David Allen - How To Get Things Done

Full transcript: David Allen on London Real

4:57 This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is David Allen, the author, consultant, executive coach and international lecturer. You are recognized as the world’s leading authority on personal and organizational productivity and been acknowledged by Forbes as one of the top five executive coaches. Your best-selling book, Getting Things Done, has been translated into 30 languages and Time Magazine has called it the defining self-help business book of its time.

5:20 David, welcome back to London Real. Brian, I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for the invitation again. Great to have you back. It’s been just under four years.

5:27 Amazing. You were the kind of inaugural guest in this new whole setup of ours and your episode really resonated with people out there and a lot of our students in our academy and just everyone. So thank you for being there in the early days. Yeah, yeah, delighted. It was one of the better interviews of my 30 year plus career of talking about this stuff.

5:50 Fantastic, well I’d love to go a little deeper today. I wanna hear about what it’s like of course to live in Holland, a little bit more about GTD and of course your upcoming event. But I wanted to start off and just ask you a question. What is a kid from Shreveport, Louisiana doing, living in Europe, being recognized around the world for his intellectual property? How did that happen?

6:13 Well, let’s see, how long do we have, Brian? A big time, you know?

6:19 I don’t know, you know, I’ve always been fascinated by things that were cultural, things that had to do with forms, that had to do, you know, in retrospect, let me back up a little bit, in retrospect, as I look back through my life, all the different things I got involved in and got interested in, they all had to do with tapping into something that we can’t see, but that I intuitively knew affected everything we did and everything we noticed. There’s something individual, you could call it whatever you want, spirit, your soul, the God, the universal energy, whatever you call it, There’s something, you know, I had a sense that there was something bigger. My first job was a magician at age five.

7:09 You know, I charged five cents for a magic show I did on the sidewalk in Palestine, Texas, where I lived my first six years. And so, well, why was I interested in magic? Well, magic is about stuff you can’t see and it makes things happen. So I kind of always been interested in stuff like that. And I thought I also had the ability the ability to study acting. My mom gave me acting classes when I was 11. I used to come out and do comedy sticks for the family and so forth. She said, well, that would be something to support there. We actually had in Shreveport at Centenary College a very sophisticated actually community theater, semi-professional. In the summer, they would bring in pros from New York and San Francisco and other places to do the leads.

8:02 And it turns out that I got my first role as playing Louis in The King and I. So I learned to sing Whistle Happy Tune and did that and I fell in love with the theater, fell in love with just being in that kind of environment. So that gave me a taste of, and I met people from New York, I met people from sort of outside the south and outside of Shreveport, which was interesting to begin with. I also had, interestingly, I had a half-sister. She was my dad’s daughter, who was quite a bit older than me, who had wound up marrying the, essentially the, many considered him the intellectual chronicler of the beat generation, a man named John Cleland Holmes.

8:47 And John and Shirley, my sister, were good friends with Kerouac and Ginsburg and all of those people, of that generation, of the beat scene itself. And they lived in Connecticut, John was a writer, and I actually got a chance to visit them. My dad died when I was nine, and so my mom took me on a trip to visit my sister in Connecticut and never been there before. But then I got to meet, now you would say the hippest of the hip in terms of artists and writers and intellectuals that would be visiting with them.

9:16 So I got to spend two or three weeks in old Saybrook, Connecticut. John Colonial Holmes, his great-grandfather, was Oliver Wendell Holmes. I was starting to be introduced to all of that. Then in high school, I turned out to be – I was a good debater, so we won a bunch of championships there. But I also – there had been an exchange student in our high school who was from Germany with the American Field Service.

9:40 AFS was an exchange program. At the time, there were not many Americans that went for a year. we usually go for the summer because there weren’t that many families around the world that would be willing to support and take on an American kid. But I went ahead and applied, and it turns out I got it. So that year, there were only 300 of us from the States.

10:01 And we could have gone anywhere through the American Field Service. Whatever family they tried to match up with, where would I go? So I wound up going to Zurich, Switzerland, lived with a Swiss family for a year, learned to speak a little bit of Swiss German, and got a chance to see a whole new side of culture. You know, I went to Rael and Gennazium Zürichberg, you know, a block from the Kunsthaus in Zurich, and I would go down and I’d have a beer in the Odion Cafe, which is where Dadaism started, and it’s where Jung, you know, wrote, and then go to the Kunsthaus and see Monet’s Water Lily. So, you know, I guess fairly young, sort of surprisingly, I was able to kind of step out of the cocoon then of what one would think of, you know, in a sort of conservative Southern culture.

10:45 And then I decided to go to a crazy little college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do kind of when I grew up, but I came back from Switzerland with an interest in, I had thought maybe I would want to go into law because again, that’s sort of this, sort of this theory sort of thing. And I came back actually after being in Switzerland with a very big interest in sort of cultural stuff. So philosophy and art and so forth was something that turned me on. My brother had gone, he was four years older than me, had gone to a New England upper university and it flunked out because he really, he went into math and science, but he was really a jazz musician.

11:26 And I didn’t want to go to a big university, maybe have the experience he did. So it turns out I got recruited to go to a crazy little college that was set up in Florida, in Sarasota, Florida. And I was in the second graduating class of this little college, and this little college was called New College, as in New College, Oxford, but New College of Sarasota, Florida. And it was actually a lot of really interested cultural supporters and education supporters, a good bit of money, funded this college, set up no grades, design your own education.

12:01 You know sort of take take take yourself by your own bootstraps and and and then use a great faculty small student body You know the the dormitories we lived in no rules but it was the only building in Florida designed by IM Pei and You know then we it was in the old Ringling Museum the area So I got a BA in three years did a lot of independent study projects hitchhiked across the Middle East as one of them In 1967, you know, so by that time I’d started to taste an awful lot of different kinds of things and different people from a lot of different cultures and different stuff. So I had a fairly wide range of stuff and I got fascinated. I started out, I hope this is not getting too long for you.

12:47 I started out interested in philosophy because I thought philosophers and I tried to read Aristotle and Plato and then a lot of the newer philosophers and I got a little bored because it seemed like the philosophers proved their original hypothesis with their original hypothesis. I’m like, that’s kind of a circle, you know? But what got fascinating, I had a good, a great academic advisor who was also the history professor there. And he turned me on to history of thought, history of culture, history of thinking.

13:18 I got very interested in why those philosophers started with that hypothesis. Why did Kant start with that? Why did Plato start with that? What was different about that? And then I got turned on, fascinating book to read, which really impacted me a lot, was Oswald Spingler’s The Decline of the West, which was sort of early in the 20th century, early writing about, he was the first guy that sort of compared the Western civilization to the fall of Rome, that civilizations had their own life, you know, a beginning, a middle, and an end.

13:49 And he identified multiple cultures around the world that had gone through these different lifestyles. You know, why did the Greeks not have a zero? Why did the idea of infinity only showed up in the Western civilization itself? So there were a lot of very interesting things about all that that had been affected. And also the college I went to focused people on a lot of the cultural history. Why did the Baroque era, did the math, the science, art, the architecture, the philosophy, the literature, all had similar themes inside of them.

14:29 So I got fascinated by that. We didn’t even use the word back then, paradigms, but really what I began to study or get fascinated by was cultural paradigms. The belief systems we have that we don’t know we have that are affecting everything we do, everything we express, everything we notice. So again, that was one of those, started to tweak this whole sense of that there’s stuff we can’t necessarily see, but that if you could get a hold of that, again, I’m probably the laziest guy you ever met.

15:02 Certainly one of them. I find it hard to believe. Well, come on. If I could go boom and move that thing from there to there without having to physically do it, how efficient would that be? So that whole idea of being a magician or like trying to find out how could I get in touch with whatever those things are.

15:20 Because if it is affecting all of us that much, if we could somehow get inside of that and understand the principles, that would be really cool, then we might be able to do stuff or understand stuff or perceive stuff or have a more effective, fun experience in life. Anyway, I don’t know that I had those thoughts in that way back then, but in retrospective if I look back on the track. So I wound up in intellectual history. And I got fascinated by the American culture.

15:49 I did my bachelor’s thesis on the decade of disenchantment, America in the 1920s. Which was funny because I did that in 1967 and 68. Of course you know what was going on in 67 and 68. All the hippies and everybody else and everybody going, when America sucks and they’re leaving the country and going to Paris and smoking dope and doing all kinds of things. Guess what?

16:10 That was so American. They were doing that in the 20s. It just wasn’t quite the volume that they were doing in the 60s But they were that’s exactly what they did That’s exactly and I was saying these people think they’re so unique and said it’s not unique at all In fact, it’s quite America. So I got fascinated by all that so I wound up in American intellectual history in graduate school I got into Berkeley in 1968. Wow. And so you went to Berkeley for grad school. Mm-hmm Okay, gotcha. So you’re already kind of looking into the matrix at this point You’re trying to see things that aren’t there, that the seeds of the GTD is probably informed as far as you saying, well, what’s happening around us?

16:47 Why are we doing these things? Why are we ruled by these invisible laws that we don’t understand why we’re behaving these ways? Yeah, yeah, fascinated by that. And then I was studying people who seemed to be enlightened and then I decided I wanted my own. And then I also sort of seemed to have the experience that I didn’t think I was gonna find that in academia.

17:08 Because that was what else could you do but be a history professor and studying intellectual history or a writer or something. And so I said, okay. And through lots of different things went on and of course Berkeley in 68 was kind of heady time to be there. All that stuff going on. But I really wasn’t part of all of that.

17:28 I’m kind of observing it. But at some point I just said, no, academia is not for me. And one day I just didn’t go back to class. and said, OK, I’m going to go after my own enlightenment. And so then I got very interested, fascinated.

17:43 A friend of mine offered to teach me karate. And so I got involved in the martial arts. I’d always been interested in, I’d loved the Zen aesthetic. I’d read all of Alan Watson’s Suzuki, even when I was in high school. And I loved that sort of minimalist elegance that the Zen aesthetic had.

18:03 And I’d always been very interested in that. So when he offered to teach me the karate, I thought, I wasn’t really interested for the fighting aspect. I was interested more in the, what’s the idea of a Zen kind of martial art? What would that be like? And so I got involved with that and kind of got hooked into it and wound up getting a black belt back in my 20s.

18:23 Was Bruce Lee on the screen then? Yeah. Okay, so early 70s, end of the dragons. Yeah, he had just come on the screen there. As a matter of fact, my sensei had sort of combined various different styles and wound up, what he taught me was very similar to Bruce Lee, what Bruce Lee had come up with, Jeet Kune Do, which was the idea of pure efficiency.

18:44 Multiple disciplines. Pure efficiency. Interesting. Because that was what Bruce did. He said, how efficient can I make this body move?

18:51 How much power can I generate with how little effort? Which was, and I guess that was kind of an attraction to me, I could probably even tie that into GTD. Like, with how little effort can you have nothing in your mind and make sure things happen out here. Interesting. You know, with Steve Jobs as a famous Stanford graduation speech where he says, when you look back at your life, you can connect the dots in reverse.

