Focused - 156: The State of GTD

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Inspired by a Cal Newport article on Getting Things Done, David & Mike go through an audit of the (in)famous productivity system.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hello, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Good. Good. I am looking forward to talking to you today. I always love doing the Focus show. It's the show where I can kind of get into the hippie productivity stuff that is so important to me, but I never have anywhere else to talk about it.

So I always feel like I show up here a little bottled up. Well, I will nerd out about productivity with you. Yes. And today we have an interesting topic. It was discussed in the forums, but it also kind of came up a year or two ago when Cal Newport wrote a book for the, we wrote an article for the New Yorker. And it's just general, like, it seems to me like there's this growing thing around GTD, you know, getting things done, David Allen's thing, about, you know, is GTD over? And is that no longer a viable system for productivity? And I've just noticed with guests we've had on the show recently that a lot of people will say they started with GTD, but they've moved on to something else. And I just wanted to stop for a minute to consider GTD.

What do you think? I think it's a good idea. And I find myself in the same sort of position as a lot of the guests that we have talked to. same sort of position as a lot of the guests that we have talked to. And I think a lot of people in the forums where I came across GTD and that was kind of the beginning of my productivity journey. That was definitely a tipping point where I embraced the system wholeheartedly and it was the thing that enabled me to do the things that I wanted to do. But over the last several years, I've found myself having this apprehension whenever I think about just GTD as a concept and never really digging into why do I feel that way. And I think maybe it's a little bit because I feel like I have betrayed my first love in a way because I don't follow it verbatim anymore yeah you know that i was thinking about you know because everything to me is star wars right and um you've got star

wars who are fans fans who are like original trilogy the ot that's me yeah i was a kid when those came out then you've got the prequel trilogy kids you've got the animated series You've got the animated series. You've got the sequel trilogy. So there's different eras of Star Wars. And everybody's relationship to this fandom kind of depends on when they grew up. And for me, my original GTD was Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That's the book that blew my mind, right? I think I was a young lawyer or maybe in law school. I don't remember when he released that book, but it was pretty early in my kind of professional career. And that's the book where I'm like, oh yeah, there's a whole world out there of stuff that I can do to be more effective and blah, blah, blah.

So that was my original trilogy. I original trilogy. You know, I think for people older than me, it was probably the Dale Carnegie when friends and influence people, which is a great book about way more than winning friends and influencing people. But, um, the, uh, and then there was the next generation that like GTD was the thing, right? Which is what your generation is, right? That is the wake-up call for a lot of people. Yeah, I love both of those previous books that you mentioned, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

and How to Win Friends and Influence People. Those are both books that I never was familiar with at the beginning of my productivity journey. Well, I knew what they were, but I always heard them referenced by people who were like, oh, you don't want to read that one. Stay away from those sort of a thing. And I think maybe it's just because of the titles. But when I started the Bookworm podcast with Joe Bielek, we intentionally picked those two and read them and got a lot out

of them. And I agree, like how to win friends influence people specifically that's not exactly what you think it is just by looking at the yeah can't judge a book by its by its cover um so i i think that uh there's a whole lot of gold to be mined in in all of these different books but it requires this mindset of you got to take what works for you and discard the rest and gtd and anything really that's packaged as a system, it's tempting to just take it or leave it. This is the system. And I think one of the things that I've kind of discovered about myself and my relationship with GTD over the last several years is that there's a lot of good stuff in there still. And like you said, maybe that was the thing that kind of got me in the the door because that was

popular at at the the time when i was just starting to to dig into this stuff but i think the the overall process for anybody approaching this this whole genre whether it's you know the new one i guess would be like building a second brain by tiago Forte. I think there's a lot of parallels with that and Para and Code now to GTD when it was initially launched. But the advice for anybody going into any of this stuff is take what you can use and discard the rest. Yeah. And see, that's kind of getting back to my Star Wars thing. So I had already learned the lesson from the Seven Habits book. when I first read that book, I summarized the book on a single typewritten page of paper and I taped it on the inside of my lap drawer on my desk. Like, you know, when you, the desk,

