the chance they spend some time to process what those notes really mean and determine what actions, if any, they are now committed to regarding what they've collected.

Think about GTD as an approach for successfully managing all of the agreements you have with yourself and others. In this approach, collecting and processing are the steps in which the agreements get manufactured. When you process something you've collected and actually define a new commitment, you literally create something out of nothing. You now have a future outcome where before there was nothing. Think about your actual physical inbox as one of the key loading docks for the raw materials that may become your commitments. If you don't actually use an inbox in this way, essentially your whole office, home, and/or psyche will become your inbox - and that can get awfully messy.

In the trenches of today's knowledge workers I've seen many variations on the concept of the in-box. For some, the in-box is a place where other people drop things off - like memos, reports, and mail. For others an inbox is where they keep all of their work-in-progress until they have time to do it. Still others have no idea why they'd even want to have a box called In anywhere near their desk.

Yes, the email and voice-mail inbox IS automatically filling up for us every day - so those are difficult collection places to miss. But remember that your physical inbox (or in-folder while you're traveling) can actually be one of the most important parts of your GTD system. Yes, it's a place for others to drop stuff for you. But more importantly, it's a place for you to drop all your own meeting notes, notes to self, and random stuff you haven't quite figured out until you've got a bit of processing time to make sense of it all and make some new agreements.

I'm curious: what's your favorite collection tool and how exactly do you use it?

"For focus areas like finance and fitness, I can see measurable 30k objectives (weight lost, school loans paid off) but I struggle with other areas like Relationships, Creativity, or even Spirituality. I can understand the 40k Vision of what these look like, but as far as measurable goals to make up the vision, I struggle. I seem to have a gap at the 30k/objectives level.

How would you coach someone through this situation?"

I thought it would be useful to share my response here as I see this issue come up a lot in my work with clients.
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Hi Erik,

Thanks for the question. First of all I want to make it clear that you don't necessarily need to have 30K goals for each and every 20K item. If being responsible to those areas of responsibility is enough to actually achieve your vision, great.

Also, while it is helpful for the 30K goals to be specific and measurable - it's not necessarily mandatory. For instance if, in my creativity area of focus, my goal in two years is to be "more consistently engaging in creative activities," great! Or in relationships, you might just want to "develop a strong and trusted support network." Those are both just fine as long as the goal itself is motivating and clear to you.

If you really want to get some of the nonspecific & measurable goals to be more specific, here are a few tips:

Put your words in their mouth
Let's say that you have a sense that in your relationships area you have a goal of being more selfless and generous but it's difficult to quantify that. One way to play that one is to make the goal about someone else who knows you well, like your partner, telling you that you have been consistently more selfless and generous. That way it's specific and measurable. It may seem like an artificial construction - but you'd be surprised how often this will actually happen IF you are truly committed to that goal. And even if your partner doesn't actually say the words, articulating the goal will still do wonders for pointing you in the right direction.

Making the immeasurable measurable
If you dig a little bit more into your intentions at the 30K level, even if your goal feels a little subjective, you can often make up an objective measure that represents that goal having been accomplished. For instance, a while back I was feeling like I was imploding a bit in the area of friendships. I was so busy in another area of my life that I'd neglected some of my key friendships and lost a few to moves and other situations. A goal I created to embody my new intention was "I have made at least two close new friends whom I will know for years."

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I'm curious what other creative and useful ideas others have used in this situation. Feel free to share your thoughts.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

In GTD The RoadMap, David does a masterful job of elucidating the power and ease that becomes available when one has both perspective on and control over all of one's commitments. All control and no perspective? You're stuck in the realm of the Micro-Manager. All Perspective and no control? You're a Crazy-Maker with grandios visions and no grip on how to really make them happen.

In GTD The RoadMap, David also shares some great perspective on how to get your own practice of GTD to "stick." His main point here is that in order to see how to implement and maintain GTD and feel compelled enough to stick with it, you must identify enough with the resulting experience that you can't help making it happen and keeping it going.

That got me thinking. How can we take that wisdom and apply it in a real, actionable way to improving our own hit-rate on doing our weekly review, the essential and often neglected practice of GTD?

How better to identify with the resulting experience of a weekly review than to actually do one and then immediately turn your attention to carefully observing your own specific experience of having just completed it. What I mean by this is to literally spend a few minutes checking in with yourself and answering the following questions:

- How do I feel about myself and my work now that I've completed this weekly review?