19:15 And he talks about points in his life where he was fascinated with typefaces. And that later became the proportional spacing that was on Macintosh. And I’m listening to your life, and it’s these little elements that kind of built parts of GTD. Yeah. Because I’ll even say that now, as part of GTD, we use the phrase mind like water.

19:35 You know, we have a clear head, you know. And now the mindfulness people, you know, that’s a whole lot of what they’re doing now. But I learned that 35 years ago because in the martial arts, there was a lot of training about how you clear your head. Because if you’re walking into being surprised by four people in a dark alley, you don’t want 2,000 unprocessed emails banging around in your brain, right? You need to be clear.

19:56 You need to be clear. So how fast can you get clear? So focusing on your breathing was the best way to get clear because it brings you present. Your breathing is current, is present, so that’s what, and the mindfulness people know that. If you focus on your breathing, you’re not in the future, you’re not in the past.

20:11 You’re actually in the present, which is, from my experience, at least with the smallest, a key spiritual principle, like acceptance. But acceptance has to be right now, can you not resist whatever is current, your current realities? What else did martial arts teach you? Yeah, it was that it was that the big thing or did it it was that and it was you know, certainly a lot about focus You know if you’re gonna if you’re gonna try to break through three inches of wood with your hand, you know It doesn’t take calluses. It takes focus You know and what you can’t have is the thought of while that’s gonna hurt in your mind You know, you have to you have to already see your hand through it So, I learned back then the power of visualization to begin with because there was so much of that ability to focus and a whole lot of that’s driven by your mind.

21:02 So I learned a lot of that and again, in retrospect, I could say a lot of that was just great training about how to do that. In one of your TED talks, you said that a lot of GTD was a bit like martial arts as in you’re doing these things that are uncomfortable at first that are building up a pattern that’s going to make you work efficiently. often ask Brian why I call it a martial art, and the reason is because, I mean, it’s really kind of an art, the art of how do I manage the flow of life’s work and my commitments and that whole inventory. And you don’t end that. I mean, how good can you get it parenting?

21:34 How good can you get it cooking spaghetti? How good can you get it playing the flute? There’s no end to any of those. There’s no end to this either. I’m still tweaking and refining. As my life changes, then how do I manage the flow of that change in my life? That doesn’t, that never stops. But the reason I call it a martial art That is because Marshall deals with surprise.

21:52 It deals with things coming at you you can’t see. Now that’s in subtle ways true with painting and dance and anything else. It’s like you’re dealing with all kinds of other aesthetic forces, I guess. But it’s very much like from email, some thought that I wake up, oh my God, they just fired me. I just got hired.

22:11 I just bought a house. I just sold a house. I got divorced. I just got married. I just had a kid.

22:16 I just discovered I have a life-threatening illness. So when those transition times in life are where you come up against how well can I deal with that, how fast can I integrate this new information, accept it, say where I want to go now and refocus and recalibrate, that’s really, that’s why it’s a martial art. So GTD is a martial art. It is. And you say before that things are coming.

22:40 They’re going to be good things, they’re going to be bad things, but most of us aren’t necessarily prepared for the next thing because we’re running these endless loops in our head. Well, you’re not prepared to deal with them as effectively as you could if you had a clear head You’re gonna tend to over and under react So see if we’re sparring, you know, right if we’re sparring I’d love nothing more than to get you upset because if I can get you upset you will over under react Called a fake right and then I win if I cuz if I can get you if I can get you to over under react I can control you So, the idea of being really, really clear so that I can’t be, I don’t want to be controlled by something. Now, I’m not saying control, I control your kids, the weather, or your boss.

23:28 I mean, good luck. I’m talking about having something under control, like stable and present, so that you’re not worried about the meeting you were just in, you’re not worried about the meeting that’s coming up. And that’s what successful people do they have it to where they can not under or overreact and that’s how they have quote-unquote success in Their lives. Well, I think it depends on what you mean by success. Yeah. Yeah, sure. I mean there’s success What what does that mean? You know, does it mean?

23:59 Happy does it mean just achieving desired results? But you’re just you know, if you go on a vacation to relax and you don’t relax, that’s an unsuccessful vacation Right, right. So if you’re talking about I think the people who are most Usually the most effective certainly the ones nicest to be around The ones that are not over or under reacting and they’re just present you talk to them and they’re there Yeah, it’s big and popular now the meditation the presence, but this is something that you’ve been thinking about for you know Yeah, come on, buddy. They’ve been this is thousands of years You know read read any of the old texts, you know about just being friendly all you know They all talk about that yeah, and if you look at you know some fighters, you know I watch the UFC a lot mix martial arts and and a lot of times the fighter will try to get in the other fighters head and Again, get them to overreact or under react and you can see it plays out right in the ring or in the cage And it’s a bad night for them And so that’s why people should think of their lives that way as in if they can be in that Present state the non-emotional non-reactive state then they can handle what’s coming at them in the way that they want to do it Yeah, yeah and you know that there’s a You know a lot of what I uncovered as I was getting into all of this and I probably should complete that story just to Bring you up to date because after I dropped out got martial arts then I got involved in it in the in both my

25:22 Spiritual explorations meditation spiritual practices people you know that were involved in sort of understanding multiple levels of the universe and seemed to have quite a knowledge of how to do that and And then I had my own personal experiences that validated a whole lot of what I kind of intuited all along, which is, hey, there’s a bigger game out there than we can see. And it’s in all of us, we’re all engaged in it, but you don’t have to wait to die to find out what it is. What was that experience?

25:52 Was this? Oh, I had many of them. But they were an awful lot about sort of letting myself kind of go out of the body and see things in another way from a whole different perspective, which was not drug related. It was really just more the ability to be able to do that. A lot of it kind of happened, not that I was that conscious of it.

26:17 I had a great spiritual coach, really, a guy named John Roger that I worked with. I explored a lot of different people and a lot of what they were doing, tried a whole lot of different things, ran across John Roger, and this guy seemed to have gone down the path that I was on, but a lot further than I had gone. But he was the kind of guy that, you meet people like that. The way he talks, he doesn’t really care if anybody believes him or not. He just knows the truth of what he was doing.

26:48 And I sort of very much resonated with him. I said, I want to go hang out with this guy and see what he learns until I run through all that, and then I’ll go find something else. I never ran through all that after 45 years. He died about five years ago. So that was the basis of my spiritual work and practices.

27:06 And essentially, as I got involved in that, my inner life got richer, my outer life kind of slowed down. I experimented with a lot of different drugs. They put me away in a mental institution for a short period of time because I demonstrated aberrated behavior. I almost lost you to that. So just real quickly to interject, last year I ran my first Iron Man race and I had to go to New York City to train for it.

27:34 And in the process of making the movie, I started talking about my heroin overdose from 2001 when I was in New York City. And I had had that in the notes for our last interview, but I hadn’t actually ever told anyone about it, including my wife, until last year. And so, and it’s been interesting for people to say, Wow, I never thought that that would happen to you, Brian, because you seem to be the guy that that doesn’t happen to. And it was interesting for me to talk about, because it can happen to anybody, just kind of the drugs and the addiction and stuff.

28:04 And we almost lost you there, briefly, right? Well, actually not really. But I wasn’t doing any of those things as escape, I was doing them for exploration. I was fascinated by acid, LSD, I was fascinated by masculine, I was fascinated by even grass. And by just the consciousness, because I was very much into what’s the other consciousness that you can get into and tap into.

28:30 So it was those days, we’re talking the 60s, so that was just kind of like, well, so who wasn’t doing anything like that? So mine, and I never, yes, I snorted smack for about a year and a half, and when I decided to stop, I just stopped, didn’t have to go through withdrawal, and had kind of a bad cold, and that was it. So I wasn’t really, and it’s tricky, because as you know, it’s quite seductive. Quite seductive, because no matter how bad you feel, it makes you feel good, right?

29:00 And that’s why this opioid thing is so, you know, I don’t know if it’s scary, but it’s certainly, it’s quite understandable why a whole lot of people, you know, get wound up involved in all that. But so all those things actually added to a lot of different experiences that I had, so I wouldn’t give any of them up, because I wound up getting where I am now through all those things, rungs of the ladder in a way. And the psychedelics were a big part of it as well, just seeing it.

29:28 Well, they just kind of fried my nervous system, so I wasn’t able to monitor things quite so well. And so I went through a period where I was hearing voices, I was seeing things that were showing up, and from my experience and other things, they were not necessarily unreal. And so, and I started to get kind of mad at the world because I could see, I was in a way so psychically, you know, tuned, I could tell what was going on in people’s heads just being around them and feel what they were feeling and that was not that fun to be able to do that.

30:06 But I also saw people, you know, that were doing really weird things and whatever and I started to call people on it and they got mad and angry and I got angry at them for not believing me and so I just kind of got pissed off at the world and pushed up against it. And at some point people saw I was doing kind of strange things so they wound up putting me away. But I never, actually even then, and by the way I escaped, I said I don’t need to be here and so I actually jumped over the wall and hitchhiked back to Berkeley.

30:39 And they went and caught me again and put me back in maximum security. That was not fun. So then I decided instead of railing against the world, I think I will cooperate with it. So I tell people now, I’m not any less crazy, you’re just looking at a high state of cooperation. And so how did this turn in to, I guess it was one of your first corporate gigs which turned into GTD?

31:02 I mean, what are those next nine years like? Yeah, this was this was 71 that that’s when I got sort of involved in the spiritual work and I was more interested in the spiritual work and the inner work, you know I was certainly clean by that time. I’m not doing I wasn’t smoking You know, I’ve had my last, you know, my last drug I took in December 1971 I haven’t done anything except good wine since then, you know in terms of in terms of any of that So I was cleaned up, had a job, you know, and was more interested in sort of exploring now what I tasted and how to find that.

31:40 And I had some very good reference points, you know, that had to kind of go back. It’s kind of like the drugs let you come up here. My coach described it this way, he said, drugs let you get close to what it is out there, but there’s a glass wall between you and it. And he said, in order to get to that, he said, you were able to see some of that, But to get to that, you’ve got to come all the way back around and come around it from this side. You can’t get through that.”

32:05 So I went. So I stopped everything. I said, okay. Because I had actually tasted how powerful that was and I wanted that. So I wasn’t that interested then in the material world and I’m not a rice bowl and cave kind of guy.

32:18 I was more like into good wine and pretty girls and all that good stuff. So I said, well, not sure what I’m going to do, but I had to pay the rent. So they weren’t paying people to do this inner work, right? So that’s when I wound up being a good number two guy. So I helped a lot of people start their own businesses.

32:38 And that’s how I started to get into that world. Also got involved in 1978 with the start of Insight Seminars, which was one of the sort of intensive five-day personal growth kind of seminar experiences, experiential training work, came out of the genre of Est and actualization of Life Spring and that genre in the 70s, which was big back then. A lot of that was huge. And I actually became a trainer. I got fascinated by it and it was quite powerful for me to experience.