the drawer that's right above your lap. So literally every time I opened up the desk to get a pencil, I looked at the seven habits, you know, that's how much I was in. So it's like, there's a religious fervor when you find that first one that sucks you in. For me, it was seven habits for you. It was GTD. I think that there is that religious fervor with GT for so many people. And that's why suddenly there's this kind of like, Oh, wait a second. You know, the, what is it? The King is wearing no it, the emperor is wearing no clothes kind of thing. And that is exactly the reason that you described, where people were adopting this stuff whole cloth.

And for me, GTD was always a set of good ideas, some of which I took and some of which I did not. And I could almost argue that I've held on to more of GTD, even though I never fully adopted it. I feel like I've held on to more of the stuff I did adopt than a lot of my friends who went like all in with it from the beginning. And I do think there is always going to be that. There's always going to be the next big movement and people are going to take it way too seriously and then eventually become disillusioned with it. Because if there's one thing we teach on this show is that there isn't a single solution for everybody and anybody that sells you one, maybe they're selling you

under the guise of, Hey, this is what works for me. That's kind of what we try to do, but that doesn't mean it's going to work for everybody and you're always going to be a little disappointed if you try to adopt something 100 because it's never going to be quite right for you the interesting thing to me about all of the different systems is really what is the outcome that they're trying to deliver and i would argue that the outcome that GTD is trying to deliver is a more engaging way to do the work. Yeah. And I think if you understand that that is the outcome, then how you get there really doesn't matter all that much. But my personality type would be follow all the rules, follow them in order.

So I guess that's kind of why I got sucked into it at the beginning and the major steps where you capture everything that gathers your attention and then you clarify what is all this stuff and you organize it into the proper buckets. And then you figure out what is the next action with this? Do I do it? Do I delegate it? Do I defer it till later? And then finally engage. That's when you actually sit down and do the work. And I remember the first time I saw those five steps outlined and I was like, oh, you don't just start doing something. Wow, that's revolutionary. You think about it before you do it, which now it's kind of like, well, obviously, you know, you ready, aim, then fire, not fire, aim, ready.

Yeah. Oh, I mean, the funny thing for me is if you boil all this stuff down, whether it's Dale Carnegie or, you know, David Allen or Marcus Aurelius in the meditations, they all come down to figure out what's important to you, do more of that and do less of everything else. I mean, that's all of these things are actually, you know, if you were going to boil them all down to a couple sentences, I mean, there's strategies and ways to pull it off, but that's really what all of them are aiming for. It seems, am I being too simplistic, you think? No, I think you're spot on. But I also think that's where maybe we've lost the plot with GTD because people are

holding it wrong. Myself included, where I didn't use it to filter out the things that I shouldn't be doing. I used it to get more efficient so I could do all the things plus some other things. And at the beginning, it provided some relief, right? Because what I really wanted was a little bit more time to spend with my family and not have to worry about working all the time. So if I could finish my work responsibilities quicker, then I could disconnect and have a little bit of time. But what happens is you get more

efficient with the work things and you don't ever develop that filter to say no to the things that you shouldn't really be doing. And your reward for becoming more efficient is that you have more work to do. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. And there is, I think, a piece of GTD that is a legitimate complaint that it does spend a lot of time teaching you how to be more efficient without necessarily questioning whether you're being efficient at the right things. Being more efficient at doing stuff that doesn't matter isn't the right answer. Actually, just doing less of the stuff that doesn't matter is the right answer. And that's not really David Allen's fault. I mean, he told us the 10,000 through the 50,000 foot view, like connect all this stuff to your big life mission, purpose, statement, thingy, whatever. But we didn't do it. We just focused on

the workflow, the system, the diagram of all the different pieces. And when something comes into my world, which path does it follow without ever deciding whether it should be allowed into my world in the first place? Yeah. I mean, it's like the, the analogy I like to use as a sailing ship. If you're in a sailing ship and you're at sea and you're really good at tying knots, but you don't have a compass, you're still lost at sea. It doesn't matter how good your knots are and how trim your sails are. You still have to have a compass, right? And I do think some of these techniques do get you hung up on tying knots and not enough at looking at the compass.

