To make it simple and easy for our clients & friends to get the latest and greatest GTD news, tips, tricks and coaching perspectives, I'll be blogging now over on GTDTimes.com, and posting to our online membership program GTD Connect.

You can still search this blog for anything that might be useful. See you over on GTD Times & GTD Connect!

Here is a nice video put together by David Spark from the Summit:

GTD Summit - What were your bad habits? from David Spark on Vimeo.

Here's a link http://twitter.com/GTDCoachMichaelto get you started.

The piece caught my ear because "doing more with less" has been a very familiar mantra at our company in the past few months in terms of how to best position our work during this recession. Indeed, many of our new clients are bringing GTD training and coaching into their companies precisely because they have had workforce reductions. Those employees who remain in those situations often have to get the work of 2 or 3 people done and are stretched.

GTD is the perfect antidote for this kind of pressure. It has an amazing ability to help people focus on the right things, and get more done with less stress and less energy. Nice to have a bit of recession-proofing built into our fundamental product!

I hope the economy is being gentle to all of you as well! Hang in there and keep on doing your weekly reviews. ;-)

This was my second coaching session with him. A year ago if you opened his calendar it would have looked like one solid brick wall - hardly any openings. And if there were any openings they'd be quickly swallowed up by a steady stream of drive-by meetings from many of his direct reports.

He finally had enough and decided to rip up the old assumptions about what went on his calendar and start fresh. AND one of the most important steps in his process was to write this great email to all of his team leaders and staff that includes his new proposals for, essentially, how he's willing to play when it comes to his calendar and email comunications. While it may seem a little blunt at times, I believe this is a great example of how to take back control of one's calendar:

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Time the Great Normalizer

As many of you know, I am a big fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done. If you find yourself overwhelmed with "stuff" and are having a hard time balancing it all, his book is a great place to start. David also offers one-day courses throughout the year, often in Chicago, that are really good. Many of our group leaders took his course last year.

One of the big tenets in his system is the idea of processing. The reality is we have less work than we think, but because we don't take the time to process information effectively, to organize our work into contexts and build a system (focused on actions) to address it, the work quickly becomes overwhelming.

I, as I'm sure many of you, can very much attest to this. As roles have changed and the firm has grown, I found my schedule quickly overwhelming me late last year. A schedule, like a meeting, will fill up the time allotted. I've found that if I don't block out time to work on the important stuff, not to meet, I spend my days in meetings that are often more urgent than important. The ironic thing is if I had more time to work, I actually could meet less as I could spend that time on helping solve the problems discussed in all these meetings.

I'm really excited about where we are going and can't wait to work with you on big problems, but to do this I first need to set some bounds on my schedule in 2009. I want feedback on this, so please let me know if you have any thoughts on how I could improve this (or if you have any concerns). With that in mind, going forward this year, here is how I'd like to operate - at least for now:

* Open Office Hours:
Tuesday: 2-4:30pm
Thursday: 2-4:30pm
Friday mornings: optional

Please use this time to come by and chat with or without an agenda. You can schedule time with Angie directly or just stop in. I am dedicating this time just to meeting with people, I will not be on a call, working on anything else, or distracted. Seriously, please use this time, scheduled or unscheduled, for serious stuff or not-so-serious stuff - just come by. The flip to this is that, going forward, outside of these times please do not stop in and sit down, especially when the door is closed. If you need an answer to a problem, and it's not an emergency, please come by only during these office hours (again, scheduled or unscheduled). Please see below for the process for addressing urgent matters.

* Meeting Requests: In addition to the open office hours above, I have blocks of time set up on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays for meetings to be scheduled. We'll use these slots for monthly group leader meetings, reviews, or whatever else comes up. To get on the schedule, please email Angie directly (if your email goes to me and not to Angie, assume that I will not see it and thus will not be able to meet). Also, please give Angie an agenda and an estimated duration for the meeting. The default time for a meeting will be 30 minutes instead of the typical 60 minutes. If you send an Outlook meeting request, by default this is not accepted and needs to be confirmed. Assume if the meeting is not confirmed it is not scheduled.