33:13 And I said, that’s the kind of work I wanna do, that work that is transformational for people that truly allows them to experience a lot more of who they really are and step free of a lot of the bonds that people put themselves in. And I actually saw that experience and I got trained as a trainer. It was all avocational, I wasn’t getting paid for that. But then in that personal growth work, the corporate world actually was starting to get interested in that.

33:38 And especially people in human resources and organization development and so forth that were more of the humanistic type in the corporate world, they were taking EST and actualizations in LifeSpring and Insight, which was the company I was working with, and say, God, this is what we need in our company. We don’t need any other strategic plan. We need people to be honest and nice and talk to each other and be real, and all those golden goodies that were the result of personal growth, the good personal growth kind of trainings that were there.

34:03 So I was very involved in all of that. Had a lot of experiences with agreements. As I mentioned, that was a huge part of, Not a huge, but it was a significant part of that training was understanding the power of agreements that you make with yourself or with other people. And when you break an agreement, what happens? There’s an automatic price.

34:26 Trust disintegrates. The trust of yourself and the trust of anybody else that you happen to have made agreement with. And that’s a price you pay automatically. So there was a lot of sort of introduction of the idea of agreements, which by the Anyway, a whole lot of what GTD is about is getting you clear about what are your agreements with yourself. What are all your could, should, would, need tos, ought tos.

34:48 And I discovered as opposed to just being a minor part of it, that was a huge amount of as we were being kind of brought into the sort of corporate training world with some of this stuff and that kind of took on the flavor of personal efficiency, personal effectiveness. So we were doing me and a partner of mine, then Russell Bishop who’s still a good friend and we were doing a good bit of this work together, we started a sort of consulting wing of this personal growth training company and did quite a bit of very interesting work in some of the big corporations. But the time management piece, that was starting to be sort of a big thing, this was the early 80s, when that was starting to be kind of a thing out there.

35:29 They were personal planners and time management trainings and those kind of things were showing up. And at the same time, there are a lot of vectors here, the same time I started my own consulting practice. After helping all these people manage their own businesses, I’d just show up and get a job with my friends who were starting a restaurant in LA and I was chief cook and bottle washer. A friend of mine had a landscape company, so I helped manage his landscape company.

35:56 I sold mopeds, I had a vitamin distributorship, I managed a service station, we did car restorations. That’s where I. Glass blowing, too? Glass blowing, absolutely, yeah. And these agreements, like, would you go in, what are some of these agreements that we make with ourselves and with other people?

36:13 I need cat food. I need a life. Anytime you tell yourself, I want good wood should have something different than it currently is, and you’ve now got a relationship to that. You’re now engaged with it. Whether you admit it or not, you will eat that.

36:31 Eat it meaning you put the karma in motion. You say, I need to, would, could, should. So that’s a, they’re all agreements. Hey, Brian, I’ll get back to you about that. I just made an agreement.

36:44 You say, hey David, here’s a restaurant you oughta try in London. You go, oh God. Now if I just said, I really don’t wanna forget that, I just made an agreement with myself that I would like to, would, could, should need to keep track of that, right? So little, big, personal, professional, doesn’t matter. And most people have no clue how many agreements they’ve made with themselves and other people.

37:04 And that’s a lot of what the initial part of the GTD process really is, just getting you to identify what’s got your attention. Right, flushing out all the agreements that are swimming around in my head. Exactly. For the past years, days, years. And every day we’re conscious, more agreements are happening in our mind, whether we want to or not.

37:21 Yeah. Because that’s what the brain does. Yeah, it does. And it’s hungry. It’s hungry, the mind looks at things that wants it says, you know, so it’s hungry for that.

37:31 So you can learn to manage all of that, but as I, you know, I would just go in and help these people do their business. But as I was starting that consult, I said, well, first of all, helping people improve their process and then I get bored once we improved it, then I get bored and go find another job. Well, then I discovered they actually pay people to do that. They call them something, right? Consultant.

37:53 Right. Wow. Couldn’t spell it. Now I R1. single Allen Associates.

37:59 And then I got very hungry to say, okay, wow, this is going to be my career, it’d be nice to find some good models that if you asked me to show up and I thought I could help you and it wasn’t clear how I could help you, it’d be nice to pull something out of my back pocket that would be a model that I could apply no matter who you are, where you are, what your business was that would improve your condition and maybe have you willing to pay me money for it. So that’s where I got very hungry for models. Also I was hungry for clear space.

38:31 My life was getting a little bit more complex and having discovered both in my meditation, spiritual practices as well as the martial arts, how cool it was to have a clear head, how much more effective I could be and happier it could be, more relaxed. But it was starting to get screwed up with the complexity of my world was increasing. And so I got hungry for techniques for myself that would keep my head clear. your own itch. Yeah, absolutely.

38:56 And then I had a guy who met me, he kind of took to me, he’d been a 25, for 25 years, had been an executive consultant and organizational change, had done a lot of work and had uncovered quite a number of techniques that he found were extremely useful and practical if he was trying to get, you know, senior people and organization to actually be able to move forward toward where they wanted to go, as opposed to kind of being in mud and quicksand. And so Dean took to me and he said, David, I brought him a client. He said, well, since you brought me this client, I’ll take you under my wing and share with you everything I know.

39:30 You help me. You and I can just deliver this work together. So we did. And he taught me a ton of stuff. And the first thing he did was he sat down and said, David, let me share something with you that how we’re going to work first of all with the guy at the top and then each one of their directs.

39:44 He said, let me have you have I’m going to put you through that process. thing was, pen and paper, big stack of printer paper. Nice pen. Okay, David, empty your head. One thought per piece of paper. Oh, my God. Now, I wasn’t broken. I had my act pretty well together. I had no idea, though, what would happen once I unloaded all of that.

40:06 And then he had me take that pile of paper, put it back in front of me one at a time. What is it, David? What’s the next action? And if I could finish the action in two minutes, We did it right then. If I could delegate it, we’d actually delegate it on a handwritten memo that would go into my out basket, out to delegate, or I would put a post-it with the next action on the piece of paper and put that in a big pile.

40:31 And then, with that big pile, first of all, I’d finished a lot of two-minute things, I’d delegated quite a number of things, and then I had a big pile of still stuff I had to do. It was longer than two-minute actions. He said, David, just organize that pile of next actions however you want. It’s like, well, let’s see, that kind of goes here, that kind of goes there. Then we could grab Manila folders and he said, okay, just organize those in some seven to ten categories you’ve got, right?

40:56 And then stick those in your second basket. And then before you start your day, you just thumb through all those things, find the things that you really think you can get to, you know, need to get to first. Pull those pieces of paper out, stick them in a red folder in front of your desk. Change my life. Oh my God.

41:10 How cool is that? So those became really key elements and he had uncovered that because he discovered that executives who hadn’t done that had all this old business clogging up their head and they’re trying to create new stuff and their old businesses was eating them like rats in the cellar. And so he had discovered that that was absolutely critical for an executive, top person first and then you had to go faster than work with all their directs because they’re spewing out all this work that, you know, they were the bottleneck.

41:41 Isn’t it strange that something that sounds so simple, you just described it in three minutes, could change someone’s consciousness? Fascinating. It did mine, and suddenly it, without fail, produced clarity, focus, more mental space, more of a sense of control, more of a sense of stability, more ability to focus on the meaningful stuff. And I turned around and started to do that with all of my other clients. It turned out it produced exactly the same results.

42:10 No exception. More control, more stability, more focus, more space to focus on meaningful things. Wow, that’s cool. So I discovered that was the beginning of what was to become GTD 25 years later when I wrote the book. It wasn’t GTD then, GTD was just the shorthand for getting things done, which was the title of the book.

42:29 Right. Right. But it became the system. It became the system. And it works because, I mean, also the same time in the 80s is kind of when computers are happening.

42:38 And then probably without thinking, we’re subconsciously comparing our brains to computers. But the brain is nothing like a computer. It’s this weird piece of biology that does some things well and doesn’t do other things well. And that’s why your system works. Well now, and you know, if you’ve read the new edition of Getting Things Done that I did a couple of years ago, you know, I put a final chapter in there on the cognitive science research that’s shown up since I wrote the first edition.

43:03 Basically validated the fact that your head’s a crappy office. Your brain did not evolve to remember, remind, prioritize, or manage relationships with more than four things. It does what it does brilliantly, which is use pattern recognition and long-term memory so that you know you’re talking to a person instead of vibrations of light and sound. So you’re doing that right, me too. That’s a light, that’s a flag, that’s a camera, that’s whatever.

43:30 As opposed to vibrations of light and sound, we make sense out of these things brilliantly in the present. Because that’s how we survived on the desert and the savannah and the jungles and whatever in the present. That’s a bear. There’s a snake over there. Oh, there’s berries to eat.

43:45 Right. We do that extremely well. And this is purely an instrument of survival, isn’t it, by definition? And it does that extremely, and computers can’t even come close to that yet. They’re starting to, they’re trying to, but they can’t even come close to knowing who you are and what you’re thinking or whatever.

44:00 There’s all kinds of stuff we do really well, but what we don’t do well is remember remind. Your brain is brilliant at all that stuff, but you go to the store for lemons and come back with six things and no lemons. What happened? You tried to use your head as your office. And most people, most people probably watching or listening to this, are still using their head as their office to try to remember, remind, prioritize and manage relationships with the multiple things in the complexities of our lives.

44:27 And how do I manage, might want to get a divorce with, I need cat food, we need to sell the house with, I need to hire a vice president of marketing, and by the way, I just found out I got a major tooth infection. That’s only six, you know, add that, multiply that by about 20, you know, and you’ll have the typical person’s life now. And it’s all trying to be managed in here, whereas if you literally wrote all that down on a whiteboard or somewhere, you’ll have a whole different perspective.

44:57 Right. And we see people trying to do these things without necessarily knowing the exact methodology, the to-do lists and the get it all out. And some people write books just so they can move on and get the intellectual property out of their head. Sure. That’s kind of something you describe here.

45:12 Yeah. And there’s, you know, even journaling, which is a much more subtle version of completion. Right. You know, even if I, you know, there are times I’ve journaled a lot, sometimes I I haven’t done so much. But it’s a lovely way to sort of clear the deck on a much more subtle level.

45:25 Just freeform writing can do that too. It’s just externalizing it so you get much more into the flow. I think it was Picasso who said, inspirations for amateurs, you know, butt in chair, boot computer, hit key. If you’re waiting to get inspired for the book, you’ll never write it. You just need to write for an hour a day or two hours a day.

45:48 Get in there. to sit down, engage, get involved, and start to externalize your thinking. And then you’ll find your thinking will mature and expand. So on that note, the word procrastination comes up a lot. What do you hear when you hear that word and what do people think it means and what does it mean?