Yeah, I completely agree. So what do we do about this? Well, I want to just take a minute to to defend gtd you know um you know just like people were so excited about it and adopting it like you know like you to you know the full extent and um and giving it too much credence i think you know they weren't questioning enough at the beginning i think the the flip side of that is true now. GTD, in my opinion, is not dead. And it is not an out-of-date concept or, you know, it's not like there's nothing good to come out of GTD at this point for anybody.

I think it's actually got a lot of good ideas behind it. good ideas behind it. And even though the world has evolved a bit, I think that the tool set, like I always like to think in terms of tools, all the little screwdrivers and wrenches that come with a GTD tool set, a lot of them still have a lot of excellent use in your day-to-day life. Even if you're not going to, you know, make 37, was it 37 folders? I forget how many folders was it? 37? 43. 43 folders. There we go. Sorry. Sorry, Merlin. But, you know, even if you're not going to make the folders and follow the, you know, the canon. So I, you know, coming into the show, if you want to know my bias, it's GTD was never the end-all be-all, but it's always been a good tool and it still is a good tool. I

don't think we should just give up on it. I with you and i would say that the uh the problem like i said is that people would myself included try to implement the steps of gtd without understanding the perspective and having the filter of this shouldn't be in the this shouldn't be put into the system in the first place. And that problem, that is harder now than it has ever been just by the sheer amount of information that we have access to in any given day. You have to have a filter. You cannot keep up with everything. I think in some ways FOMO is still the fear of missing out. That's still very real. People deal with this in different ways but in some ways like in certain areas of our lives we completely move past it

just because we've had to it's it's no longer an option to try and keep up with all of the things we have to be selective because there's just so it's exponentially a higher amount of information that we're being exposed to and so we have to be able to say, this is what's important and this stuff isn't and be okay with the stuff that we're not able to see. We can't be completionists anymore. Yeah. And honestly, I think that is the big lesson from this. And that's really the argument that Cal Newport makes.

And I would recommend anybody who's interested in this question, read that article. We're going to link it in the show notes. But the subtitle is How Personal Productivity Transferred Work and Failed To. And I mean, the things Mike was saying earlier about, you know, the focus on getting better at doing things without thinking about what the things are is definitely a, not necessarily a failure in GCD. It's just a, I think it's a productivity system bias that we all bring because honestly the cheap and easy parts are the tying knots, right? You get the little hacks, you get like, I remember, you know, one of the concepts of getting things done, we're going to talk about later in the episode, just the idea of collecting everything out of your brain and putting it on a piece of paper. Man, the endorphins you get from doing that still work.

And it's easy to be doing that stuff but still not thinking about which way is north. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The thing that we've really got to focus on right now is to insert the intentionality and have a filter for effectiveness. I think my mistake with GT at the beginning was simply optimizing for efficiency. We had a whole episode where we talked about what are we optimizing for? So you can't optimize for efficiency. You have to optimize for intentionality or for effectiveness. How do I move the needle in the areas that are important to me? But if you're able to do that, then absolutely GTD gives you the structure, the scaffolding you need, the support to follow through on the things that are important to you.

But it's also a focus on the minutia and not a focus on the result, which is maybe the biggest criticism I've seen leveraged at GTD because GTD affords for the minutia. And I do think that that is a, that can be very helpful to a lot of people who are stuck, but it should never be at the cost of understanding what the result you're looking for is. I get that there are five steps to clean the garage, but don't forget what you're doing is you're cleaning the garage.

