David Allen - Mastering Productivity By Getting Things Done

Full transcript: David Allen on London Real

4:15 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is David Allen, who is a productivity consultant and author of Getting Things Done, the art of stress-free productivity. Time magazine called your book, The Defining Self-Help Business Book of Its Time. It’s been published in over 28 languages with a brand new edition out this year.

4:34 David, you grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana. You then went to grad school at UC Berkeley and went on to hold many different jobs. I think you were a magician, a karate teacher, a vitamin distributor, a glassblower, moped salesman, 35 different ones before age 35. You have two amazing TED Talks, a global fan base, and our former guest, Daniel Pink, swears by your methods. Welcome to London Real.

4:56 David Allen: Thank you. Glad to be here, Brian.

4:58 Brian Rose: It’s so good to have you here. You know, you grew up in the South and then you went to school in California. You now live in Amsterdam.

5:04 I was curious, what is your relationship with London? Do you remember the first time you came here? What does it make you think about?

5:12 David Allen: I love London. I absolutely love London.

5:14 That was probably our second choice. If we didn’t move to Amsterdam, we would have been here. I absolutely love it. It’s such a global city. You know, you walk down the street and it’s a global viewpoint.

5:26 And, you know, there are just so many cool things to do in London. You know, it’s a great place. I love it. So it’s one of my favorite places on the planet, for sure.

5:35 Brian Rose: Yeah, mine too.

5:36 I loved it so much, I named the show after it, so. Why, you moved to Amsterdam last year, right? I was curious. That’s a big move to make for a lot of Americans to go over there. I was curious why you made the move and why Amsterdam and what is it like living in Europe?

5:51 David Allen: You know, there was kind of a perfect storm of several different factors that went into it. Catherine, my wife and I had been thinking for a while that we sort of wanted to shift gears. We don’t have kids. And my company is still in Southern California, a small company, our training, consulting, coaching company there, and have a great CEO who’s been there for now three or four years. So he’s handling most of the operational stuff.

6:15 And frankly, we’re, like most people, we’ve gone pretty virtual as a company anyway. So I have the freedom as long as I’m near an airport because I go all over the place to do keynotes and do workshops myself now. So we could be anywhere. We fell in love with Amsterdam. We’d been there two or three times before.

6:31 And just love the city. It’s just such a charming place. And so about, you know, I won’t make this too long, but we lived in a fabulous house in Ojai, California, kind of a little bit out in the country. We had sort of God’s little acre, had a fabulous garden, outdoor fireplace. It was just a stunning place.

6:51 But it was just kind of starting to fall down. And it was one of those things that the property was so elegant that in order to, we really, if we were gonna stick around, we were gonna really need to redo it, but we really couldn’t afford to really redo it the way we wanted to. We invested in building a little jewel box office building for our company. So we said, you know, let’s just put a price on this thing. If somebody, nobody was getting, you know, it was the bottom of the market.

7:14 Nobody would, nobody probably would ever, you know, show up and do that, but let’s put a number on it just in case. And sure enough, two weeks later, somebody walked through it and said, that’s exactly what I want, gave us exactly what we’d asked. We went, oh, well, I guess that’s a sign. I wasn’t ready to totally unhook from the States then at that point for various reasons. So we said, well, let’s just get trainer wheels for Europe.

7:34 So we moved to Santa Barbara, which wasn’t when we 40 miles away and got Dutch bikes, lived downtown, you know, so we could walk to it. And so we lived there for three years. And finally I said, let’s just throw a dart, push the button and go. And we didn’t really know anybody other than, you know, I had some connections and acquaintances in Europe. Anyway, there’s also a semi good business reason in that we are now franchising our training program globally around the world and starting to get a good bit of traction in Western Europe and the UK.

8:06 So Amsterdam is, as you know, right? It’s an hour and 40 minutes from pretty much anywhere in Europe if you get, you know, hop to the airport and go. And I, you know, we love San Francisco. We love the style of San Francisco and the size and, you know, the nature of it. And Amsterdam, in my viewpoint, is the San Francisco of Europe, where London might be compared to New York, Amsterdam, San Francisco.

8:28 But it’s even more village-like and informal than San Francisco is. It’s exactly the same size.

8:32 Brian Rose: I didn’t realize that, that’s San Francisco. Interesting. And so it’s more like Santa Barbara-ish as in?

8:37 David Allen: Yeah, it’s like Santa Barbara-ish, yeah. And it’s so informal. It’s kind of like, you can’t dress up if you’re gonna ride your bike and everybody rides bikes if it’s, you know, windy and cold and raining. And the Dutch, they just get wet, you know. Anyway, so that kind of informality, you know, certainly fit with our style, too, and our DNA.

8:59 And we just love it. We love the Dutch people. They’re just, you know, they’re great. And it’s got, talk about a global viewpoint. I mean, if you think back to the history of that place, you know, it ruled the world from the first half of the 17th century.

9:13 And it did it by being so global and international. And that’s one of the reasons it’s so, you know, such an open place in a way. And they just, the Dutch all travel. They all see the world from that way. That was another reason for us to move.

9:25 We figured, you know, at our age, I’ll turn 70 this year and my wife’s 55, we saw people a little older than us getting a little too sedentary. And we thought, you know, if we’re gonna do this kind of global thing, put my money where my mouth is, because what I teach, I think, is global and really crosses borders. I said, it’s time to get rid of the sort of the US-centric viewpoint. You know that in the US, they’re just such a myopic viewpoint. Not bad, but it’s a very certain lens that people see the world through there.

9:52 And it’s really nice to be over here and, you know, open that lens up to a much more global viewpoint.

9:56 Brian Rose: Yeah, I try to explain to us, the Europeans I know here in the Londoners, that when you are in America, it’s just so introspective. And people really were like, why would I need a passport? Because I have all these places to go. And America has so many different options.

10:08 But you do, you don’t look outside sometimes. Europe is over there. But that’s a big move for you. A lot of people wouldn’t do that, you know, in their 40s. And I’m talking about out of your comfort zone.

10:18 David Allen: It’s like, wow. You know, because I like to have my systems grooved. It was kind of like moving from the PC to the Mac. You know, that was tough.

10:25 Brian Rose: Which you did do.

10:26 David Allen: Which I did do.

10:27 Brian Rose: And you’re glad you did it, right?

10:28 David Allen: Yeah, I’m glad I did it. But, you know, I just needed to find out what everybody was talking about, what all the magic was. And just, and really to test it out, to see if that was really true, if it made a difference in terms of productivity.

10:40 And, you know, six of one half dozen of the other, there were reasons for it. But, you know, it’s not like, wow, I can suddenly unhook from my whole 20 years of PC-ing. And then suddenly sit down to a Mac and hit the road running. No, not quite. So, you know, regrooving pattern.

10:56 So, you know, certainly Amsterdam was a regroove. You don’t realize how many systems are sort of habitual and grooved in until you suddenly don’t have them. You know, it’s like, now where do we buy what? And how, what? Anyway, but we love it.

11:11 We absolutely love it.

11:12 Brian Rose: And it’s fine in your stain.

11:13 David Allen: Yeah. At least for another year. You know, you’ve got temporary residency for two years and then you have to re-up again.