46:05 Because what you just described there, some people would say, procrastination. Well, usually in my experience, people procrastinate for one of two reasons. Either the thing is not motivating enough, Not interesting enough, somebody just told you to do something, you know, you don’t really care that much. Maybe I should, but I don’t really care about it, so there’s no juice in it to begin with. Or you don’t feel comfortable that you can engage with whatever the thing is successfully right on the beginning.

46:37 Right? You know, the fear of losing control is the greatest human fear. Control is the master human addiction, by the way, right? People are killing themselves and each other as I speak right now just to maintain or achieve a sense of psychological control. It’s that powerful a driver of human behavior and experience.

46:55 And in our normal folks, the way that fear of losing control, I mean, I doubt if you woke up this morning, Brian, and said, gee, I can’t wait to be an incompetent jerk today. Right? I mean, neither, right? So you don’t want to engage with something that you feel like I might be an incompetent a jerk about this. And why do we want control so much?

47:17 Because that was our survival in the past. I don’t know. Okay. I don’t know. Because of dealing with the rest of the monkey clans or who knows, but we are addicted to it.

47:27 So when we see something that has the chance of us not being in control, we shy away from it. That’s true, and that’s why GTD helps a lot because if you can break it down to the very next physical action required on this thing, pick up phone, punch number, you know. If you could just focus on that, some part of it feels, well, I can do that. So it lowers the barrier of entry tremendously. But if you don’t figure out what the next action, there’s a void between you and it, right?

47:56 You don’t know, so I need to set a meeting. How are you gonna set the meeting? I don’t know. And you’ll avoid, you’ll procrastinate about setting the meeting because you haven’t decided that’s an email to send, that’s a phone call to make or that’s just a face-to-face conversation. If you made that decision, then it’s like, oh, I can go do that.

48:12 But that’s challenging if you can just keep your head just focused on, you know, I don’t know, what I would bite the elephant one at a time or whatever the thing is. You know, it’s just like, whatever that. So the smallest next action step is possible. The very smallest next action step. And if you feel yourself procrastinating, make it even smaller.

48:26 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. See, if you’re a good example, if you’re an accountant and you do people’s taxes, right, doing Susan’s taxes could be a next action because, you know, it’s so simple. You’ve done her taxes 15 years and she’s only got one form to fill out. So you can sit down at one thing and do that. So that could be a next action.

48:47 But doing Jose’s taxes, oh man, that’s a whole thing. That’s a whole project to make sure that works. And that’s the one you better decide what’s the very next action on that and take that thing down to, wait a minute, I need to talk to Jose or I need to send him an email or I need to check something on the rules and regulations. So you need to then get it down if it’s any bigger thing. So even though, as long as some part of you looks at it and they’re not resisting it because you’re not sure what to do, then you may just not do it because it’s not the thing to do right now.

49:18 That’s not procrastination. That’s just a priority choice. Right, right. For people that don’t know, can you break down the five stages of GTV quickly so they know, and from what I understand, it’s capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage. And by the way, ever since I met David four years ago, I started doing this.

49:34 I started idea capturing. I have a poor form of doing it, but I actually email myself. And so it’s a little rough around the edges, but it means that I will always see it the next day. I always type an email, and whenever I’m with someone that I’m not present with, I said, I’m just doing idea capture. I literally say that to them.

49:51 I’m idea capturing, and then I’m back to be present with you. But I make sure I do it right when it comes to mind. So maybe you could describe this, because some people don’t know what I’m talking about. I hang out with a lot of people, and they’re like, oh, I should really do that. And then I watch them, and David, they don’t capture.

50:06 And I know to myself, they’ve just invited more chaos into their lives and they’re never gonna do this as well. It takes a long time to change that habit, to recognize when you’re making those kind of decisions that you can’t finish in the moment and then to have that habit of doing, as you describe what you do, I capture it right then. And so the capture step is the first step of identifying what’s got your attention, what you can’t finish in the moment that you think of it.

50:33 Potentially meaningful things. It doesn’t mean that you’re committed right then to do something about it. It means you’re committed to look at it again and then clarify whether that is actually something to do about it or not. So you wanna, you know, my capture tool, I’m probably sure, the last time, yeah, the last time. And last time you had written down like a bottle of wine and you went, there it is, boom, and you write it down.

50:54 Look at that. And so I throw away probably 80% of these notes. I just don’t know which one of them is really worth keeping yet. don’t force me to make that executive decision, otherwise I won’t, I’ll stop thinking, right? So the thinking flow needs to be, that’s the first step is just capturing things that are potentially meaningful.

51:16 Potentially meaningful, right? Then the second, then, now if that’s all you do, then you got little sticking, you got little notes turned all over the place so you don’t do anything with it. We all know that guy. It’s got Post-its everywhere because they just read the first chapter, capture. Or if it’s somebody like you and you’ve got, you’re sticking it into a black hole in your phone as opposed to emptying that thing sooner than later within the next 24 to 48 hours.

51:38 So that’s the clarify step. Once I’ve captured it, then I can’t let this life fallow very long. I need to then make sure I clean this up so that this stays nice and clear, ready for the next capture to go on. So then the clarify step is, is it actionable? Yes or no?

51:54 If no, you toss it, trigger it for a later reminder or a filer’s reference. If it is actionable, then you just ask yourself, look, what’s the very next action I need to take on this? And if that one action won’t finish it, then you’ve got some outcome you need to track. So action and outcome then become the clarifications of what people have on most of their lists. So most people, even though they make a list, still haven’t gone to the next couple of steps which is clarify and then organize the results of that thinking.

52:22 They’ve got things on their list like mom or bank or doctor or college or, well, great. Well, great. Well, they captured something that’s got their attention, but what the hell are they… Why have mom… Yes, they had one.

52:34 Why is it on her list? Her birthday’s coming, right? What are you going to do about mom’s birthday? Oh, God, I don’t know. How do you find out?

52:42 I should call my sister. Great. Call sister Ray mom’s birthday. That’s the clarification step. Then if you can’t call your sister right then, better part some reminder to call her when you’re at a phone and have time, otherwise it’s back in your head.

52:54 So the first three steps of those five are really the critical operational steps, which is capture, clarify, and organize, what you can’t finish in that moment. Step four is critical then to keep the system going and to use it well, which is I need to then review or reflect on what’s the content. When I go out for errands, show me the six errands I need to run that I’ve decided. When I talk to my life partner, show me the four things I’ve said, that’s the next step is to talk to him or her about the business of life stuff.

53:23 So you need to make sure you use this inventory that you’ve captured in an appropriate time and place. Otherwise, you won’t trust it. And the whole point is to have a trusted system so that once it’s there and you know you’ll look at it at the right time, it’s off your mind. And those are all required steps. And you have to build this process so you trust it.

53:45 And that’s why it takes a little bit of time to get that clarity and presence back. It does. Some people say, well, David, I did all that, but it’s still, this stuff is still on my mind. Say, when did you do that? They said two weeks ago.

53:56 I said, give yourself two months. Otherwise, your brain still won’t trust it. Because it doesn’t trust itself. It doesn’t trust you’re going to really look at it again. Right.

54:03 Okay. So you have to prove to yourself it’s a system of organizing and reminding yourself a system of it. So that then allows the brain to just free and be flowing because it’s confident that it’s handled. And anybody watching or listening to this right now that says, wow, that’s too complex. Do I really need to do that?

54:20 Do you have a calendar? Do you have a diary? Why? Well, my brain can’t do it. Right.

54:25 And why is two weeks from Wednesday not on your mind? Because it’s in a system I trust I’ll look at at the right time. So you’re already doing this, right? You already have a lot of examples. I didn’t make this stuff up, Brian.

54:36 I recognized it. I recognized the fundamental best practice behaviors that allow the mind to be able to let go of something it does not do well at all. Right. High performance people, or whatever we want to call that, have probably been doing this maybe for hundreds of years, but you saw the best practices and put them in place to where we can do it now, especially with writing utensils and these kinds of things. Sure.

55:01 And our life is a lot more complex. Right. Well, in a way. I mean, I think Ben Franklin’s life was probably just as complex given all the things he was doing, and he was a huge list maker. Right.

55:10 Do you think Ben Franklin and Alexander the Great and Gandhi were actually probably pretty decent GTDers without knowing them? Yeah, probably in their own way. Yeah. they had a way of delegating, making those things happen. Because otherwise, they couldn’t have had those big ideas.

55:23 Well, now, I don’t know that that’s true. That would be a little unfair. I think you can have all kinds of big ideas, you know, even though you’re overwhelmed and depressed. Yeah, but they’re known for executing on them, right? Yeah, they may not have the, I don’t know, they have to be there, you know, it’s kind of unfair to generalize too much about anybody.

55:41 Okay, and so just to give people an example, I could be walking down the street and I could capture three ideas. One could be, I need to get married. One could be, I need to pick up tomatoes at the grocery store. And one could be, I need to start working out more. I mean, now those are three just very general, normal ideas.

56:00 So I would ideally now with this new system, capture them all, write them all down, and then go to the next step and start putting them into this process of clarifying next action step and all of that stuff. And that’s, it’s really that simple to start. It is okay, and people say how long does it take to experience the value of this? I said how long would it take you to write the top thing ten things down that are on your mind right now? And how long would it take you to decide the very next action?

56:25 You would need to take if that was the only thing you needed to do in your life. Oh about two minutes and watch what happens so Now how long how long will it take before that’s a habit in your life that you can’t stand not doing that Give yourself a couple of years Okay, couple years and then it’ll be part of who you are as long as some part of you keeps being interested in having a clear Head the real problem is most people don’t realize when they don’t have a clear head Those people just live in fog in a way and you wouldn’t know that until you got rid of the fog Right. So I’ve got a big marketing issue. I’ll solve a problem. A lot of people don’t realize they have right?

57:02 Yeah, and one of your TED talks She said most of you won’t take action on this because you don’t know you need it or you don’t realize you need it because you think I’ve got a few friends, I’ve got a job, I’m getting my education. Everything’s going pretty good, and it’s hard to see that actually there’s a lot of fog in there. Yeah, and I’m not trying to beat anybody up and tell them they should get rid of the fog. I’m just saying, look, if you want to get rid of the fog, could you use more space?

57:29 What would you do if you had nothing pulling on your psyche right now, Brian, or anybody? What would you do? How would you use it? Because I guarantee you, of all the thousands of people that have implemented this over the years, and I’ve worked with a lot of them, that without exception, you implement these best practices, it creates more room. What you do with that room is quite unique to you.

57:52 Some people use it to be more creative, some people to be more strategic, some people to be more innovative, some people just to be more loving and present with whatever they’re doing. And I can give you examples of all of that. So how you use the space is up to you. So anybody says, well, I’m fine with the way it is. I said, could you use more space?

