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

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.

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 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 the three CDs, David Allen leads a great conversation of how-to's, perspectives, and real-life stories about the weekly review with Marian Bateman, our VP of Business Development, and Meg Edwards, our Director of TeleCoaching Business Development.

We're very excited about this product. If you end up buying it I'd love to hear any feedback you have.

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.

And.. I've got something terrible to admit...

The other day, it took me pretty much a whole day to do my weekly review, because I hadn't done one for over three weeks!!

"What!?" you say, "A David Allen workflow coach missed TWO of his own weekly reviews? Heresy!!"

Yes indeed. It's true. Even a DavidAllen coach can be rather human when it comes to occasionally missing a weekly review. And you know what? The experience of falling off the weekly review wagon and finally getting back on was actually a big eye-opener for me. When I actually caught up and finished the weekly review my mood shifted, my peace-of-mind increased, and even my body felt more vibrant. But only through experiencing that post-weekly-review glow could I really see just how out of sorts I'd been the couple of weeks prior. It's as if I just got a new prescription for eyeglasses and I suddenly realize just how fuzzy everything was without them. The experience also made me realize just how cranky I get if it's been too long since my last weekly review.

And so I encourage you: If you're a student of David Allen's GTD and you've fallen off the wagon of the weekly review, give yourself a break, set aside some time, and get back on the wagon. If you're like me, your holiday season might be a little more in control and a little less cranky.

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.

In my own approach, I notice that it helps to always keep one eye on the look-out for how well my system and approach is serving me. Over time, things change in and around me. So I've got to make sure that I regularly recalibrate the agreements I make with myself to fit the environment and situation I'm in.

My experience of it is like an ongoing fine-tuning of the temperature of a shower in a house that has inconsistent plumbing. I've got to recalibrate my system regularly so I don't either burn myself or chill out too much.

If you know anything about the practice of the weekly review, you know that there's a lot of recalibration built in. In my weekly review I not only collect and process all of the stuff I haven't yet processed, but I also take a fresh look at all of the agreements I've made in the past and give myself the chance to change my mind. The weekly review is like the macro-level recalibration - and it's essential to keep things running.

Someday Maybe
One specific example of recalibrating during the weekly review has to do with the Someday Maybe list. I always try to keep a healthy give-and-take between the things on the Someday Maybe list and my Actions and Project lists. The Someday Maybe list is like the release-valve of my commitments. If I'm doing a weekly review and I notice that I'm starting to reach capacity in terms of workload versus energy, it's time to recalibrate and shift some things that were once committed projects into Someday Maybe mode. I can always tell that I need to do this when my overall feeling of relaxed control starts to morph into the beginnings of a slight feeling of anxiety (Yes, even a DavidAllen coach feels anxiety sometimes). I can actually feel it in my body. And when I do, that's an important signal for me to start recalibrating and renegotiating those agreements.

Of course the opposite is true as well. When my schedule and bandwidth start opening up and my energy starts to be available for more commitments, one of the first things I do is hunt on my Someday Maybe list for some juicy bits for which I've been hoping to have time.

Have you ever noticed that when you don't have a lot to do, you do proportionally less with your time? Recalibration is about keeping your commitments at just the right level so that you're not swamping yourself and you're not succumbing to laziness.

Mitch - it would be my pleasure...

I'll use the framework of David Allen's five phases of workflow to discuss my system: Collect, Process, Organize, Review, and Do

Collect
The tools I use to collect what's got my attention are:

Medium Black Moleskine lined notebook - I usually keep it with me whenever I'm working. I date the pages and use if for notes, brainstorms, sketching, etc.

My email arrives in two different places. One in my Lotus Notes, which is the application that we share at the David Allen Company. The other is a personal email account which I collect in Outlook. Yes, I often need to copy info from a Lotus email into an Outlook task or project, but this is a trade-off I'm willing to make at this point.

DavidAllen NoteTaker Men's wallet - for collecting on the go when out and about.

Jott.com - when a thought occurs to me while driving or really anywhere, I use Jott to get in to my email in-box for processing.

Since my current "office" setup is essentially in my kitchen, my physical in-box is a built-in box in the exposed
cabinet of the office area of our kitchen. Other than that, I have a portable in-folder in my mobile office bag, which usually sits next to me whereever I'm working.

Process
For the GTD un-initiated, "processing" essentially means to define what exactly you are going to do or not do about whatever you've collected.

I try to process everything I collect at least every other day. Sometimes when I'm slammed this slips a day or two, but I almost always catch up in my weekly review if that happens.

I use Outlook and the Netcentrics Outlook Add-In for processing my stuff.

Organize
Outlook contains my next actions, my project list, my digital notes, calendar and my contacts. These all sync to my Palm Treo 680.

I usually have a five drawer upright old Steelcase file cabinet not far from where I work in the kitchen. But right now it's actually in storage! We're in the process of showing and selling our home - and we needed to clear a lot of things out temporarily until it's sold. So for now, I have a small portable file container that contains the essentials I thought I'd need for the time-being.

As mentioned above, I keep a lot of things in my Brookstone traveling office roller-bag, including key working project folders, an Action Support Folder, Read FYI folder, Travel Support Folder, and all of my coaching gear (Brother PT-15 labeler, books, supplies)

I also use Plaxo as a tool to link my Outlook calendar to my wife's laptop. That helps us a lot in terms of coordinating childcare, travel, and the "work" of our family.

Review
I typically look at my calendar at least a couple of times a day, and review my action lists at about the same frequency, depending on how booked my calendar is for that day.

I get in a good weekly review, on average, every 8 or 9 days. And yes, I am human: Sometimes I'm so slammed that the weekly review gets either abbreviated or pushed off. But I think the longest I've ever gone without a weekly review was about three weeks (and man did it take a while to get through that one!!)

Do
When I've got actually "doing" time for things that aren't on my calendar, I'll scan my action lists, consider how much time and energy I have, try to consider my higher-level goals, and essentially just use my gut and the due-dates on my actions as my guide.

Sometimes during my weekly review I'll schedule some blocks of time in the upcoming week for specific projects or just general doing time. This is especially true when my schedule is crammed.

So there you have it - or at least an overview of it! Of course from my perspective being in control and having perspective on your work is not just about the system and tools that you use. What's more critical is the thought process with which you actually use your system and tools. In other words, you can have all the fanciest gear and most up-to-date systems, but if you're not actually consciously defining the agreements you've got with yourself the tools will be pretty useless

Also - a brief disclaimer: This is just the way my system has evolved. A lot of this is a matter of personal preference and just plain what works for me. Your system and approach is probably different. We are different people, with different styles, work, and lives. The golden rule when it comes to system and tool choices is to do what is attractive and workable for YOU, no matter how your neighbor is doing it.

That was about eight years ago. And I guess you could say that things have changed a wee bit.

I'm now a Coach at The David Allen Company and have worked one-on-one with more than one-hundred clients who, in one way or another, have needed exactly what I needed eight years ago: A systematic approach to focusing on the right things at the right time and not the wrong things at the wrong time.

My work happens in the trenches of my clients' offices. There we roll up our sleeves and figure out just how to actually gain and keep control over their piles of papers, disparate to-do lists, overloaded email in-boxes, and overstuffed psyches.

The purpose of this blog is to share what I have learned and continue to learn about GTD, both through coaching other people and practicing within my own system.

My plan is to share insights, musings, practical tips and tricks, and personal reflections about the art and practice of GTD, and I invite you to join in the conversation.

Let's learn something new together.