11:19 So we don’t know. We might unhook and go Kyoto or Stockholm or Milan or whatever.

11:24 Brian Rose: You’re actually practicing what you preach there. So, you know, I was watching, I think it was your recent TED Talk in Amsterdam. And you said something at the beginning that really moved me.

11:35 And I hope you don’t mind if I quote it back to you. It’s before you started getting into a bunch of the details, and I want to get into some of the details of the art of stress-free productivity. But you said this, I’ll just go ahead and quote you. You said, I love having clear space inside of myself with absolutely nothing on my mind, which gives me the freedom to be as much as I can be wherever I show up and whatever I’m doing, and also be able to trust that what I’m doing is the best thing to be doing given my intuition and spontaneous judgments.

12:02 That’s a cool state to be in. So I developed some processes that really allow that to happen. And I just said, wow. And I had to play that back a few times. And I don’t even think you rehearsed that.

12:13 What did you mean by that? And has that taken you a long time to get to where you can recognize that sometimes it’s great to be in that space?

12:21 David Allen: Well, I started to taste that space many years ago, over 30 years ago, especially when I got into the martial arts. As you know, a lot of the high levels of training there is, clear your head, and very practical techniques for doing that. There may be a spiritual component as well in some of those arts, but there’s certainly a practical one.

12:39 When four people jump you in a dark alley, you don’t want 2,000 unprocessed emails hanging on your psyche. Right. You don’t want to be thinking about a technique. You don’t want anything. You don’t want to be clear and open in space.

12:50 And the clear space, and also with spiritual practices, I was getting into and practicing various meditative kinds of exercises as well, and discovering that clear space, it’s not like nothing is going on when you do that. It’s like you quiet this sound so you can listen to more subtle sounds. And I found that extremely,

13:11 I wouldn’t call it transformation, but it was extremely enlightening to realize that the universe is always on. So which part of the universe do you want to listen to? So when it’s noisy, there’s a lot of subtleties and sophistication and sublimity that you don’t have access to. So being able to quiet yourself so that you can listen to different sounds or to different frequencies or to different information internally or otherwise I tasted that. And I don’t know, I just love freedom.

13:46 Don’t fence me in, I’m a freedom kind of guy. And the freedom of not feeling like I’m being distracted by something that I shouldn’t be distracted by. So the freedom thing started to get more subtle as well. So a lot of those things kind of came together and I found as I got into the professional world after all my professions, you either become a consultant or a flake. So I picked the positive route hopefully.

14:13 And I was a really good number two guy. I didn’t have the vision. I had friends that were entrepreneurs and starting their own businesses and they had sort of an aspirational drive and I just needed a job. So I showed up and helped my friends do what they were doing. And I just looked around and said, well, how much easier can you do this?

14:30 And I found as I began to uncover some of the techniques for myself personally, as my life got a little bit more complicated or complex in the professional world, I found that clear space started to get unclear, pretty easy. You start to make, you take a lot of things on your plate, you start to make commitments, you start to have a lot of would, could, shoulds, need tos, ought tos. And those things started to create static. I said, how do I get rid of this?

14:55 And I had a great friend and mentor, he’s been a lifelong friend now, who had uncovered some of these techniques that are now part of what I teach and part of my methodology. And he had me, I thought I had my act pretty well together, but he had me sit down and empty my head and make next action decisions on every one of those things. And I experienced this incredible sense of release and relief and clarity and freedom in just a few minutes. I went, wow, that’s pretty amazing.

15:21 So then I turned around in my consulting practice and began to apply some of those techniques with people I was working with, and without fail, they all had the same experience. I went, wow, this is pretty cool stuff. So that was a long time ago, that was 1981, 1982, when I started to work with this material. So a part of it was my attraction to clear space discovered in the work I was doing that what really helped people get their life more under control and more appropriately focused was something that gave them clear space.

15:55 So I didn’t sell it as clear space back then, nor did I really even understand it like I’m explaining it now. But the revision of the first book that I’ve done has done a lot more to frame it’s really not about getting things done. It’s about being appropriately engaged with your life so you can be fully present.

16:11 Brian Rose: Right, that’s because people, your message is very nuanced because people think you are the guy that gets things done. And when they first look at the book, it seems like that, but you say it’s like about being appropriately engaged with what’s going on.

16:23 Sometimes that means not getting something done.

16:26 David Allen: Exactly, exactly. Well, you and I, how many things are you not doing right now, Brian? And the only way you’re gonna feel comfortable sitting here with me is if you know what all that is and said it’ll wait. So as I, one of my favorite famous sayings is, you can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing.

16:44 And most people don’t have a clue. So knowing what you’re not doing and then saying, that’s okay, having a beer or taking a nap or watching my kids play football or whatever is the most important thing to be doing right now. And then your choices about how you’re engaging with life are coming from a place of trust, not hope.

17:02 Brian Rose: Right, and when your first TED Talk, you said that the brain is not necessarily good at multitasking, but it actually is a good planner, but it doesn’t always know what to be telling you at the right time.

17:13 For example, three in the morning, you’re thinking about the guy at work you can’t do anything about. But you said in the long run, your mind does plan things. It plans reproductive decisions, eating decisions and things like that. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

17:28 David Allen: Well, the mind naturally, we naturally do a lot of that stuff.

17:31 And all I did was recognize what the process is that we go through and we do that. It is kind of interesting. I don’t know that I have the solid answer to this yet. Why everything I talk about in the book is easy to do. It’s stuff we in a sense naturally do.

17:47 You will naturally plan. The natural planning model is called that because that’s how you got dressed, that’s how you walk, that’s how you talk. You have an outcome, you have a reason to be doing what you’re doing, you have a vision of it being complete. And that then generates all the potentially meaningful things you need to consider. And then you sort those and organize them and then you take an action.

18:10 So we’re doing that all the time and yet when people, they don’t really apply that same process in much larger or more complex kinds of things and those kinds of ways. So it’s really sort of like learning from the smart part of us.

18:25 Brian Rose: Right, that you deconstruct the smart part of us and apply that to those longer, those other pieces that we don’t seem to do the smart things.

18:33 David Allen: You know, and in that too, I just did a tweet because I was reminded of it, I was doing another interview, that you need to make action decisions when you’re smart so that when you’re dumb you do smart things, right?

18:47 Because see, it’s the smart people who really realize you’re only smart and inspired in very random moments. So when you’re smart and inspired, you want to use that to capture the results of that and then park the results somewhere where then when you’re kind of thick and stupid, which is the majority of the time, you actually do smart stuff that you figured out back when you were smart.

19:05 Brian Rose: Okay, and that does make sense. And that is the concept of getting it out of your head.

19:09 David Allen: Exactly, exactly. It’s the concept of just not losing a potentially valuable idea and you want to lose it, stick it in your head. Yeah, it’s stuck in there in long-term memory somewhere, but to your point, it’ll wake you up at three o’clock in the morning when you can’t do anything about it and then you won’t have it in your hand when you actually need that information. A big champion of our stuff, Evan Taubenfeld, he was Avril Lavigne’s guitarist and producer for a while in the early years.

19:35 He’s doing some other stuff in the music business now, but Evan was a huge champion of my methodology. And the way he described it was, he said, David, before GTD, he started 150 songs a year. After GTD, he finished 150 songs a year. Big difference. He also learned that when they were cutting a new album, that the best ideas about a song occurred when they were cutting another song.