58:11 Could you use, what would you do if you had nothing pulling on you right now? And so getting people to kind of scratch their head and say, oh yeah, I guess I have stuff pulling on me right now. Well, what if it wasn’t? So yeah, so that’s trying to convince people about either the need to do this or not. And you know, over all these years, the people that have been most attracted to this are the people who need it the least.

58:37 They’re already the most productive, aspirational, positively-focused, forward-moving people. They’re just people that already know the value of system because they’ve had one, got them where they were, but they’re also people that feel like they’re full up and they need more room. They’ve got more ideas they wanna do more with. They’re already in that frame of mind. They just know that they need some assistance or could use some help to give them more space to be able to do more and do better.

59:03 And, you know, that’s kind of the good news about my professional life is, I just got hundreds of people that fit that category that I’ve now got a relationship with. I remember last time you said, Brian, people think that GT is for CEOs and consultants, but you said some of my most successful clients are musicians and artists. They just wanna free that up and boom, so they can take leaps in their creative space. Yeah, well, they publicly said it already, so Will Smith and Robert Downey Jr. are champions of my stuff.

59:36 And Howard Stern, huge champion of my stuff, changed his life. One of my coaches coached him, and then he hired us, he’s his COO now. So I’ve kind of changed his, certainly his professional world, and even his personal world. And how does it change these people? What do they say when they describe this system?

59:53 They just go, God, I’m just so much more relaxed. I’m getting so much more done with so much less effort. And I’m able to do some of the things I really wanted to do. I was freed up enough to make some hard decisions I needed to make and made some changes in my life that were important to me. I mean, testimonials are legion.

1:00:17 Some of the most impactful testimonials I get are parents that say, my God, I was able to actually watch my kids play football or soccer and not be on my phone. To them, that was like heartfelt change that they weren’t going to miss seeing their kids grow up. What about people that say they don’t have time, they don’t have enough time? I’ll go on to somebody else, get to a no as fast as I can. What about people that say, I don’t have enough time in my life to do anything?

1:00:47 Yeah, well, you find enough time to do something. You take showers and brush your teeth, right? Find time to do that? Why? You can’t stand not doing it.

1:00:58 The biggest issue most people have is they’re just addicted to their stress, they’re addicted to that thing. I’m not saying they’ve got to shoot up stress, they’re just willing to tolerate that. You know, if the good fairy showed up and disappeared, everybody’s email backlog right now is zero. In three weeks, everybody had pretty much the number they currently have. It’s not about volume, it’s about how many things you’re comfortable not capturing, clarifying and organizing before you do something about it.

1:01:23 Some people have 3,000, some people have 300, some people have 30, I’ll have none. There’s never none because there’s always stuff coming in. I don’t take a shower 24 hours a day, but once a day, I clean up. And the same thing with all that stuff coming in. So changing, sort of raising the bar in terms of how much uncaptured, unclarified, unorganized, unreviewed stuff are you willing to tolerate because the bigger that volume is, the less you’re going to be able to deal with surprise.

1:01:53 Back to our earlier topic. So that’s why when I’m not doing anything else, I’m cleaning up because I got something coming toward me. I can’t see. And when that hits, I want a smaller backlog of uncaptured, unclarified, unorganized stuff so that I can have a clear head and be very present with now how to deal with that new thing coming at me, no matter what it is. Are some people always busy being busy?

1:02:18 Yeah. Yeah. And that is because maybe they’re addicted to that stress. But also without the stress, sometimes their mind gets to expand and think about things that they don’t want to necessarily deal with. Well, the busy trap is- And I’m guilty of this too sometimes.

1:02:32 Yeah, the busy trap is usually because you’re feeling out of control and unfocused. And if I work harder, faster, longer, I’ll get off my own back. Sorry, that’s my experience with that. Yeah, which is a lie to yourself pretty much. Yeah.

1:02:50 And sometimes there’s nothing wrong with being very, very active, as long as that’s okay with you, and as long as that’s what you need to do, but we know now, and again, this is a lot of new cognitive science stuff of the last decade or so that showed up that says your brain had better rest, otherwise you’re gonna sub-optimize your cognitive process. If you’re not taking a nap in the afternoon and getting eight to nine hours of sleep a night, you’re not as smart as somebody who does, simply because that rest and relaxation is critical for the brain to move into its archiving function, which has to stop this conscious mind thinking. So even if it’s just every 90 minutes, you get up and walk around and go have a cup of coffee or just go out and smell the air or something like that.

1:03:32 Just daydreaming is great stuff. I used to think, well, I like sleeping a lot. I sleep as long as I can and I thought I was just lazy. Now I’m just, no, I’m just now smart. You’re archiving.

1:03:44 I’m archiving, dude. But it is how you learn because without that, then all that new input is lost, right? if you don’t have that rest. Yeah, yeah, it is. I guess it’s not optimized.

1:03:58 A friend of mine now, Theo Compagnole, who’s a brilliant guy in Brussels, who’s a practicing psychotherapist and psychologist and an executive coach now, has written a great book called Brain Chains. And a lot of it is about, he’s curated 650 of the major cognitive science research papers and projects that have been going on and sort of curated all that into this book. And it’s a whole, it’s kind of a big rant about the fact that, you know, kids are not letting their brain go very deep because they’re staying, you know, in the social media game.

1:04:31 And that people are not giving themselves the permission to do what they need to do so that their mind is as fresh as it needs to be. I mean, you wrote the book in 01. You know, it got re-released in 15. I mean, the last five years, technology has changed the game with people. What do you see now technology doing besides what you just said, and can there be helpful ways that that technology can get us to GTV better?

1:04:55 Or is it something that we really have to look out for, for attention spans, for brain function? There’s not much new under the sun. Right, I’ll kind of push up against that thought. I mean, the word processor changed the game. So did spreadsheets and relational databases.

1:05:11 Those were game changers. We think differently. We act differently because of those. Because of those. Everything else, for the most part, is just speeding up and volume.

1:05:21 Right, but also sapping our attention. Well, that’s the speed and the speed and the volume is what will do that. And as that last count, there were over 300 apps that had been built around the GTD process, not mine, but they just said, hey, all I need are lists. So there’s hundreds of now list managers out there. So, hey, get a good list manager.

1:05:42 And so those are helpful, those are nice. I use one. But I know some high-tech people that are going back to paper planners. Because a paper planner actually, in a way, works better to map to how your brain likes to see an overall context and gestalt of all your agreements. Because you can flip and see the pages against each other.

1:06:03 You can tie them against each other. And I’ve got a Thunderbolt screen in front of me, and I still can’t, with that big real estate, I still can’t see what I can see with a paper planner. You know, in a flash. and it’s also in your face and tactile. There’s no perfect system out there, but I haven’t seen it, and I’ve made two attempts with some very smart people at two different times in my career to see if we could build a real GTD app.

1:06:29 Neither one worked. We could build it. There is technology to build some really cool stuff, but there was no market for it. People still keeping their stuff in their head. Why do they think they need some complex or sophisticated tool to not do that?

1:06:43 There’s still no market for it. Well, there’s a small market for it, I think. Well, I think where technology is going, and it’s going in a cool direction. I love anything small, black, and high-tech, and expensive I want. I’m kind of an end-user geek, at least in any way in that way.

1:07:00 But I think where the world is going and where it will go that will support this a lot is decision support. So it was probably pretty easy for you and your staff to do a bunch of research about me pretty quickly. That’s decision support. So the ability to be able to have information at your fingertips in the way you want it, the way you want to see it, and that can get much more sophisticated. I think some AI may be going in that direction in a cool way and says, gee, Brian, every Friday afternoon by 2 o’clock you tend to want to go and have a beer, would you like one now?

1:07:36 Because you tend to have some really good ideas after you have a beer and you’re ready for a beer, you know, and then you go, yes, and the refrigerator opens and it comes out and pours it on the glass. I don’t know. And so that’s how tech could help also this GTD system as well. Yeah. Well, GTD is really about decision support anyway.

1:07:54 What do you decide to do? Well, let me look at an inventory of all the different things that are my options. Right? Right. You went out for errands.

1:08:01 What do you want to look at? How about all the errands you’ve ever said you need to do? That’ll help. Okay. That’s decision support.

1:08:08 But really all GTD is creating the appropriate maps. It’s just that in the future, you’ll walk in the room and say, David Allen, I’ll show up as a hologram. With all the connections you’ve ever made to me before, you’ll be able to go tap that and see where that goes and tap that and see where that goes and you’ll be able to integrate all that. But you were able to program how you wanted to see all that and where that data came from. So fairly recently, I worked with a company for three years, a really sophisticated group of tech folks to see if there was a new technology ready to be able to handle that kind of thing, what was new and what can happen out there.

1:08:45 The problem is you don’t need one app, you need a dashboard. If we could build one app that handled your email, your calendar, and everything else so that you could put it all in one database and then be able to then curate that however you wanted to see it and bypass programmers to be able to do that, that’s what these people were sitting on as a technology. But the problem is, if you’re trying to build a dashboard like that, you’re not going to give up Evernote or Dropbox or WhatsApp. You’re not going to give those up. You’d love to have something that integrated all that.

1:09:18 But as it is, you’ve got to be pretty labor intensive about which one of those you go look at and do what with and where do you put what. You’re still going to have to do that. So the future might be, and I think probably if you had enough money, you could build what I’m talking about right now. But again, who thinks they need that? Right.

1:09:34 So who’s gonna fund it? Right, but maybe someday that would be the ultimate integration device. Yeah. And would simplify all of our lives, potentially. Potentially. Potentially.

1:09:43 Do we cover all the steps here? We could capture, clarify, organize the reflect, engage. Well reflect means, what map do I need to look at and what horizon to feel comfortable about what I’m doing? When’s the last time you looked at your strategic plan? When’s the last time you talked to any life partner you got about what you’re doing with your life and your career and your lifestyle?

1:10:00 When’s the last time you looked, talk to your boss or your staff about your job description and theirs. So there’s a lot of these maps that you might need to look at to make you feel a lot more comfortable. So review can take on a review every few minutes what’s on my calendar. They review every hour or so, the WhatsApps and the messages that I’ve gotten on my phone. It may be every two or three days I need to look at my calendar for the next three or four days, see where I’m going.

1:10:26 It could be any of those multiple horizons that we’ve identified that you have these commitments at. So then you just need to make sure you’re looking at which map I need to see at the right time so that some part of you doesn’t feel anxious that you might be missing something. So building a map room is essentially what GTD is. And that’s the reflection process. And then step five is just, I want you to look at what you’re going to look at, what are you going to do?

1:10:51 Going to have a nap? Going to have a beer? Going to write a business plan? You want to what? What do you do?

1:10:56 Activities and your thought and your focus based upon an analysis of that Gestalt. Okay. I like the weekend review. That’s a powerful day. Oh, huge.

1:11:08 Do you do yours on Sunday? I do mine whenever I feel like I need to do it, and that’s usually about every seven days. Okay. Okay. I don’t have weekends.