That's an interesting point because that's kind of what GTD, I would argue in some ways, was designed to help with is those little things that would fall through the cracks. So if you're going to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks, you have to be able to look at all of the things. And in order to look at all of the things, you really can't have those different hierarchical levels, I guess, where this thing is more important than the other thing. It's really all important or it's not, you know, shouldn't be in the system. But I think what the tendency can be is once it gets in, it's in. And you just have to figure out how to get this thing done without ever asking yourself, should I really be doing this? This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by NetSuite. Go to netsuite.com slash focus for the leading integrated cloud business software suite and get a special one-of-a-kind financing offer.

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has a special financing program for those ready to upgrade at netsuite.com slash focused. So head to netsuite.com slash focused for this special one-of-a-kind financing offer on the number one financial system for growing businesses. That URL one more time, N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E dot com slash focused. And our thanks to NetSuite for their support of the focus podcast and all of relay fm all right so let's get into the nitty-gritty here maybe let's talk about the different pieces of the gtd system and how we're implementing them or not. Yeah. I mean, I thought it would be fun to, rather than look at GTD as a whole, look at what makes up GTD.

And we have a list here. You may have a list differently if you're listening at home. You may think there's other pieces of it that are more important, but we've got our list. And how many of these still make the cut and how do we use them?

And what parts of GTD are left for us you know and i mentioned before the break one of the the mind benders for me and gtd that i had never read before was the what they call it the mental clearing what they call they had a very clever name for it but the idea of emptying emptying everything out of your brain and onto a piece of paper, just kind of getting all of those background thoughts and ideas and tasks that you had into a trusted system, getting everything on the paper and out of your brain. I think he used the RAM versus processing power kind of analogy in the book. I should have read the book again, but you know, I've read it two or three times by now, but you know, this whole idea of a brain dump and, you know,

just getting thoughts on paper as opposed to trying to carry them around in your head. I think it's an excellent concept. I think it's a great exercise. In fact, to me, that's the no brainer of GTD. I think so many people after doing that one exercise, that's where they became believers and got all in. I also think there's a whole group of people that did that one exercise and never did anything else with it, but they still thought they were doing GTD. Because you talk to people and you find, oh, yeah, I'm totally into GTD,

and I've got everything written down. And it's like, but do you have a review? They don't have any of that stuff. They just have the brain dump. But I, um, I think, you know, the brain dump for me was a new idea and it was an excellent one. And it's still one that I use to this day. I really liked the idea of the brain dump, although the activity that you described at the beginning of the whole GTD process. And I agree that this is where the majority of the value came for a. And I agree that this is where the majority of the value came for a lot of the people that David Allen talked about. He shares all these

stories in the book of people that he worked with and he's walking them through this process. And the minute that they wrote everything down, there was this huge relief that came over them because they got it all out of their brain. I could totally understand that. However, I think this is maybe where my system has evolved the most from the canonical GTD because it has been quite a while since I have done a comprehensive brain dump. And to be honest, I'm not sure I really want to anymore. This whole step of capturing, I feel like this is really important and I do capture things still. However, I'm not trying to capture all of it. In fact, I have kind of intentionally inserted a bunch of friction. The things that I capture, I only transfer about 10% of those into something else. I assume that

most of the things that I capture, I should not be paying any more attention to. And I just discard them believing that they're going to come back later if they really are important. Okay. I see that. And that is a lot of like ideas and concepts or like, what are the types of things that you're discarding? Yeah, that's, that's a good distinction. It is a lot of ideas and concepts because a lot of times it's stuff that I'm going to create. because a lot of times it's stuff that I'm going to create. And so I'll capture ideas for focused episodes, for example, or something I want to make a YouTube video of. One of my favorite ways to do that is in drafts when I'm on a run. That's when my ideas usually come.