20:00 And so what he did was just fill the studio with whiteboards. So whenever they had any idea about anything that might be a potentially useful riff or something, they just grabbed, they stopped what they were doing and they grabbed it right there. So songs were building all along, so they never lost an idea about anything and then it all got accumulated. So it’s not just get stuff out of your head, it’s like don’t lose a valuable idea and park it in the right place.

20:27 Brian Rose: That’s productive. Weren’t we taught, though, to focus on this and finish this song? I mean, is that something that came from education where we segment? Because you would think that’s the wrong thing to create. That’s the wrong way to create.

20:38 David Allen: Well, I think it’s great to complete things. So that’s a lot of, we know when we finish anything, there’s a part of us that sort of reaps energy out of that. That feels good. Those are your best days when you handle that, you turn that in, you bought that thing, you fixed that, you got the light bulb and screwed it in and then it worked and wow. So those are your good days when you actually finish a lot of stuff.

21:02 There’s a lot of value to completing an open loop. And at the same time, you don’t want to feel bad if that loop is not closed. And that’s a lot of what the GTD methodology does is like look, you don’t have to finish all this stuff in order to get it off your mind. But you do have to identify what it is and trust that you’ll see it at the right time wherever you are with it, at whatever its status is. So yeah, you don’t wanna, there’s a whole new idea that goal setting is really not the best thing to do, especially if you set a goal and feel bad until you get the goal.

21:39 Because then you’re not appreciating the process of moving toward it. And so you don’t wanna be able to create frustration or guilt or undermine your energy by having some only future ideal win.

21:50 Brian Rose: Is goal setting just as a pure exercise bad?

21:53 David Allen: No, you’re setting goals all the time. That’s how you got dressed, that’s how you talk, that’s how you walk.

21:59 You’re always, you’re seeing yourself out the door and then you will fulfill the picture. So we’re setting, you can’t stop actually because you’re a teleological being. You’re always moving towards something. There’s a part of us that’s always attempting to expand, express, fulfill, complete something. Just look around, just anecdotally anyway, everybody’s doing something.

22:22 Even when you’re not doing something, you’re doing that. So there’s an intentionality still there. But like a goal of I’m gonna be a billionaire in three years, da da da da da, might not always be the most productive thing. It depends on what you’re doing with it. It depends on whether it’s running you or you’re managing that.

22:37 Call, hey, here’s a picture, here’s an image. Let me just stick that in there, why not? It’s better to have nice, positive pictures and images in your head than a bunch of negative ones. And as long as it creates expansion instead of contraction. I think that’s the big key.

22:52 That’s something that I learned years ago as a marker for me about whether things are in alignment. At whatever level you wanna interpret that is engaging in this creating expansion or contraction. Love or fear, so you can look at it that way. Same thing, right? In loving, everything works, you know?

23:14 In fear, nothing works. So in a way, it’s just that aspect of making sure. So don’t beat the medium and there’s no reason, there’s no bad or good about any of these kinds of things, whether it’s goal setting or not, other than is that the most optimal thing, way to be engaging with it.

23:31 Brian Rose: Okay, and love or fear, expansion, contraction, that’s kind of a way. And you have a gut feeling whether you’re opening yourself up, doing that.

23:40 Whether you’re protecting and limiting.

23:42 David Allen: Yeah, and it’s also a good way for decisions. Like, I don’t know which way I should go, should I change jobs, should I move to Amsterdam, whatever. Start practicing rehearsing scenarios in your mind about whatever that future scenario is and see if that’s feeling expansive or contracting.

23:59 Brian Rose: Yeah, that sounds like expansion, the no-brainer to go to Amsterdam, right?

24:03 David Allen: Yeah, yeah, but again, it’s subtle, it’s tricky business, Brian, as you know, because oftentimes, when we are throwing ourselves into new situations, we think, oh my God, I’m feeling nervous about that. But that just may be, you’re out of your comfort zone. That’s not necessarily fear, it could be unfamiliarity is a kind of, will create a sense of fear or a sense of resistance, you know? So that’s why visualizing things gets the nervous system more grooved and more comfortable with it and more familiar with it.

24:37 So building familiarity using visualization and setting a goal as a way to visualize something. Wow, five years from now, what would a Sunday afternoon be like, you know, how would it be? Because I say, too, the value, the future never happens. I don’t know if you’ve ever discovered that it’s just always now. Once, once, damn, it’s today again.

24:55 No, you know, just now. So, you know, the future is an illusion, but it’s a handy one. Because if I said, hey, Brian, imagine five years from now, what’s gonna, the images you probably pull into your head are probably gonna be somewhat different in quality than if I said, Brian, imagine how good your life could be five minutes from now, right? They’re both illusions. Neither one of them actually ever happens.

25:21 But the value of the future, the five years, you gave yourself a picture of stuff that started to affect your nervous system right now. So it’s the value of goals and future thinking is not in the future they describe, it’s in how it changes your perception and performance right now.

25:34 Brian Rose: Okay, talk to me about the unnatural planning method because you walked it through in your first TED Talk and I just, I found myself almost in hilarity because you talked about the natural planning method which is kind of the human one, you know, which I believe was kind of like the purpose, vision, ideas, structure, next action.

25:49 And then you talked about the way that a typically corporate environment will push people and we’ve all been there in that conference room where it’s like, I think you’re, come up with a good idea. And then you like reverse engineer it until you hire the management consultant that comes back to the why. I just wondered how you, you could describe that better than me.

26:08 David Allen: Yeah, well, and I blame Mrs. Williams in the fourth grade, you know, she’s the one that had to teach us how to write reports.

26:15 That’s the first time we started to learn how to plan something oftentimes in a more formal way. And of course, in order to write a great report, what’d you have to write first? An outline, great. So then you sit down, okay, write an outline. So Roman numeral one and you just stare at that and freak out.

26:31 So basically from the very beginning, most people when they start to get trained in some way about what planning or organizing is, it start by getting organized. But you don’t have the content to get organized yet. So that’s actually an unnatural thing to start at phase three, right? You need to know, you know, hey, let’s go create a plan. Well, how about you say, well, why?

26:54 You know, that’s the purpose of what we’re trying to do because then that will then describe what the vision of success and the final outcome would be. And you have to have that before you can even start brainstorming. And then that’s then what you then, they actually stage four is organizing. Then you start to create a structure around all that. But we were trained, it seems like most cultures, and I haven’t tested them all out.

27:17 But certainly in the US and apparently in the European and the UK cultures as well, a lot of the education is about go get organized, go create a structure. Not about how do we really think through. I don’t know, I don’t know how many kids are being taught when they write a report to ask, what’s the purpose of this report?

27:34 Brian Rose: I don’t think so. I don’t remember it.

27:36 I mean, if someone had said why and said, well, it’s for you to learn about history or to learn more about this author. But it was always like, yeah, do the report. And it feels like with our young children, we don’t ever go to the why. It’s more do this probably because I did it. I wish you didn’t.

27:50 David Allen: Yeah, probably. Get into that. The sins of the parents.

27:53 Brian Rose: You know, this is, I mean, you originally wrote this book in 2001, is that right?

27:57 David Allen: It was published in 2001.