1:11:17 Weekdays. It’s all kind of the same thing. Yeah, but it’s a nice time just to kind of look back and just give yourself a report card on what’s going on. What did I ignore? What probably is important?

1:11:27 What’s not important anymore? Yeah. It’s important. And the seven-day thing, several years ago, and I forget the source of it, but I read that your brain, if you tried to remember what went on in a meeting, as long as it wasn’t longer than about seven days ago, you can recreate that very well. You let it go seven or eight or nine days, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, Because your brain tends to dump a lot of that peripheral contextual information every seven to eight or nine days apparently.

1:12:00 So there is a good reason to build in a kind of a weekly, you know, bring up the rear guard kind of an event, you know. So we’ve just found that over the years and, you know, that’s what makes this stuff stick. You do a weekly review like you’re talking about. Your system will grow and expand and be rich and creative. You don’t, you’ll fall off this wagon.

1:12:21 What’s the two-minute rule? Yeah, once you figure out what a next action on something is, if you can do the thing in two minutes or less, you’re just a lot more efficient to do it right then. It’ll take you longer to track it and look at it again than to finish it when it’s in your face. And technology has probably definitely helped with that in 20 years because, I mean, you can do a lot of things in two minutes now. You know, send the email to the personal trainer.

1:12:42 That’s true. Book the hotel maybe in two minutes. There’s less excuses. It’s true. It’s true.

1:12:48 And a lot of people mistake that, well, God, if I did that, I’d spend all day doing two-minute things. I go, I don’t have the backlog of two-minute things. They were done when they first showed up. And a lot of two-minute things are quite strategic, by the way, once you figure out your next action on something. Many times, those are very quick things you can do.

1:13:06 And usually, the two-minute rule comes in the one to two hours a day that I’m actually processing input. I’m not stopping my work when I’m doing work. We’re not stopping this to do two-minute things. doing this right now. It’s just that whenever you and I go back and kind of, okay, I need to catch up on email or whatever, that’s when I’m gonna be handling the two minute stuff and getting them out of there.

1:13:31 Right, yeah. And how have things been the last 10 or 15 years? I mean, since you wrote the book, I know that at one point your company was growing and then you said, you know what? I kind of want to contract it. And I went to one of your classes here in London And it was some great people teaching your IP, but you weren’t there.

1:13:52 And I was wondering if you could tell us about that journey. Yeah, that was really great. I mean, we decided several years ago, once the book, the first edition, was starting to take off in the different languages, was spreading around the world. Slowly, but it wasn’t going that way. And then we had the choice, because the book was fairly successful early on, that I could have kept this just my own small boutique kind of consulting or my own practice that I just, you know, did myself, maybe a staff person or two.

1:14:26 But then the world is knocking on our door, hey, we need this, we want this, can we do this, or whatever. So back then, I probably had a staff of maybe 15, 18 people back then, and I said, well, look, guys, we have an opportunity to take this to the world if we wanted to do that, but I’m not going to do this by myself. You guys game? You guys want to do that game? this is maybe 15 years ago.

1:14:47 And they said, yeah, yeah, then we thought then the strategy to do that would be partnerships and technology, you know, really the only way because I’m not, I wasn’t that entrepreneurial or aspirational to say I want to build a big company or training company to do this. So being able to leverage it through those means was really our strategy. And so it’s been a pretty tough row to hoe but we’ve kept going with that direction. So we wound up, now we’ve got, fast forward, now we have partners in officially 60 countries.

1:15:18 Now, a lot of those are small countries in a region that there’s just a startup business in that region. So we’re not doing things in 60 countries. But we’ve now certified, I think, 20, 25 master trainers. That’s been our job, really, to certify people that themselves then are certified to train other trainers to spread it in their own languages. All of our master trainers are trained in English, speaking English. So we built that. We were able to do that. We started that about six years ago. And then we were still trying to manage our own coaching and training business in the U.S. This was all outside the U.S. So we kept the U.S. And then at some point we just went, wait a minute, this is just so hard for us to try to do that as well.

1:16:03 Long story short, we wound up running across a great partner that is now the exclusive distributor of our stuff in the US and Canada, VitalSmarts, that does crucial conversations, really, really good stuff and they’re really, really good people. And they took us a while, but we made sure we mapped to the DNA and we trusted that they were going to do a really good job with that. So now we’re global. So now we’ve shrunk ourselves from like 50 people at one point to eight.

1:16:26 So we’re just, now we’re just a, it’s mostly an IP licensing company and a lot of my time and effort is spent now serving just our partners that are themselves working to get traction. So I was just in South America, South Africa last week with our new partner there, spent a whole week. We did some executive lunches. I did some press stuff for them also because there are a lot of pirates for GTD around the world. So a lot of our stuff has been to make sure that our person is acknowledged as the source of the real stuff.

1:17:00 And so that’s been a lot of what I’ve chosen to do and a lot of how I spent my time over the last couple of years is helping sort of just nurture the businesses that are just starting to get traction to spread this stuff. And at one point, you kind of had the wrong CEO and the wrong culture and the wrong DNA. How did you realize that and how important is that for anybody listening when it comes to building a company? Ouch. That was tough.

1:17:27 And he’s a good guy and it didn’t match. I learned a lesson, one of those lessons you learn in life, I allowed myself to be forced to make a decision before I did enough due diligence to really discover what we’re talking about. And I’m not sure that I could have even found that out in that period of time, but paying attention to whether something is disturbing to the culture that you’ve got in a way that’s not taking it in the right direction. And so that was an aha.

1:18:04 And so then I tried to figure out how to run a company myself. One of the reasons I tried to hire somebody, I figured because I don’t want to do it. I’m not the best player for that play. And mostly I was just scared I didn’t know how to do it. So I figured somebody else probably does.

1:18:20 So naive. So okay, how do I run a company myself? So I dug for a year into what’s all the best things I need to learn or read about doing that. I said, but I got a bunch of hip, savvy, smart, sensitive people around me. Can’t they run themselves?

1:18:37 Can’t this organization sort of run itself? And then, I don’t know, four years ago, we’d probably already run across holacracy by that time. But I shared the stage with Brian Robertson on a Conscious Capitalism Conference back in California in 2010. And he talked about this founding, this whole concept of an operational system of self-organizing organizations called holacracy. And I went, oh my god, so I listened to that.

1:19:02 I said, well, I’m going to prove this wrong as fast as I can. Because if it’s right, I don’t want to wait one day and actually start to implement this. And it turned out Brian had been a huge champion of GTD. It’s sort of a religious experience for him. But then he wound up going into his own organization and saying, well, wait a minute.

1:19:18 How come mine like water is getting screwed up pretty fast? Because as soon as you go from one to two people, you’ve expanded exponentially how complex managing commitments is. right, exponentially. So I can have a clear head. You can have a clear head, but you and I, Brian, decide to do something together.

1:19:36 Is that yours? This is mine. What exactly? What? What?

1:19:42 And so being able to then create forms of communication so that organization can start to recognize the tensions and what tensions are showing up in an organization, have those recognized as soon as possible, as rapidly as possible, and then be able to be resolved as effectively as possible, as fast as possible, at as low a level as possible. So that was a lot of the foundation of what Brian had then come up with is building an organizational structure that could create organizational clarity. And that’s what you’ve used to build.

1:20:09 Yeah, that’s what we’ve used. Oh, honesty. We were one of the first organizations that sort of dived in full bore with Brian and his work and that was two, you know, nine years ago. Wow. Any words of advice if someone wants to jump in on that?

1:20:22 Does it take- Just read, just Google holacracy. Does it take in a certain of psychology or honesty with yourself, or lack of ego? No, what it takes is if anybody actually wanted to implement it, somebody has to be in a position of power to be able to give up that power. So kind of paradoxical, I had to be dictatorial that my company was actually going to do this. But then I had to sign off that I would let the purpose of the company drive the decisions, not my ego.

1:20:49 So you have to be in a situation where the power is willing to give itself to where the power really needs to be distributed. So a lot of it’s about distributing power appropriately. It’s a very, very big fault. Sounds like a trust, like when someone puts a trust with their assets when they’re no longer in control. But you only trust the system.

1:21:07 They have to trust the process. Right. You trust the process, you don’t have to trust the people that much. But as Brian would tell you, people have to do GTD really in order to be able to make holacracy work because each individual then has to be able to take their piece that they’ve taken on and make sure that they manage that so people don’t have to keep holding their hand or clean up after them. Okay, and this has worked well for you.

1:21:31 Yeah, absolutely. You know, you’re a unique guy, David, in that, you know, this whole movement and this business and thing, it never seems to be about your ego and how big can I be and how many people I can be in front of and the billions I can make. You know, you always, you know, this is all remnants of a guy that isn’t the typical guy that writes the book that’s the big seller that wants everyone’s name, then be saying their name. Am I wrong in making that observation?

1:21:59 No, I think that’s pretty right. I was not even comfortable putting my name on the business, David Allen and company, or having my picture on the book. But it was easier to sell a personality than a process. Right. Hi, come on in, be totally accountable for all the commitments you’ve made in your life.

1:22:15 What a sales pitch, I don’t think so. But if I can sort of demonstrate, which I do a pretty good job of, what it’s like to have nothing on your mind, be kind of relaxed. People meet me and they say, God, you’re nothing like what I thought you’d be like. I thought you were gonna be anal, retentive, and OCD and all that. And that’s hardly my style.

1:22:37 So a lot of it, I think, is kind of the, the medium is the message to some degree. And we actually started to change. In the early days, in the first edition of the book, and a lot of our work all came out of the corporate world So we kind of made ourselves look corporate. So we kind of would fit in and not disturb anybody. But then we started to realize, especially with a later edition of the book and so forth, that we just needed to be more honest and authentic about who we were.

1:23:07 And then just let the world come to us, that want to come to us, being who we are. So our website changed, it got more relaxed, I got more relaxed, I barely wear a tie unless I’m in Russia or somewhere. So that was kind of a change that went along there as well. And yeah, no, those are not my key drivers. Right, and never really have been.

1:23:30 I mean, I like a nice lifestyle. That’s fun. And it’s fun to kind of win at this game, to do that. But that just doesn’t turn me on. What do you say to the people that are watching or listening that are the housewife with the three kids, the 14-year-old girl, this is my stepdaughter I’m talking about, the 10-year-old boy The grandpa out there who’s already retired who says yeah, this isn’t for me This is for these other types these type a personalities blah blah blah. What do you say to them?

1:24:02 Well, I usually don’t talk to those people because they don’t talk to me, you know, so I just tend to go where people recognize that they might want to do this, but this is eternal stuff You know, we’ve got we’re teaching 9 10 11 year olds this now. So, you know, it’s it’s something The same principles, and we just came out last summer with the GTD for Teens book. And it doesn’t step down this information at all. It just puts it in, frames it for them.