So I've got a watch complication. I can dictate it and then I bring it back later. I've always got a bank of those things that are ready to go, but there's not very many of them that I action on. Most of them, I jot it down in the moment. I'm like, this is going to be a great idea. And then I look at it later. I'm like, what was I thinking? Well, I'm not sure that you're off the GTT Canon road there. I mean, I think that was, I think david i saw him interviewed once or so i did a video of him sitting at his desk at home and he was like

emptying his pockets and he had like dumb ideas he'd written down on a piece of paper and all these you know various collections he had his canonical inbox sitting there and he was rejecting things at that point as well i'm'm not sure that's exactly outside of what they call GTD. I do think that that's kind of part of it is to write it down, but be willing to reject it. I agree with that. I guess I've just really taken that to an extreme where almost anybody who is, if you were to ask them, are you following GTD? And they say yes. And then we're to look at how many things I capture and how many things I take action from the things that I capture. It's a very small percentage, but I also feel like that's the

thing that makes it really click for me. We had Tiago Forte on the podcast and we talked about building a second brain. And he had a tweet the other day, which I really liked. It said, in order to let the great ideas shine, you need to cut the merely good ones. And I feel like I'm really good at coming up with good ideas and I capture't let the majority of those into the rest of the system where I'm developing these things and spend some more time thinking about them. Just being willing to discard them quickly and trusting that if it's really something that I should be thinking about, it's going to come back. I feel like that is kind of anti-GTD because you want to capture the thing and if it is important, you put it in somewhere so that you don't lose it, right? You got to capture it now or it's gone forever. And I kind of capture it now, but then like, well, I guess it's sort of disposable unless it bounces

back. Then I guess it really is important. Yeah. And I don't really know GTD well enough, I guess, to argue one way or the other. But if that is beyond GTD, I think you are doing it right. I mean, I think you should not be holding on to all the other stuff. What I was thinking about is like, I got sick a few days last week. You can probably still hear it in my voice. And I woke up and started feeling better. And the first thing I did is just empty my brain of like stuff like, oh, I need to get, you know, a show topic for

this podcast, or I need to get this thing done for the labs, or I have to respond to some emails that are important, or like a bunch of stuff that was just kind of starting to tickle the back of my brain that I hadn't really processed while I was sick. First thing I did is get them into OmniFocus, you know, and just like, okay, now they're there. I don't have to think about them. I'll account for those as I work through the day. And that to me still is really good. Now, ideas and concepts are different for me. I don't really track those. When I have an idea quite often, I don't even write it down. I'll think about it for a little bit and say, no, that's a dumb idea. Or, oh, yeah, that's something I want to do. And I'll write it down in Obsidian where I've got a list of ideas I want to cook on. So I have evolved if that's evolution. But for the day-to-day kind of bread and butter stuff I need to do to keep the lights on, I still find this idea of a brain dump of use. I think it's useful. I think the tendency

with a brain dump is just the natural assumption that everything that I am thinking about in some way, shape, or form is therefore important, and I should figure out how to get this thing done. Yeah, that's not true. Yeah, and that's not even really gtd but i feel like that's where you're holding it wrong right if you're not careful that's that's a slippery slope that you can you can uh fall into um one of the things that we did a while back is we put together our input workflows yeah and i actually wrote mine up for my blog and I looked at it prior to recording here today. And I realized this was back in episode 114, so quite a while ago. But the majority of this is still the same. I've got all the different places that inputs come in

and then I figure out from there, what are the different classifications there? Is it an idea? I figure out from there, what are the different classifications there? Is it an idea? Is it information? Is it a task I need to do? And then boil it down. Does it get captured? Really, it's two different places. It's either my fancy notebook or it's drafts, like I mentioned. But then instead of Roam Research being the center of it, now it's Obsidian. And instead of Notion being an additional bucket for team-based tasks, it's ClickUp for the day job. But for the most part, this is still very much intact. And that was kind of comforting to me to look at that. Yeah, I mean, you switch the tools out, but the workflows have not changed.