27:58 David Allen: I started writing it in 98, 98, 99, 2000.

28:00 Brian Rose: When you read, when you put out the brand new edition, you know, some people say there’s so many new things these days with all of the, you know, the iPhone apps to put notes in, with all the social media bombarding this, that kind of thing. But a lot of what you talk about is very, you know, old school as far as getting things clear in your mind. And when you went to rewrite this, you know, what did you, did certain things surprise you that you didn’t need to add and what things did you add to update it?

28:28 David Allen: Well, you know, I rewrote the whole book, but basically a lot of it was just transcribing it. What I wanted to do was to make sure somebody picked it up now that would read it, would say, this is current. If you picked up the first edition, it’s all the same methodology. None of that has changed. As I say, in 2190, when we land on Jupiter, they still need an end basket and they’re still gonna have to make next action decisions about potentially meaningful things.

28:51 So the methodology itself is timeless. And I knew that even when I wrote the first book. But there were certain, just some of the languaging and also some of the subtlety about how I’ve even deepened my understanding of how powerful this methodology really is and how universal and lifelong and what a lifestyle art and craft it is. So there’s a bit more, as I was re-transcribing it, I was listening as I was writing it to, would I say that that way now? And a lot of it, I said, no.

29:22 David Allen: Actually, it was the first time I reread the whole book was when I rewrote it.

29:26 Brian Rose: I was about to say, how was it like looking over something you worked on almost 20 years ago? Did it embarrass you? Did it make you proud? Did it show you how much you evolved as a person?

29:36 David Allen: All of that, all the above, actually. When I wrote, it was a labor of love and it was my 25 years of work. And it really took me 25 years to realize what I’d realized and that it was unique and that it was bulletproof and that nobody could punch a hole in it and tested in some of the most sophisticated, demanding professional environments and people that you can imagine and it went viral in those environments. So I said, hmm, okay, I guess I now have enough courage because I’m not a Tada kind of guy.

30:07 I’m not the kind of guy that let me just go put it out there and hope it works. I had to really trust that this was very real. So I had that confidence when I wrote it but I was a bit self-conscious when I wrote it because I still had a very small network of people who knew my work and I was gonna put my life work in a book out there that Viking Penguin was gonna publish. I was like, oh my God. So there was a little bit of a stiltedness and a stiffness.

30:30 Some people who’ve read the new version said, gee, David, it’s more informal, it’s an easier read, it’s more relaxed, there’s more self-confidence in there.

30:39 Brian Rose: Okay, it is nice and informal because I expected something, you know, but you have a kind of a, you’re just talking to me in real words about how we do these things. And it kinda…

30:50 David Allen: And part of it was even making it more evergreen. I mean, we did a lot of work on the first edition to make it as evergreen as possible, meaning not get dated because we were using business buzzwords or concept du jour or whatever.

31:03 So we really did a pretty good job of that. And even right now, if you picked up the first edition and people were still buying it until last week and still going, wow, this changed my life, this is fabulous stuff. So it would still work. But again, there’s some silly simple little things like VCR I think is in the first edition. A lot of people under 30 going, what’s a VCR?

31:25 And also I focus, it’s interesting because one of the changes obviously that’s happened in the last 15 years is all the digital world and always on, always connected 24 seven stuff. And I had one person sort of the critique of it, he said, well, gee, David kinda chickened out and he actually unhooked from talking a lot about the technology. They wanted the next new, new thing that I uncovered that’s gonna change their life. And actually what I did was unhook a good bit of mentioning of the technology simply because anything you mention is gonna be out of date in a week anyway.

31:59 It’s moving so fast. And then people focus on the technology and the tool as opposed to the methodology itself. So you need to understand the methodology. Then you can make any of the tools, the ones we haven’t even seen yet that are coming down the pike next week and next year, you’ll be able to then utilize those on steroids once you understand the methodology. So understanding the methodology was much more key.

32:22 So I unhooked, even in the first book, I talked about the Palm Pilot, I talked about Microsoft Outlook, I mentioned Lotus Notes and other things like that.

32:31 Brian Rose: And we all know Palm Pilot is too bad in the graveyard now, because it was the best, the best list. I had one of the first mobile ones in 99, I think, or 2000, where it would have a little antenna and it would sync. Oh, Hawking was great. And the graffiti that he did was just, and the form factor, ah, so cool.

32:48 Anyway. And does this ultra-connected world change things at all when it comes to the GTD methodology?

32:55 David Allen: It doesn’t change the methodology. It reinforces the need for it, because it’s very easy to let all that technology and all his own stuff distract you. So you better be really clear about what you’re doing and then know what to do with all that data as it’s coming at you.

33:12 The two-edged sword of all the technology is, if you know what to do with it, you’re real clear about your own system and how to make determination. Is that reference, is that meaningful stuff, is that potentially actionable? Those executive decisions, which are part of the GTD methodology, that you need to, you can’t just rearrange data. You actually need to put your human consciousness on the input that you’re letting into your life and decide what input do you want to let into your life and then make the decisions about what it means.

33:39 If you’re not, then all of that stuff just makes it crazier. Wow, do I stick this in Evernote? I could put it in Dropbox, but yeah, but I’m using Outlook, but my wife is on Gmail calendar and it can just get nuts out there. So if you’re, that’s why the technology and the methodology itself, it’s challenging enough to just be dealing with, okay, what’s the tech that I need to work with now to optimally manage the changes and all the different things that I’m doing.

34:06 Trying to learn them both would be, is almost impossible.

34:09 Brian Rose: And we have a few questions from our audience on YouTube and one of them asks a bit about what you’re talking about. So I wanna get to that. By the way, if you’re watching this now, if you tweet out the best quote from this episode, then we’re sending out five free books out to you anywhere in the world. So just keep that in mind and jump on Twitter, as long as it doesn’t mess up your GTD methodology today.

34:29 I wanna get to come to some of these questions. You said that the art of stress free productivity is a martial art. And I just wanted to get a little bit of your feelings on your first TED Talk. You threw out a pretty mean looking karate punch and I just know you had a history of martial art. What did you mean by that?

34:44 And you talked about quieting the minds.

34:47 David Allen: Well, one of the things I’ve understood now is this whole getting things done methodology is not a single transactional event. It’s really a lifelong lifestyle art and craft about how do you manage the flow of life’s work? Because your life is gonna change, your work is gonna change. But managing, understanding the art of it, no matter what it is, no matter what its contents are, no matter what changes are on you.

35:12 If you know how to then calibrate those changes, calibrate new input, reset, sort of the control alt, delete, but now I know how to appropriately frame where I’m going today and where I’m going tomorrow and how things are handled. That is a martial art and it’s a martial art as opposed to just an art form because martial has a lot to do with overcoming things coming at you, right? So somebody asked me for my definition of martial art and I said successful overcoming.

35:43 And that’s different. Yeah, sure, a ballet dancer is gonna need to overcome their own limitations and everybody’s gonna need to overcome or whatever, but the martial aspect of it is like, wow, here’s an unexpected thing, how do I deal with that, right? And so that’s why my second book, The Compilation of My Essays, was called Ready for Anything. So that being in that space and that place that allows you to most optimally deal with change is a martial art, at least I see it that way.