- How does my body feel now that all of my commitments are updated and current? Am I tired? Awake? Calm? Invigorated?

- What is now possible that may not have been possible before I completed this weekly review?

You might even write your observations down over the the course of several weekly reviews and then look back to see what patterns you find. I believe that doing this self-observation over the course of several months will improve your consistency in actually doing and completing weekly reviews. It's a simple, quick exercise to engage yourself in fully identifying with one of the core practices of GTD.

Some other ideas I've seen work wonders for instilling and supporting the weekly review habit include:

- Invite the support of your friends and colleagues to do your weekly reviews together. We've seen this work well at several of our client companies, and we even do it in our own company.

- If your schedule is always changing or you travel a lot, making a repeating calendar appointment a lost cause, include as part of each weekly review a step in which you plot out and commit to the dates and times for your next two or three weekly reviews.

- If distractions are difficult to overcome, temporarily move your weekly review to a private space or conference room where you can be undisturbed.

What about you? What has worked for you regarding strengthening the muscle of the weekly review habit?

I thought David did a great job of getting across some of his core GTD principles even in the rushed pace of this quick interview. What did you think?

The story of how I became a workflow coach is a great example of the power of the reticular filter in action. The reticular filter is that part of our brains that filters in and out what matters most and least to us, respectively (see here for more about the reticular filter.)

Over the course of my previous professional experience I had often wondered if I should become a coach, but I'd never really verbalized my thoughts or taken any actions to discover more. I didn't have the cajones to jump out of the the track I'd been in for years into the world of coaching. Then, one day, I was talking with my wife, AnneLise, about career musings and shared with her that I was interested in investigating a career in coaching. She agreed, saying, "Of course you should be a coach. You're already an amazing coach." Hearing her reflect back to me what I probably already knew deep down inside, gave me the courage to embrace that possibility and start taking actions toward becoming a coach. And suddenly my reticular started filtering away...

Just a few days after that, in my search to learn more about the world of coaching, I volunteered to be coached in an all-day integral coaching course at a nearby coaching school. My coach was supportive, sensitive and objective. She took me through several exercises in which I created my vision of what my experience of my life would be working as a coach - in other words, we created not just a successful outcome statement, "Coaching Career Launched," but also a much deeper, richer vision of how it would feel, how it would look, what I would be doing and saying. The works. The conversation we had that day created an incredible opening for me - and suddenly all I could do was see opportunities to make my new vision come true. My reticular filter was now programed to filter in the internal ideas and stimulus from the outside world that would all help me achieve my new goal and vision.

Literally, two days later in a conversation with a friend, I noticed him mention something about GTD and I was suddenly reminded of David Allen, and the workflow coaching I'd once received and loved. Within a week of that I was starting the interview process to become a workflow coach...

If I hadn't already set my goal and articulated my vision, that mention of GTD would have probably just floated by me like so many other bits of information I pass by every day. But this time I noticed it.

From the moment I actually set the vision and goal it took about two months before I was hired and hit the ground running with my coaching training. My own personal experience is my best evidence of the power of setting intentions, articulating goals, and letting your own reticular filter do what it does best.

I'm sure you all have similar stories about seemingly serendipitous things that happened or showed up once you set your mind to a certain goal or vision. I'd love to hear about it.

The head of the group was interested in using this feature so that he could essentially assign and track all of the requests he sends to his team members in the same step on his own To-Do lists. However, in the practices of GTD, we typically don't recommend using this feature because it essentially ends up adding tasks onto others' To-Do lists without giving them an easy way to fully process it for themselves.

In other words, if I had a task from my boss appear in my to-do list that sounded something like "please take care of the PDG report," that's probably not the way I would articulate my own next action about the PDG report. I would instead process that request into a specific project and/or next action for myself with the specifics of exactly HOW I'm going to take care of that request. My boss wouldn't really know what my actual next physical, visible action needs to be. Only I can define that.

It's much more helpful for me if all of the things on my own next actions and projects lists are created, worded and processed by me, in my own words - so that I'm the master of my own domain, so to speak.

If there are a lot of things on my own next actions lists that I didn't actually put there, my assumption is that I'll start to lose trust in my lists a bit and maybe even be confused when reviewing them.

I ended up recommending that they not use this feature of the software and instead just use other normal means of communication (like emails and conversations) to assign tasks and request actions.

I wonder if anyone out there has found any success using this assigning tasks feature of Outlook or Lotus Notes - and how that has worked with a GTD structure of processing if there was one in your environment.