Exactly, exactly. exactly exactly uh but this is also the application of gtd concepts in my own flavor my own style um this thing once i drew it out i remember when i went through this exercise it's like i could breathe again it's like ah there now i can see all the different vectors where something important might come in front of me. And it's a little bit more convoluted than the standard GTD one. But I think maybe that's just because of the complexity of our digital lifestyle since the book was written too. Yeah, agreed. And there has been evolution. We're going to talk about that with context. I think there has to be an evolution discussion there. But in general, the capture everything principle is something I still use.

And I think you do too, just differently. And honestly, I use it differently too. I've never followed the exact kind of letter of the law as it's put down in the GTD book. the laws it's, you know, put down in the GTD book. But I think this idea of, of trying to not capture things like, you know, do this show planning in your head, uh, is, is a good idea. I think that my brain is ill suited for holding onto things like that. And if I write it down, there's a much better chance of me actually doing it. So I think there's something to this. I agree that the basic principle behind capture is a short pencil is better than a long memory. You're not going to remember it later. So you got to write it down in order to have any chance of doing something with this later. And that part,

I absolutely have embraced. It's basically what you do with those things after you capture them that I think has maybe changed a little bit for me. But I think it still kind of fits under the capture bucket because I'm not really organizing them yet. I'm not breaking the projects into next actions, which is the next one that we're going to talk about. It's still this big collection of all of these things. And then what do I do with this stuff? And I feel like just the percentage of the things that actually get through the next filter is where I have made a lot of adjustments. Yeah. So let's talk about that next step is breaking projects into next actions. And this is something that I think also resonated with a lot

of people. And the way I interpreted this from the books and the various media from David Allen that I, that I read was, you know, one of the big reasons for this is people often get stuck. You know, you say, well, my big project, I don't want to use clean the garage. I think that's too pedestrian, you know, but let's say your next big project is a work project. That's going to get you a promotion or some kind of, you know, or better yet something in your personal life. I, I don't know. I, I didn't think of this in advance, but let's say your next big project is let's say writing a novel. I know that's really overdone, but you know, um, if people get stuck, they say, I want to write a novel. They don't know where to start. And, uh, David Allen, I think even use that example at some point and talked about, you know,

doing the research and making the outline and all of a sudden breaking it down in achievable steps. And then using that as a launching pad in combination with context to suddenly take action on this big goal or this big project. And that's the way to unstick yourself. And I always felt like that was the reason why he did it. Before we get into whether or not we're using this or not, was that your interpretation as well as why he wanted you to break it into pieces? Yeah. If I could restate what you said, I think you've got this big thing, feels monumental. There's no way you're going to take action on this because it just feels so big. And so you break it down into the tiny pieces and then you feel a lot better about, oh, well, this one I can actually do.

Yeah, I don't want to jump ahead too much, but this is one of the areas where I've diverged quite a bit. Yeah, and this never landed with me. I mean, I read it and I said, okay, you know what, that makes sense. If I ever have something that I just can't make progress on, this is a trick that I could use. I could break it into component pieces. But I'll tell you, rarely do I do that. Like when I'm working on a field guide, I don't have, I don't break it down into, you know, record video, do audio dubs, you know, blah, blah. I don't break it down into 20 steps.

I just put an entry in my calendar that says work on field guides. And I already have the outline. I, you know, I know what I need to do. I don't need to go through the process of checking it off. Some of this always felt to me a little artificial, like the people who put things on a task list just so they can feel good about checking things off a task list. I know that's not always the case. There are some things that I do this on still, like when we do a podcast release,

I have a checklist to make sure everything gets done right and so in that case it makes sense to break it down into pieces but largely i don't break things down into pieces i've never that's never been a takeaway for me from gtd and um at this point it's not something i do very often but but you know, like I said, I'm aware of it. I use it when I need it, but this is not a thing where I, I apply ritualistically to my entire task list or project list. Yeah. This is one of the areas where I started to feel like I had broken David Allen's trust because I don't like to break things down into all those individual steps either.