36:11 Brian Rose: I mean, and it’s not something that you’re born doing. As you know, when you first start learning the martial arts, the moves feel very awkward, they feel unnecessary, they feel counterintuitive. Almost the opposite. It was that Clint Eastwood movie about the female boxer and they were explaining when you wanna move left, you push right with your foot and it’s almost the opposite of what you expect. I remember when one of my instructors said, Brian, you need to relax in a fight.

36:34 David Allen: And people that, and they think that’s the last thing, or a famous Bruce Leland, a martial artist, is not tense, but ready. Yeah, so a lot, and in the same way, getting things done is somewhat counterintuitive because in order to get to clear space, you’re gonna have to deal with a lot of things that are not the most urgent, immediate things. And that’s why a lot of people say, yeah, but it’s not the most urgent, I don’t have time to go deal with buy cat food and, oh, I need to fix that.

37:01 I don’t have time to go write all that stuff down and get all that out of my head. Not realizing that it’s because they’re secondary that you need to get them out of your head so they don’t take more of your energy than they deserve. And that’s counterintuitive. It feels, I don’t have time to sit down and improve my process of that and to deal with things that are not immediately just yelling at me in front of my face.

37:22 Brian Rose: For people that are listening right now, if there’s one thing that they could do to kind of grasp this, would it be the brains up?

37:29 Would it be like writing down the things they need to do, everything that’s on their mind?

37:34 David Allen: I mean, yeah. Yeah, that’s job one. You can’t just end there. If you do, you become a compulsive list maker.

37:41 But the first thing you have to do is you have to identify what it is I still need to think about because there’s still need to think about to happen. So if you look at most people’s to-do lists, you see things like mom, or bank, or doctor, or assistant, or babysitter, whatever. And they’ve identified something that’s pulling on their attention. What they haven’t decided yet, but excuse me, what exactly is the very next thing you need to do to complete that?

38:06 And by the way, what does complete mean on that? What are you trying to do with the bank? What are you trying to do with the doctor? What are you trying to do about a babysitter? So identifying outcomes and clarifying and deciding what’s the very next allocation of resource, i.e. next action I need to do, those do not happen by themselves.

38:24 And if you haven’t made those decisions about things, even if you’ve written them down, then you don’t wanna look at them, right? The list is, anything on a list is either attracting or pulsing you psychologically. There’s no neutral territory, Brian. You’re either going, ooh, when can I mark that off? Or ah, get out of my face because they’re still thinking and decision-making about this thing I haven’t done.

38:44 I don’t have the energy to think and decide. Stop reminding me I’m overwhelmed. But so there’s a big difference between capturing it and capturing and clarifying and organizing that. So that’s why there’s a five-step process in getting things done about how you get things under control. But yes, if nothing else, you just keep a pad and pin by your bed and you’ll sleep better.

39:04 Brian Rose: Right, because we’ve all had that thing on the to-do list that’s now old and colored with coffee stains and it’s that one that we just almost don’t even look at and we work around it, right?

39:14 David Allen: Well, the people who procrastinate the most, and you probably got a question about procrastination in there, the people who procrastinate the most are the most sensitive, creative, and intelligent people. Right, right, oh, oh, oh, I guess so, right? And so why? Because it’s the creative, sensitive, intelligent folks who glance at something and in a quarter of a second generate incredible phantoms of negative future scenarios of the thing not being done totally perfectly and all the negative consequences of it’s not, they just freak out, right?

39:42 If they just dumb themselves down, you know, and actually a way to intelligently dumb things down is figure out what’s the very next action on this? That’s all you really need to decide. You know, and a lot of times there are tough things you need to decide, tough things you need to deal with, whatever, okay, well, what’s just the very first thing I need to do and not let my mind run out into all the oh my gods and what might happens? So there is a bit of a discipline that one could apply or directionality, I don’t like the word discipline, it’s too hard, it’s like sweat, you know?

40:14 But I like the word direction. If you can direct yourself, direct your thinking along these lines as opposed to this. You don’t break a sweat in doing that, but it is something that you actually have to put cognitive horsepower to. So that’s a lot of the essence of this, why it looks so simple and yet when people actually start to apply what we’ve been talking about, it’s profound.

40:38 Brian Rose: Yeah, and it is profound and very nuanced and it gets quite complex, but that is the way you get over all of those humps.

40:45 Brian Rose: Zero time it takes is one of the things you said, the issue is not time, and it was a fascinating statement, to get that idea that doesn’t take any time, but people associate it with time, is that the point you were making?

40:57 David Allen: Well, most people feel, God, if I just had more time, my life would be better. I could finish a lot of stuff, I could do whatever, and I say, well, if you had two more hours a day, you’d just fill it up with two more hours of your feeling of overwhelm and stress and confusion, because time is not gonna solve that.

41:13 What you need is space, because to have a good idea doesn’t take time, but you need room to have it. How much time does it take to be present, to be loving, to have a creative idea, to be innovative, those things don’t take time. But you can’t do those things if you don’t have any room. If your head is still distracted and still using your head as your office, and your head’s a crappy office. It’s a terrible place to put that, and now that’s another new chapter in the book is about the cognitive science over the last 10 or 15 years that’s basically just validated this, that your head’s for having ideas but not for holding them.

41:45 So anything that’s gonna be able to keep them out. You don’t have to go very far for me to start coaching somebody. I just say, well, what’s on your mind?

41:57 What’s preventing you from having nothing on your mind right now? Oh, the bank thing, oh, great. Well, what are you trying to accomplish about that? Right, well, what’s the next action? Right, where would you need to part that so that some part of you trust it?

42:07 And suddenly, ah, they haven’t gotten the extension of the credit line, but they are now back in the driver’s seat. They’re now in the saddle. And that’s what this does is it puts people back in the saddle of their life as opposed to feeling victimized by all of these things that are still not being clarified and managed appropriately that you’ve let into your ecosystem.

42:26 Brian Rose: Right, stop being reactive, be a bit more proactive. One thing I noticed when I was reading this is that a lot of times, I’ll write emails to myself.

42:33 And I do it sometimes in the tube or something where I don’t even have a signal. And just an idea comes to mind and I’ll write an email and it shows my inbox the next day. And my girlfriend was like, what do you do with that? I was like, I just thought of it and I put it in there. And then I was like, oh, this is what David talks about.

42:46 So it’s a lot of things that I have somehow found, stumbled over that seemed to work for me, but I didn’t know why.

42:52 David Allen: Yeah, I didn’t make any of this up, Brian. I just started to recognize it. I didn’t suddenly invent the five stages of how you get things under control. I just started to notice what happens when people do get their kitchen under control or their company under control or a meeting under control.

43:07 And so I just really identified that. That’s why everybody recognizes these behaviors. When you read it, you go, oh, that’s why that works. That’s a lot of the validation of the book is exactly what you just said. You go, oh, that’s why that works for me and that’s why I built that habit in.

43:25 And that’s good stuff. A lot of times it’s just a reminder of what people have done that really works.

43:30 Brian Rose: Right, the other one was you said there’s a time where you choose to get work done and there’s a time where you react to things happening. And I thought like email is the ultimate reaction trap. And so you might go in to do work as in write an email proposal and then you end up falling into this kind of reactive space.