1:24:31 A CEO comes back from a board meeting, they need to empty their briefcase with all the notes they took and the business cards they collected or whatever, the receipts they need to hand off to somebody or whatever it is, nine-year-old just needs to empty his or her pack. Make sure that mom gets the note that she needs to sign as opposed to it slip through her crack and she sees it two weeks late. Same principle, right? Just a little different application of it, a little different content.

1:24:57 But the kids get it. They get it. Do you think this will be taught in school someday? Because when you described this process earlier about 40 minutes ago, you just thought to me, this seems like, I mean, maybe I’m a little crazy here, David, but this seems like a human right to know how to do this. Yeah.

1:25:13 And I think it’s just getting more and more so. That’s why the new edition of the book was really expanded. I didn’t change the methodology, a little more subtlety to it that I put in in my understandings of it. But it was mostly to expand it to a much broader audience. I knew early on this worked for the clergy, it worked for doctors, it worked for kids, it worked for students, it worked for grandparents, it worked for anybody.

1:25:34 Anybody that’s got a busy life that wants to have a clear head and more space to do more cool stuff. So just who’s in that category? If they’re not, hey, come on, there’s enough people who are. Why leave America, and what’s it like living in Europe? We wanted to get out of America just for a reason that America is quite America-centric, as you know, and for good reason.

1:25:57 It just seems far away from the rest of the world a lot, and we kind of wanted to be out there. Catherine, my wife, had never lived outside the country. She wanted to kind of get a change of pace. We saw people a little slightly older than us who were looking a lot more sedentary than we wanted to be. We were both active and healthy.

1:26:14 We said, come on, let’s throw the dart and have another adventure. You know, what the heck? So we looked around where we wanted to be. We wanted to be on the continent. And we’d been to Amsterdam two or three times and loved the city.

1:26:25 So we sort of threw the dart and said, let’s do Amsterdam. So we did. And we loved it. We were still there. And five years later.

1:26:31 In your 60s, you do this. You throw a dart. And how many people do that in their 60s? Or they throw the dart into Florida. Yeah.

1:26:37 Yeah, maybe. Well, Amsterdam is a terrible place. You never want to come and stay away. What’s been the biggest surprise with leaving America and going there, both good and bad? Biggest surprise.

1:26:54 Not much because I’ve traveled so much the world in the last 20 years anyway, in 25 years. So I’ve kind of been around a lot. And I discovered people are people pretty much anywhere. It was more probably a surprise of how cool the Dutch are, just as a culture, how cool the country is. I mean, everybody’s got problems and everybody’s got weak suits to all that, but the place really works.

1:27:18 And right now especially, I guess maybe we were just intuitive, I consider Amsterdam and even the Netherlands as a country a real oasis right now of openness, global thinking. You know, there are 172 nationalities that live in Amsterdam. You walk down the street and it’s everywhere. There’s a much more integrated, and it comes from 600 years of being merchants of the world, the Dutch are just like that. I have a mission, basically our mission of GTD is to have a world where there are no problems, only projects.

1:27:52 And talk about a problem, water and the Netherlands. Talk about projects, ain’t anybody come close to what the Dutch have done to build You know, as somebody said, you know, a great saying is that, you know, God made the world and the Dutch made the Netherlands because there was no land, you know. So they built a non-feudal society by doing that, you know, and it just really works. You know, it’s very practical. We haven’t had a car in five years.

1:28:18 We walk, we bike, quality of life there is great. Kids are out there with their parents, you know, spend time. They actually relax. They’re not working 80 hours a week. Tell me about this event because you are not a guy that regularly does events.

1:28:32 You did one a while back and I think this is in a similar vein or similar thought, but this is big. You got a lot of people coming to town and why do this now? I don’t know. I just had a hair up my ass, I don’t know. Damn idea capture.

1:28:47 It was just crazy. Well, there was some practical reason for it. I mean, 10 years ago we did this to sort of solidify the brand and GTD against all the pirates that were going on out there, a lot of people. So we needed to kind of put a stake in the ground to say, guys, GTD is coming from this source. And just raise the flag and see who would salute, and we had 35 really cool presenters and about 350 people that came in San Francisco.

1:29:14 And that was 10 years ago. And it just sort of occurred to me now that GTD is a much more obviously a global movement that you’re not going to stop. And we have all of these great partners, and they’re just lovely folks, and some of the coolest people you’ll ever meet, that helping support them and also give them the strength of the brand globally. And so give an opportunity for them to come together and hear. And also a lot of the people that were the foundation of GTD.

1:29:42 So my mentor, Dean’s going to be there. My partner, Russell’s going to be there to speak. Just lots of cool folks. I sent out invitations to sort of my A list of people that I would love to have speak or present there, be on a panel or do a keynote or host a roundtable or something. And we got oversubscribed almost immediately.

1:30:03 People on their own dime are coming, you know, cool folks, Marshall Goldsmith, Jim Fallows who writes for the Atlantic, Katie Coleman who was one of the first women astronauts. She got coached while she was on the space station. By you? No, by my head of coaching, by Meg Edwards. In GTD while she was on the space station?

1:30:21 They had to stop when she got on the other side of the planet because they kind of lost communication. Anyway, Katie’s great. And these are, by the way, not only are all these friends, but they’re all GTD champions. Every one of them. Daniel Pink as well.

1:30:34 Daniel Pink has been one for years. Yeah. Yeah. He’s been on the show a couple times. Yeah.

1:30:39 Dan’s a great guy. Yeah. I was having dinner with Dan in Washington and he said, David, I have to show you this. And he went running upstairs and he came down with a cassette series that I had recorded That God, you know, it’s only five years before whatever like eight cassettes and he said it’s funny He showed it to his daughter and she picked these up. She says what’s this?

1:30:59 A cassette tape what what is that? You know, that was funny Well, Dan’s a good guy and so it’s gonna be a two-day event Would you get also it’s a great at people in the room lots of great ideas and also, you know an underlying GTD focus Yeah about this. Yeah, and and not just that but that because that’s a common denominator nominator these people will be talking about a lot of things. They’re all being invited to say what do you want the world to know right now? What do you think is important for people to know? And there’s Robin Scott, who lives here in London, a great lady. Look her up. She’d be a great person for you to talk to. I grew up in Botswana and she’s running incredible projects in Africa as well as working with executives here in London.

1:31:43 And she’s a big GTD fan and practitioner too. So again, a great range of people are going to be there, mostly just the networking is going to be, because anybody who would come to this conference, and we were expecting maybe a max of 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 people out of the facility could handle that. I don’t know if that many people will come, but we’re already pretty well down the road in terms of subscriptions for it, so that’s nice. Yeah, and it will have anybody who’s coming there, because they’re coming there, you would want to probably have a conversation with anybody else in that room, just because of their attraction to this to begin with.

1:32:22 And they’re coming from, you know, they’re coming from Moscow, they’re coming from China, they’re coming from Australia, they’re coming from all over the world. Is this gonna be a regular thing? No. Okay. No, no, no.

1:32:34 As soon as I told Catherine, I said, God, you know, I really think it’s 10 years, that would be kind of a hallmark event. She said, do another summit. I said, yes. She said, oh. Oh.

1:32:46 Yeah. Because again, it’s not something that I want or need to do regularly. And I just thought this would be, being 73 right now, I thought that’s probably, I doubt that I would even have the juice or have the interest in necessarily doing another one. Because I think this will be enough of an event to just put a big stake in the ground for the next hundred years. Okay.

1:33:07 Ten years from now, at 83, what’s David Allen doing? Oh, yeah, I don’t know. Really don’t know. I don’t have any goals like that. Probably not, probably still doing what you like doing, painting or whatever.

1:33:19 I just like doing what I like doing. Yeah, I just started painting, you know, so that’s kind of fun to do. And my wife and I love good food and drink. We love traveling places that are pretty to go to, that every time we go somewhere and come back to Amsterdam, we say, ah, so glad to be back to Amsterdam. That’s a good sign you’re in the right place.

1:33:34 Yeah, yeah. What’s something you do every day that’s just not negotiable, something that keeps you where you wanna be. 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.

1:34:10 It’s nice to be able to do things that produce that kind of result without having to stress too hard about. Yeah. What scares you? Hmm. I can’t, nothing comes to mind right now.

1:34:25 Let’s see, let me, if something were to scare me, what would it be? Aside from having the tubes stop in here in London. What scares me?

1:34:42 I don’t really have, I can’t think of anything that scares me. Are there things you feel like you still need to do on this level of consciousness? I think so. Yeah, I think maybe that’s probably the things that scares me that what would scare me the most if I were to get scared would be getting bored, you know, kind of having done it. Just writing the book was a big milestone in my life to be able to get what I had learned and what I figured was valuable information for the planet into some sort of virtual form that people could pick it up without me being there.

1:35:21 And that was a big mouse because I didn’t know I could do that. And once I’d done that, I said, you know, I’m done, or could be done, you know. But then I said, well, God’s not finished with me yet, so, hmm, well, let me spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to distribute this to people and get it to stick, which are not my areas of expertise. So, you know, we’ve now incorporated and partnered with instructional designers and all kinds of people to help, so the training you experienced here was a result of not my instructional design, but some smarter people than me that knew how to do this and knew how to take this to some other levels.

1:35:56 So some part of me, it may be if all that got so much under cruise control, then I go, well, what’s next? Maybe I would just get bored, but that hasn’t really happened yet. Every once in a while, you get a little tinge of that, and that’s kind of scary. Right, right. Yeah, it is a detailed system.

1:36:09 I mean, I went to that class in London, and I mean, we talk about these five steps, but you can go real deep on the GTD for sure. What would we be surprised to learn that David does in his spare time? Besides that you’re an introvert. And by the way, I think a lot of great introverts should force themselves on stage. I’m quite introverted as well.

1:36:28 So I kind of like go home and recharge a lot as well. What would we be surprised to learn about you? Probably how much I love doing Ikebana. You know, Japanese flower arranging. Really?

1:36:43 Yeah. Wow. How long have you been doing it? One of my favorite. Oh, for several years.

1:36:47 I did bonsai for a couple years when I lived in Ojai in California. But that’s a big job. you’ve got to manage that, and Ikebana’s a lot more temporary, so I didn’t have to, you know, it’s just a thing to do, but I absolutely disappear, you know, when I go out and do stuff like that, and just finding just the right shaped flower thing. My wife and I are big Japanophiles, so we love Japanese vases and, you know, wabi-sabi, you know, slightly edgy things, and minimalist kind of things.

1:37:25 And the painting that I’m doing has that sort of style to it now, too, so. And what does that process look like? Do you have to go out and shop for the flowers, then you come home and then you arrange them? Well, you don’t have to walk very far in Amsterdam to have tons of flowers all around you. I mean, there’s a flower stand on almost every corner, at least around where I live.

1:37:45 And so that’s neat. And so, yeah, I just go find something that’s kind of fun and pretty, and then I come back and say, okay, where does this go? I usually get myself a good glass of wine while I’m doing that and work on getting it just right, tuning it just right, putting it just in the right place where it needs to go. And when it’s done, do you take a picture? Sometimes.