I'm glad you shared that example about the field guides where you just have time blocked off to work on the field guides. I feel like that's kind of the same approach that I've taken. And the more that I study goals versus habits, that just kind of reinforces my belief that I don't really want to script out all the different steps of this project and assign it a due date and all that kind of stuff. I want to be flexible and I want to be able to let my projects evolve. I've found that if I were to define them and break them down into all those individual steps, my natural tendency then is to lock into those steps and I just follow those things and

I check those things off. And you shared an example with like podcast publication where a checklist can be very beneficial, right? But not when, for me, I think it's less beneficial when you're using it to create something. When you're just playing with something, you want to be flexible with it. And any sort of structure that pushes you in a certain direction i feel for me anyways uh works very much against that so i have not done this either um my application of like projects if you want to define them that way i don't even think about them like that is i've got this podcast that we're recording and there's a date that this

has to be published and i've got a single thing in due which is going to nag me to publish it just in case I forget but that's it you know the up until that point I'm going to let my brain just play with the different ideas and we're going to have a time on the calendar for when we actually record but I'm not worried about all the individual steps that are going to go into the planning and the production and the creation of the actual content. Yeah. And I understand why he did this though, because I think there's a lot of people that have big goals like writing the novel and they don't know how to get started. And what he's giving them is a framework to make some progress and get some momentum. But my guess would be that a lot of people that adopted this, that learned

how to build their own momentum, eventually stopped doing this. Because once you have the momentum, I'm not sure you need all this. Yeah, but even the writing the novel thing, because I went through that process when I self-published my first book. And if I would have started with figuring out what the project was going to be and breaking it down, I never would have done it because it would have been too scary. I was fortunately ignorant. I decided I was going to write a book and I had no idea what to do, no idea how to go about it, but I figured, oh, I better just start writing so I get good at that. And I did that for an hour every day.

And eight months later, I had self-published the book. And I feel like that's the advice I would give somebody who is going to tackle that project specifically is don't worry about the outcome. Yeah, it's good advice. Yeah, just sit down and fall in love with the process. I'm sure there are projects where this is the right approach to begin with the end state that you want to achieve and to break it down into all the individual components. But especially when it comes to creating, I feel like that's not the way I would advise people to go about it. Yeah, well, this is one that I never really adopted. So I'm the last one to really defend it. But I think that is a piece of GTD that sounds like neither one of us is really actively engaged with now.

But I will, like I said, I will deploy something like this tactically if I think I need it. But I just don't do it very often. Another piece of GTD that I thought was useful and helpful to people is future planning. You know, getting back to the idea of 43 folders and taking a piece of information or an action item and saying, this is not something that I can deal with right now, but sometime in the future will be the right time to deal with this. So I'm going to plan for it. I think this ties in nicely with block scheduling. And I think it is a habit that is worthy of developing. I agree.

I have to confess that when I read GTD, the whole idea of the tickler file never really stuck with me. So I don't think I've ever really applied this. But I did as I was thinking about this before the episode. I realized that there is one application of this that is becoming very, very common when it comes to email. I'm curious, do you snooze your email at all? Yeah, yeah.

I made fun of it when they first started. I thought it was a dumb idea. And then I did it. I'm like, oh yeah, this works. That is essentially a tickler file. Yeah. Well, I mean, I've had a lot of experience with tickler files. Although I will also tell you when I read the book, the GTD book,

and I saw that he had this thing with setting up 43 folders, I just laughed because I felt like that was so antiquated. And even when I came into this book, it was already a few years old. And I feel like technology raced past GTD very quickly. And that's going to be even more true, I think, with some of the other points we've got in today's outline. But yeah, the other way I use Tickler files is deferred dates and OmniFocus.