43:46 And with social media today, you know, this creation and reaction space is on the same platform.

43:52 David Allen: Those rabbit trails are rapid and rabid out there. Dangerous.

43:55 Brian Rose: All right, I wanna go to a few questions from the people that were rattling them off. So I’m gonna ask a few that are interesting.

44:03 Brian Rose: Let me hit you with one. Given that the future is unpredictable, how does your productivity system or you personally take advantage of spontaneous opportunities as they arise? Is there a cost to be stuck in a rigid plan of following to-do lists?

44:17 David Allen: I plan as little as I can get by with. The to-do list just keeps stuff out of my head of things that I’ve decided that I actually want to move on at some point and in some way.

44:27 So I just, all I do is park those things. So in a way, as you know, that one of my recommendations is a someday maybe list. Well, in truth, everything, except what you’re doing right now is someday maybe. The world could end in five seconds. So we didn’t get to any of that.

44:41 That’s fine. So there’s nothing about being a slave to your list. You’re a slave to those things if they own you in your head. If you can’t stop from thinking I need cat food and it wakes you up at three o’clock in the morning and go, oh, that’s right, I need cat food. It just means you’re inappropriately engaged with your cat.

45:00 And so it’s not being, so the fact that you put cat food on a list, does that mean you’re a slave to the list? No, it happens, no. You can constantly keep deciding. I decide a whole lot of what my system is is so that because I like to follow my spontaneous hunches, I like to follow that creative hunt. That’s why I plan as little as I get by with.

45:21 But if you said, hey, David, you wanna party? I go, well, let me see. Yeah, party, right? Because now I’m free to party as opposed to partying and feeling guilty and not knowing what I’m not doing or whatever. So a lot of the whole reason for this is to give me the freedom to be able to be spontaneous and follow my intuitive hunches because that’s kinda how I’m wired.

45:44 Brian Rose: And then you can be present because the cat food’s been written on the list. You know you’re gonna buy it on Monday and now you can be present with whoever you’re with or doing whatever you’re doing. Exactly. And there’s not all this feedback. Another one you mentioned earlier, how do I stop obsessively using media forms like Facebook and YouTube to stop procrastination?

46:00 You must get asked this a lot.

46:04 David Allen: Stop, just stop. And as a friend of mine said, I can resist anything but temptation. Turn it off, walk away. You’re not gonna be able to resist it if it’s there.

46:22 I understand. I’m very much the same way about anything that I don’t wanna be engaged in. Don’t put it in front of me. And there’s a brand new book out, by the way. I didn’t write it, but it just came out and I highly recommend it.

46:33 So I use every opportunity I can to recommend it. It’s called Brain Chains, two words, by Theo Teo Camponale. He’s a Belgian researcher. He was a child’s psychiatrist and got into cognitive science. And it is a fabulous aggregation and compilation of a lot of the new scientific research about how absolutely dangerous the digital world can be.

46:56 Not that it’s bad, but first of all, it’s addictive, quite literally in the same sense, random positive reinforcement. And it’s also what you are not doing when you let yourself do that. You’re not thinking. You’re not having real conversation with yourself or anybody else. And you’re becoming this surface skimming kind of brat, if you will.

47:22 It’s a great way to avoid life and to avoid confronting your own life. Well, Theo’s book is a rant about that, but there is a lot of data out there now that actually shows that you actually, even having your phone in your pocket, if it’s on, wondering who’s texting you will create a dopamine rush.

47:38 Brian Rose: The other book is called Hooked. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but it talks about all of those dopamine pieces, the concept of variable reward, which I never thought about before, but that’s what attracts us.

47:49 The email’s gonna be a crisis or a happy thing or a nothing, and mixing those up. It is like dopamine, 60 Minutes did something a couple years ago about these slot machines in Vegas that would pay you these micropayments back and they would keep people there for hours. And again, since it’s not a quote unquote drug, people say, well, it’s not, but it has all the same effects. Exactly. Or something like that.

48:10 Brian Rose: Good advice, just stop, I don’t even do it. I don’t allow myself to go on Twitter or Facebook anymore. We post, I have other people that tell me the feedback, but I don’t get to go in there and get my dopamine rush all out. I do every once in a while, but from the beginning I’ve looked at it as a cocktail party. Right, okay.

48:26 David Allen: You wanna spend your life in a cocktail party, but kinda fun, I hop in and glance around, chat with somebody, add something, it’s kinda nice. Actually, I like the 140 characters, it sort of forces me to do the zen koan in a way. And many times I’ll actually use that as a way to say, what, I’ll just learn today. And see if I can put that particular kind of a spin on it. So even if nobody read it, it’s kinda fun to give myself the limitation of that.

48:52 So I wouldn’t put them down, I wouldn’t shoot the medium. The behavior with the medium is what you have to be careful about.

49:00 Brian Rose: Okay, control it. What type of advice would you give to a 21 year old college student just starting to find his place in the world? Just starting to find his place in the world?

49:12 David Allen: Well, keep going. Don’t stop. And you know, advice to anybody I think is advice that I certainly have utilized all of my life is, you know, it’s always a good idea to spend some time and create what’s your ideal life. You know, what would you be experiencing if your life could be the way you really want it to be? Not necessarily all the things you’d like to have, that’s okay too, but you know, inner experience.

49:36 You want a sense of fun, you want a sense of adventure, you want a sense of whatever. And those things are actually much more accessible to you than the red Porsche or the big house. Nothing wrong with imagining those too. But sit down and you don’t need to share it with anybody but make it up, write your own scenario of your ideal life. And when you get better data and you get more mature, rewrite it.

49:53 Brian Rose: Right, then change, then change. Do you recommend an accountability coach to employ to get things done?

49:58 David Allen: Well, accountability coaches are useful and you know, if there really is a habit that you wanna change, you know, anybody who’s studied habit change can tell you that, you know, yeah, if you get somebody to get in the game with you and slap you around if you don’t do it and you-

50:13 Brian Rose: Martial arts instructor too.

50:14 David Allen: Yeah, and you hold each other accountable to it, sure.

50:17 Yeah, that’s good stuff to do. You have to be careful about that stuff too, though. Again, it’s oftentimes, if you get one and then you fall away from it, then you can feel even worse. So it’s tricky business, again, a lot of it has to be how self-aware are you. You don’t wanna be a slave to anything.

50:36 I mean, again, that’s my freedom thing coming out here. Just use it for what it’s used for.

50:42 Brian Rose: Digital, again, what tips do you have for capturing tasks when it’s not possible or proper to use a capture device?

50:49 David Allen: Well, I’d be questionable because when is it not proper to use a capture device? I mean, mine’s with me all the time.

50:57 At least whenever I have, you know, license or whatever. How often will you capture? Okay, so how often will you write on that pad? As often as I have something that’s potentially meaningful, I can’t finish when I think of it. Okay.

51:08 Which could be 10 times, 20 times a day. Could be, I mean, this is, oh yeah, I stopped at a new wine shop. I saw an Amsterdam yesterday and it turns out the guy had, because I was bringing my dog from the vet and he said, oh, vet, we started talking vet and his holistic vet and here’s the name of raw pet food that we, and it’s like, cool, stop, huh? So this will get to my wife and I’ll do it as soon as I process that note. Okay.