* Leadership Meetings: Also, so everyone knows, I spend Thursday mornings in firm leadership meetings where Chuck, Brian, Aaron, Tad, Jeff, and I get in sync for the week and make any necessary operating decisions. My Friday mornings are dedicated to MM leadership meetings with a similar agenda.

* Flexibility: With this said, any system we use to manage time has to be flexible. These rules are not written in stone, but if they must be broken, there should be a good reason. I would define this as the need to discuss the immediate termination of an employee or another personnel issue of similar severity; a trading, risk, or expense decision regarding an amount greater than $50K that needs an immediate response (i.e., it can't wait the 48 hours until the next office hours); and other similar situations. If you need to talk to me about one of these urgent scenarios but can't find me, your best bet is to email Angie and cc me. In a true emergency, call my cell.

* Emails: When emailing, assume that I will read email within 24 hours. I typically check it in the morning and late at night. Assume also that if it is actionable, it may take a couple more days for me to get back to you. Email is another thing that expands to fill the time allotted, and if I leave it open all day, I can spend all day replying to it. I have large blocks of time on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to "get to zero," a David Allen idea. So twice a week, my inbox is actually empty, which is quite an incredible feeling as an inbox with 1,253 emails represents a long list of tiny (or not-so-tiny) commitments that weighs on you every time you look at it (consciously or unconsciously). If something does come up and you need assistance in less than 24 hours, please notify Angie.

* My Travel: In terms of travel plans, I have a fairly busy schedule this year. I will be in New York often, as well as a couple other cities for conferences. I plan on visiting London again later in the year as we get things going there and have a few other trips planned as well (for example, hopefully, China in the fall to learn about Asian markets). My travel schedule is typically set 2-3 months in advance; in fact, many of the dates for 2009 are already scheduled. If we need to get large blocks of time on the schedule, please let me know as soon as possible so we can integrate these times with my travel schedule. I will not make up office hours or other routine meetings that I miss while traveling.

Overall, my goal is to spend focused time with our teams to work on the big problems and less time in meetings this year. I can make this happen but will need help from all of you. I believe that with a firmer schedule, I'll be able to work more effectively on the problems that matter.

So, to recap, here are the basics of my weekly, non-travel, schedule:

Tuesday:
Scheduled meetings (appointment, agenda, estimated duration required)
Open office hours 2-4:30 pm (no appointment necessary)

Wednesday:
Scheduled meetings (appointment, agenda, estimated duration required)

Thursday:
Morning - firm leadership meeting
Scheduled meetings (appointment, agenda, estimated duration required)
Open office hours 2-4:30 pm (no appointment necessary)

Friday:
Morning - MM leadership meeting
Morning - optional open office hours

Thanks for your understanding, and I welcome feedback from everyone.

- Nate

I thought that just rocked. What do you think?

It was great to work with someone who is so on top of what's happening in the technology world. Here's his first blog post about his experience that includes a :15 minute video of him interviewing me.

The idea for this post was triggered by a conversation I had with my fellow coach, Kelly Forrister, a while back about our favorite collection tools. She's a big fan of the Levenger Circa system for taking notes and I tend to like bound notebooks like the large Moleskine. I know we also keep a different set of categories in our action lists and reference lists.

The point of GTD is not about installing a preordained system that will plug in a change your life. It's a bit more subtle than that. It's about applying the higher-level principles and using the tools and strategies that are attractive and workable for you to accomplish them. Here's a reminder of the "Five Phases of Workflow," the core framework representing the higher-level principles of David Allen's GTD:

Collect, take notes about, or somehow gather what's got your attention,
Process that collection of notes earlier rather than later and decide what it all means to you and what you will do,
Organize the results of those decisions in a way that is easily reviewable and retrievable in a calendar, lists, files, or other systems,
Review your system at appropriate levels often enough to feel in control and in perspective, and
Do, using your system to choose the appropriate thing to do based on how much time and energy you have, what context you're in, and your higher sense of priority.

If you love the feel of pen and paper or aren't attracted to typing your lists, use a paper system. If a digital system works for you, great! The point is to do what works for you.

I'm curious what unique variations from the "standard" GTD approach are working for folks out there.

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