1:38:06 And you show, or do you present it to your wife? Sometimes. Or is it sometimes just there? No, it’s just that we both enjoy it, both enjoy that. Every once in a while, I take a picture, it’s on Instagram.

1:38:15 Wow. Have you ever lived in Japan? No. Been there three times. Okay, and we have a very close friend who’s he’s now retired But he has been one of the top tour guides for Japan. He lives there with his Japanese wife He’s American, but he speaks Japanese. Absolutely. He’s been there for many years and he knows he’s the top was the top anyway Arts and crafts and architecture got tour guide for all of Japan So he knows a lot of the masters of that and knows where to go and so we go with Steve and you know It’s great I’ve been there two or three times with him and then been around the country and been able to see it Sort of from the inside which is a really a nice way to see Japan I went when I was 12 years old and stayed with a family and oduwara and knew my mind Oh, it’s just such elegance in the ordinariness of what they do. Yeah, I mean they’re just such thought I mean after my first or second trip there. I said no wonder they thought we were barbarians as we are compared to a lot of the simplicity, the elegance, the caring, the consciousness that’s put into just even some of the simplest things in that culture.

1:39:17 Yeah, a lot of integrity, a lot of custom, and yeah, a lot of honor. These kind of invisible rules that you pick up when you’re there and you’re like, wow. I remember trying to tip, I tried to tip someone at the hotel like 10 times and it was just, it was not happening. Yeah. Our tour guide actually, we were on the shinsan, the fast train, and he, by mistake, left his laptop on the train, right?

1:39:44 And got off, realized, oh, my God, it was on the train. He called, made two calls. It was on the next stop for him. They don’t steal Japanese tourists. The tour guides anywhere else in the world hate it when Japanese tourists show up because they’re so trusting of the world.

1:40:01 Anyway, you know, we’re probably over-blowing the culture because every culture’s got It’s up and downsides, but those were all things that we, the Katharine Eyeboats, just resonate with a lot. What keeps you awake at night? I mean, you read the news, you see what happens in the world. Is there anything that does? No, I sleep, I love to sleep.

1:40:22 I have no trouble sleeping. Okay. And what do you think about the politics of this world and where we’re at as a society? Oh, gosh. Because you’re a deep guy.

1:40:33 I don’t know, I don’t know. I think being a history major, everything goes in cycles and so there’ll be corrective swings no matter what happens. I just hope that nothing too disastrous happens in the swing that we’re in right now in terms of the retreat, reactionary, fear-mongering, retreating that a lot of the countries are doing now. So that’s not the most fun to pay attention to. So hopefully that will change and the new world order will rear its head again.

1:41:10 But does your knowledge of history make you feel comfortable that it is a cycle? Well the first law of spirit in my experience is acceptance. So I just as soon accept what’s going on in the world and do the best I can to just keep putting positive vibes and do what I can to assist people to be better at it. At one point, people were questioning why at a certain stage, my partner and I were doing a lot of this kind of training in the aerospace industry in the US.

1:41:46 People building bombs and jets and all that kind of stuff. People said, do you feel uncomfortable about that? I said, you know, quite frankly, people do as much damage and a personal relationship with each other as even wars do to people. So I said, pick your battles, if you will. And also I discovered in the longer term, just philosophically I guess, or maybe spiritually, I figured if I can help people feel more in control of their life, more stable, then that will minimize their interest in doing those negative things.

1:42:22 Because in my experiences, most people, actually anybody, kind of like I never met them, Will Ruggler never met a man I didn’t like. It’s kind of like everybody’s really got a good thing to them. You and I were talking. I mean, when you sit and connect with people, you find out they’re just people. And so just connecting to the people-ness and letting people get more in control of their own life, GTD helps do that tremendously, getting the driver’s seat again.

1:42:48 And then that builds a lot of confidence of self, and confidence of self will then usually make you a lot freer and more comfortable being as good a person as you really are. Yeah. When I learned Transcendental Meditation, there was the Maharishi, I think, that was teaching it. And they always suppose something called the Maharishi Effect, that if one percent of the population knew this, it would calm everyone down. You think GTD has that possibility as well?

1:43:13 I don’t know. But it’s a nice thought. It’s a nice thought. Well, in a way, people often ask, well, how does GTD affect an organization? I say, well, any one person in an organization gets GTD, it affects every single intersection that person has.

1:43:29 So how many people are you intersecting with, Brian, on a weekly basis or a monthly basis? And so you doing this is going to affect, it’s going to move you up the food chain with every one of those relationships. It doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to do it, but you’re going to be keeping track of what they’re doing you care about and what you have committed to that they care about. And that just builds trust in the relationships that you have with everybody.

1:43:58 And so we watched this happen sort of osmotically. As people start to catch this, it affects their whole ecosystem around them. And when two or more are gathered, that’s really cool. Yeah, we’re gonna have to definitely think about some company-wide GT Implementation here David. I always ask everyone a couple questions at the end I’m gonna ask you if you could pick up Magic phone and ring the 20 year old David Allen who I guess is at Berkeley at this point No, maybe you’re still in Sarasota at this point and give that young man a bit of advice Well, what would you tell him based on who you are now and who he was then?

1:44:32 Relax. Don’t be too concerned about what you need to do, or whether it’s right or not, or whatever. Just keep going. The 20-year-old in me was pretty adventurous anyway. And what would I tell me? I would relax in a bigger way. It’s like just assume that the world is going to be And you don’t have to have all the answers, you know, or be, you know, and, and be more of who you really are, as opposed to what you think people want you to be.

1:45:18 Well, that was something that, you know, all my personal growth training and a lot of that stuff helped train me about later on, but that would be my, my advice. But I think I took, I took that, my own advice, you know, at least in doing that, by getting involved in a lot of that stuff. Was that 20-year-old kind of anxious to get it happening faster? Not really. I was just pretty much involved in whatever it is I put in front of my face to do next.

1:45:51 Not really at my 20-year-old, but I certainly got a piece of advice from sort of my inner guides or counselor at some point in one of those freeway aha moments and epiphanies. I kept thinking, I don’t know what I need to do with my life and should I do this Or should I do that and should I do that and it’s this still small voice just popped into my head said David Do not worry about what you need to be doing in your life You have created so much in this life and many others that you don’t know about All you need to do is deal with what’s in front of you presently with as much elegance and excellence as you can and the next Thing will show up automatically and I’ve never really gone back from that When did you get that that thought that was probably in my that was probably in my mid the late 20s That’s powerful.

1:46:37 Yeah. Very powerful. And that’s a lot of what GTD does for me. Let me just deal with this with elegance and finish this as much as possible. Not perfection, just excellence.

1:46:50 Do that as best I can and make this the best spaghetti I could make right now. Make this the best painting I could make right now. Not the best in the world, but the best I can do right now. And as long as I’m at that level of at my own best at whatever it is that I’m doing and just complete it You know as best I can or call it finished whenever I need to the next thing is gonna show up and it always has Are there future lives coming down the pipe? I in a way. No, my spiritual work is basically getting off the planet So I would love for this to be unless there’s a reason to come back You know and do other work. What does that mean off the planet? Oh Oh, it means, literally, when I leave this body, I don’t come back.

1:47:35 Not as a human. Or not ever. Whatever. Not ever. There are many other worlds, believe me.

1:47:41 Right. I do believe you. I’ve seen a few of them, I think. It’s funny, I had an ayahuasca ceremony in Costa Rica last summer, and what you were describing earlier, as far as not being in my head, thinking about all of the things, It’s kind of one of the things I feel like happened during that ceremony and allowed me to think about all the possibilities, to open my brain up to all of these ideas and truths about the world. And it’s an amazing space where it does that pharmaceutically or whatever it is.

1:48:16 And yeah, it kind of described that ultimate GTD state. Interesting. On that same note best advice you’ve ever received could have come from the martial arts instructor or you know One of these partners over the years or anyone, but something that really stuck to you or something that came to you perhaps I It’s hard to it’s hard not to just say let go and let God You know since control is sort of the master human addiction let go Don’t try to hang on you know and because it’s it’s all good Final part to that 20-year-old that’s watching us, listening to us right now, you know, born in a different world than you and I were, but maybe not.

1:49:02 Advice to them, things that they should think about with their own lives right now where they are. I would say start to pay attention to when time disappears for you. What are you doing? What was your experience? When did you show up?

1:49:20 Would you say, God, if I could just have that kind of experience, what was that? And look around, not waiting to have it just show up again, but ask yourself, what could you do now in the world that you’re in that might give you at least a little more of that consistent experience? What’s your fantasy? And, you know, be a rock star, be a, you know, create great software, run the world, I don’t know, whatever fantasy is and say, what do you think that would give you as an experience?

1:49:54 A sense of completion, a sense of power, a sense of expressing myself, a sense of service, a sense of whatever. Say, well, great. What could make you feel more powerful now? What could give you a sense of better service now on a consistent basis? And start to go for that.

1:50:13 That was advice I got a few years later that was extremely powerful for me. Hmm It’s powerful advice. Think of that time where you felt in control maybe that was in that flower ranging moment or the athletic moment or wherever and then try to Engineer more of that in your life and be conscious about that. Yeah And you know, who are you who is that go for it Amazing conversation. Thank you so much for coming David for people who want to find out more about your stuff and the conference It’s all on your website, is that right?

1:50:48 Yeah, gettingthingsdone.com. Go to the conference, it’s gtdsummit.com. Four years ago, you were here, and what happens to me is I get to see a lot of people in my job, and so I have a certain amount of bandwidth, flexible but not perfect, as you would say, and when they make an impression on me, I go deeper, and that’s what you did. So I went deeper on the GD mindset. I went to one of your courses here in London, which really opened up a big rabbit hole for me very well-instructed, by the way.

1:51:18 And I started implementing these things into my life and I tell everyone about them and students and trying to tell people about this stuff all the time. So thank you for that because it’s, and I still have got a ways to go, but it’s really helped me a lot in that process. And I know a lot of people really enjoy you and everything you’ve done. So thank you for being you and just leading your life the way you lead it as well. I’m always impressed when I see you uprooting and going to Holland, because I just know so many people that would allow, I have family, or this to this, not to do that, and I’d like to think I can do that in my 60s, or the rest of my life, where I can just pull up and say, hey, let’s go for a new adventure, and it’s really inspiring, so thank you very much for all that stuff, David.

1:51:58 And thanks for the conversation, Brian. These are wonderful and great fun. There are a few people are interested in tapping some of the more subtle levels of both me and this work, so I appreciate that. My pleasure, I learned a ton about you that I didn’t know about, and I would love to hang out with you for about five years in the 60s for sure, so I do some martial arts as well. But all the best for the conference and with everything else you continue to do and I hope to stop by and see you in Amsterdam sometime.

1:52:23 Thanks. All right, thank you, sir.