51:31 But I forgot, I even happened, right? But that’s the whole point, externalizing that. So, you know, and people say, well, David, what if you have an idea while you’re jogging or in the shower or somewhere? And I understand that, but there’s actually a, you know, it’s kind of a California woo-woo thing, but you can actually get things out of your mind, in your mind. Okay, you place them somewhere.

51:50 No, what you do is imagine yourself being back to where you can first capture that thought and it’s, imagine, see yourself walking in to your desk or wherever, picking up a pen and going, ah, that’s it, and be all excited and create a big emotional picture around it and then forget it. Because the way the brain works associationally, when you get back into that scenario, the brain says, I’ve seen this before, then it maps that back and that thought can come back to you. Okay.

52:13 Brian Rose: So that’s the California way of capturing. That’s the California way of capturing. I wanted to ask you a few of your personal success secrets. Just a few questions. Do you have a success habit or a group of habits or a crucial part of your daily routine that, you know, you found over time just works for you?

52:28 London Real promo: These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy. Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more. Now back to the rest of the show.

52:54 Brian Rose: Is it true that you said the greatest human fear is being out of control? Yeah. I never thought about that.

53:00 David Allen: Yeah, it’s a huge addiction that we have, that control factor. I mean, people are killing themselves and each other as we speak, just to achieve or maintain a sense of psychological control.

53:10 I mean, it’s that powerful a driver of our behavior. I think it’s why a lot of people keep stuff in their head because it gives you a false sense of control. All of those things get floating around. People say, oh God, I don’t want to write down all that stuff. Throw me out of control.

53:25 You’re out of control already. You want to get under control. Kind of the way out is through. You need to unload that stuff, take a look at it, objectify it, get you on top of it.

53:35 Brian Rose: Do you think that’s our subconscious sometimes?

53:37 Just kind of jumping up there.

53:39 David Allen: I think so. And putting these things up. Yeah, probably. Yeah.

53:42 Brian Rose: You talk about this great story when you were boating one time and you had a real crisis when you were a holding anchor, I think it was off the coast of California. And at one point you said that in all of this really potential life threatening, boat threatening behavior, you said that that crisis produced a calm that was rare to find because it demanded it. I was wondering why you tell that story and why you think people can kind of take that and apply it to their life.

54:10 David Allen: Well, I mean the real practical aspect of that is if you really think about when time disappears, oftentimes it is in a crisis because you’re actually applying the key elements, a real concentrated focus on a desired outcome. Live, don’t die, whatever it is. And then you’re very specifically taking next actions immediately and then of course correcting. Okay, that wasn’t with this outcome in mind. And your taxes and the tires on your car and your kid’s grades, all of those are put on someday maybe.

54:45 So the whole idea of being clear about what you’re not doing, being clear about what you’re being focused toward, being clear about next actions on that and engaging with that appropriately is how time disappears you get in your zone. But you don’t have to wait until your boat sinks to do that. You should be able to do that every day. You should be able to do that every day. That does not, so the crisis creates the behaviors but those behaviors don’t require crisis.

55:11 Brian Rose: Right, so we can learn from that and know how it feels. Everyone’s had that moment where it should have been a horrible moment but yet you processed everything perfectly. I mean the human biology did it and then yet we forget about that in our times of being busy. Are there more books in store for you? I know you’re over and you’re up now.

55:29 You’re expanding the company and like you said, getting this IP out there. What are your plans for the next few years?

55:36 David Allen: Well, there’s a couple of big ones. And thank goodness I’ve got people more talented than I am in these areas that are helping out with all that. And one big one is we’re franchising the GTD training program around the world.

55:50 So building exclusive franchisees that’s just starting to get some momentum on that. We’ve been a couple of years. But we have officially now 50 countries that have exclusive franchisees that are just starting to get trained. So we’re training master trainers so that someone in Arabic can teach in their country and somebody can speak Norwegian and Norway and train people there. So we’re training a set of master trainers around the world.

56:16 Fabulous peoples. But designing, instructional design is not my area of expertise really. So we’ve had some great people and some great talent that have helped us now craft this sort of global training program. Again, it’s a way for us to scale what we’re doing so that we can also then, just from a business model, be able to work with companies that are global that say, hey, can you do this training in this language in that country? Say, sure, and the book’s in that language as well already.

56:43 So being able to have a network of people that we pretty much trust the standards in terms of this training and the methodology that are real champions of it and that can distribute it in their own networks. That’s a big, big, big, big project probably gonna take the next, I’d say in the next five years we would like to have maybe 60 master trainers around the world all vetted and that community of practice is such a rich community of people. I mean, the people who take the GTD are really the best.

57:10 They’re really, obviously I’m biased in that regard. But they’re a radical bunch of non-joiners trying to get them all together to do anything because this embodies and embeds a whole sense of sort of self-accountability in putting you in the driver’s seat and people who are interested in doing that. So it’s a great network of folks. I get to work with the best and brightest on the planet. The strange paradox is the people who need what we teach the most or the least are the people most attracted to it.

57:38 It’s the most productive people that are most attracted to this work. And I used to scratch my head and say, why? And then one day I went, duh. What this work does is it relieves drag on the system. And who’s most aware of drag on the system?

57:51 The fastest people. If you’re in your comfort zone, you don’t wanna be anywhere different than where you are. Getting rid of drag is a drag. You’re gonna have to do different things. You’re gonna have to change some habits.

57:59 You’re gonna have to write stuff down. You’re gonna have to make next action decisions. You’re gonna have to do that. But the people who are really catching that, and oftentimes it’s the most creative and productive people that are throwing themselves the most out of control because of their aspirational and their goals and their values. People say, hey, you should focus on your values.

58:14 That’ll make your life peaceful. No, it won’t. If you really want to relax, lower your standards.

58:20 Brian Rose: So you self-select the people that your methodology actually works the best for.

58:24 David Allen: We don’t.

58:25 They select us. Okay. That’s why, in a sense, we don’t know how to market what we do. We have a problem, because we solve a problem most people don’t realize they have. It’s like the noise in the room you don’t hear until it turns off.

58:38 Brian Rose: What is your typical GTE person? We were talking earlier, and you said it really runs the gamut. I mean, you talked about a musician earlier, heads of corporations.

58:47 David Allen: There really isn’t a profile. One CEO in a company, and another CEO could be almost demical twins in the same kind of company in the same industry, and one gets it and one doesn’t.

58:57 And the only difference that I can see, and it’s just anecdotal, is that the people who really take to this are people who assume their life is gonna be more enhanced, richer, different, better in some way in the next 12 to 18 months. And that’s not necessarily work harder or produce more money. It could be, hey, more free time to write, more free time to fish, more free time to be more loving with my kids and spend more time, I don’t know. As I say, this is about creating space.

59:23 What you do with space is as individual as you are. What would you do, Brian, if you had a lot more space? Be very different than what these guys might do when they have more space. But that’s okay, but you will all want more space, or you could use more of it. So that’s an interesting, very interesting, I’m sort of bemused over all these years to watch what’s happened with this kind of brand that ran out from under us.

59:47 It was an accidental brand. GTD was just our own shorthand, and somebody picked it up, and it just suddenly started to spread around the world.

59:54 Brian Rose: It’s fascinating. How important is it to teach that stuff in person? Because I know you do consulting.

59:59 You’re now talking about really putting people in place. So that was a conscious decision. Is that because you get better results when people are kind of in-person instructing?

1:00:09 David Allen: I think so. Well, first of all, you can’t be a trainer of our work without being a practitioner of it.

1:00:15 And that’s different than a lot of other kind of training programs. That’s not bad about the others. It’s just that ours, you have to really live this stuff, and you really have to know it.

1:00:24 Brian Rose: It’s true. And when you speak from that level of confidence on that level of, I don’t need to make you believe anything.

1:00:30 David Allen: I’m just gonna share what’s my experience with this, and everybody I’ve seen does it, produces these results. You kind of want those results, try it out. And that sense of confidence has to come from real practitioners who really get this. And that’s why in person, I think you can get a lot of that in that way. At the same time, another big project we’re working on is building a self-paced digital online version of this.

1:00:52 So that’s, hopefully sometime this year, we’ll at least have a beta version of that out. Because we know we need that too. I mean, that’s where the world is going. But building partnerships and using technology is really our strategy, and staying small and doing what we do best, which is maintain the flame of this IP, and manage the quality in the community. I’m not interested in having a big company and being hugely wealthy and having, I mean, I wouldn’t mind that it’s fine, but that’s not my prime driver.

1:01:21 Our driver is getting this to as many people on the planet as might want it.

1:01:25 Brian Rose: Sounds a bit like a martial arts instructor, kind of demonstrating what works for you, what practice, that kind of thing. Do you still train martial arts? And what did you train? What did you used to train?

1:01:34 David Allen: I trained for about four or five years, and then I didn’t train for several years, then I got back into training again. My teacher was a guy who, weird, wonderful guy, he was a fencer. He made the Olympic team in fencing, and he had gotten a black belt in karate, but he also had studied various different styles himself. So he was teaching me just sort of personally, so I started with shodokan just for the, because the basics of stances, there’s probably no better great basis than learning those low stances in shodokan and the Japanese karate styles.

1:02:11 So I learned it was karate, but then we did Korean foot stuff and Chinese hand stuff. Ultimately, it came down to very close to just jikunada, which was what Bruce Lee did, which was basically just a pure efficiency martial art.

1:02:23 Brian Rose: Right, and open to any ideas in any form.

1:02:25 David Allen: What I would call what works in that way.

1:02:28 Brian Rose: Yeah, he’s fascinating, because these days, mixed martial arts is now popular with the UFC and the states, and Dana White, the president will say the original mixed martial artist was Bruce Lee, because he was embracing all the different aspects, and a lot of his core group in China were not happy, that he was like, oh, boxing, that might work, this might work, Olympic lifting might help me do this, it’s always funny.

1:02:50 And you think maybe Japan someday, for you.

1:02:53 David Allen: Oh yeah, we’re Katherine and I are serious Japanophiles, I love the aesthetics, I was into bonsai for two or three years, I do pikibana myself now, it’s probably one of my favorite hobbies, and just give me some flowers and a Japanese vase, and time disappears.

1:03:08 Brian Rose: That is the arranging, is that, oh really, wow. I guess you could do tea ceremony, but that’s supposed to be for females, right? I don’t know, I don’t know.

1:03:17 I spent some time in Japan when I was 11 or 12 years old, and one of the girls there, she was doing the tea ceremony, she still does it, and it’s just, now I get it, because it’s meditative, but when I was 12, I didn’t understand. She was doing it.

1:03:29 David Allen: No, no, we love the culture.

1:03:31 Brian Rose: David, I always ask everyone at the end, a few simple questions, I’m gonna ask you, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old David, and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him?

1:03:41 David Allen: Relax.

1:03:42 Brian Rose: Were you at Berkeley then?

1:03:46 David Allen: Not quite yet, no, I wasn’t at Berkeley. Relax. I would say, relax and trust,

1:03:56 Trust what you feel like you wanna do. I sort of lived a lot of other people’s lives for a long time. So that’s a lot of my own personal growth and development over in my 20s and 30s was, starting getting comfortable in my own skin, and getting comfortable with my own ideas, getting comfortable with my own desires, getting comfortable with my own direction, and not trying to find the right thing, just trying to find my thing. It’s funny how it can take a long time just to listen to yourself.

1:04:33 Brian Rose: Still working on it. Still working on that. Second part of that is, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received? It could be business, it could be personal.

1:04:47 David Allen: Let go and let God.

1:04:49 Brian Rose: What does that mean?

1:04:52 David Allen: Exactly what it says. Let go and let God. Yeah, I would stop trying.

1:05:00 God does not need my help today to make the world work. So I just need to let go, another version of relax, and trust that whatever that thing is, this higher spiritual reality that we all really live in all the time, but that I’m more and more conscious of and work to be more and more conscious of, more and more to access it and express it. But I have to relax and let it be what it is, and then let myself engage with that, as opposed to trying to control.

1:05:33 Brian Rose: Powerful.

1:05:34 Brian Rose: Last part of that question, to the 20-year-old that’s watching us, listening to us from somewhere around the world, that’s fascinated by some of these concepts, but doesn’t know where to start, what should they do?

1:05:47 David Allen: What they feel like doing. See, if you’re really willing to do what you really feel like doing, what you feel like doing will change. If you resist doing what you feel like doing, it will start to run you. So, you know, in the martial arts, you never stop moving.

1:06:04 You’re sparring, you do not stand still. It takes a lot less energy to change directions 180 degrees if you’re moving than it is to go the new direction from a standstill. So get in motion toward what you wanna do and pay attention to the clues you’re getting, and find out who you are.

1:06:23 Brian Rose: Fantastic. David, thanks so much for your time.

1:06:26 I really appreciate this. This was an epic, epic talk. If people want to get a new copy of this book and find out more about your training, is it straight to your website? What’s the best place to go?

1:06:35 David Allen: Yeah, well, it’s on the website, gettingthingsdone.com.

1:06:38 It’s the new edition is just getting published in the UK edition, you know, where they misspell all the words.

1:06:45 Brian Rose: Color, like the French. Color and favor and, you know. Do you do that yet, or are you still writing in American?

1:06:51 David Allen: So that’s the US version, the new, and I think the UK version is just out now, and a lot of the languages now are re-upping into the new edition.

1:07:00 So, you know, check with your local, wherever you locally get books and see what’s there. It will be called the new edition and 2015 edition, so that’s the, otherwise you get it wherever you get books.

1:07:11 Brian Rose: Excellent, and again, we’re giving away five free copies of this, so if you quote, sorry, tweet a quote from this episode from David, maybe from me, and just put both of our Twitter handles on, we’ll be picking five of those and posting those around the world.

1:07:26 Brian Rose: Thank you so much, I look forward to hearing more about you. I am actually now gonna dive even deeper into this and figure out if I can become more productive, more efficient, but this really rings a lot of bells with me.

1:07:36 David Allen: It won’t hurt. It won’t hurt, especially when it comes down to the ultimate goal of being more present and being, you know, with your children, when you’re with your children, being in the office, being with yourself when you need to be with yourself, and, you know, all of that stuff.

1:07:49 Brian Rose: So, as we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well in yours, and thanks so much.

1:08:13 David Allen: My pleasure, Brian’s fun.