Yeah, exactly. So there's different ways that this idea, I think, is very applicable. But the way that it's presented with the 43 folders, which just for people who have no idea what this is, essentially the's presented with the 43 folders which just for for people who have no idea what this is essentially the whole idea behind the 43 folders is you've got 31 folders one for each day in the month yeah and then you've got 12 additional folders one for each month and basically all of the daily folders go inside of the current month so if you want to bump something

out a week you put it in the folder for that day inside of the month So if you want to bump something out a week, you put it in the folder for that day inside of the month. And if you need to not look at something until the end of the year, you put it in the December folder. And so I actually bought the folders. I set up the system. You went all in. I did, but I used it once. I put one thing in one folder one time. And it felt so good setting them up, right? It did. It did. But I think it's interesting that there are like the inbox snoozing

and the OmniFocus deferred dates. Like there are ways that we have adapted this principle outside of the GTD system. And I think you maybe just fall into some of these things. Like I don't need to see this right now. And there's tools that are available that allow you

not to see it until you need to see it. That's the whole idea behind task management systems is it's going to show you the right thing at the right time. We'll probably talk about that when we get into the next one too with context and tags, but I feel like don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I don't do the 43 folders,

but I do kick baby out with the bathwater here. I don't do the 43 folders, but I do kick things out into the future. One of the ways that I do this is simply the calendar. I don't go all in with my calendar. I don't have everything I need to do there. I've got my big new year calendar on the wall behind me with the real important stuff on there for the year. And if there's something I have to do at a certain date, a certain time, it's going to go on my digital calendar. And I guess if my future planning, if you want to call it that, it's really just to put the things on the calendar. And then I'm going to time block my day each day around the things that are on the calendar. And I've kind of adopted, this is kind of getting into review, but the Sunday evening plan your

week, I'm looking at the calendar and I'm seeing all the things that are coming and I have a rough idea of what I'm going to do on what days. But really, if you were to boil it down, there's two components to future planning for me. It's making sure the calendar is up to date. And then when I sit down to plan the day, I work around that as my central source of truth and everything that I am going to try to get done needs to get done around those things. Yeah, I think all that's good, right? And this to me was, at least for me personally, the least innovative section of the book because I'd been familiar with ticklers my whole career.

And this was already a trick I was using. So I don't even really give kind of GTD credit for this, but it's something I was using before I read it and something I still use. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by set up more than 240 powerful apps for one monthly fee. Try it free for a week with the link in our show notes. Getting things done is a challenge that everyone struggles with. One way to tackle it is to make apps for one monthly fee. Try it free for a week with the link in our show notes. Getting things done is a challenge that everyone struggles with. One way to tackle it is to make sure you have the right tools on your computer, and that means having the right apps. The best way to discover new quality apps and get all the tools you need to be successful and productive is Setapp, a subscription for Mac apps. Setapp packs over 240 apps into one.

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application. There's just so many. No matter what productivity problem you're trying to solve or what utility you're looking for, there's an excellent app for that in Setapp. So head over to Setapp.com to try Setapp free for a week. If you like it, pay just $9.99 a month. Once again, that is Setapp.com. Let them know you heard about it here on the Focus podcast. And our thanks to Setapp for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right, so we've been teasing context for a while now. And this one is one of the most interesting for me in terms of evolution. Like one of the big ideas of GTD is to categorize tasks also by context and with the idea that you can group context, you know, and, and it feels to me like he wrote the book at the tail end of time that

context mattered, you know, because with modern smartphones and computers, context are harder to define, right? You know what I mean? It's not like you're sitting in front of a big IBM machine with a big, you know, cathode ray tube and you're like, okay, now I can do email. The fact is now I can do email at the grocery store if I want to. So a lot of this idea of context, I think, has the lines have been blurred for people. And I think that's one of the big reasons people are frustrated with GTD at this point. Absolutely. And this is sort of a self-inflicted wound, this point. Absolutely. And this is sort of a self-inflicted wound, in my opinion, because I remember when Getting Things Done got updated. And it was talked about in the productivity community. It's being updated. It's going to address current technology. And instead,

all that happened was all the technology references were pulled out of the book. So it's sort of a missed opportunity in my opinion to embrace the digital lifestyle and culture that we find ourselves in. But yeah, contexts specifically don't really work anymore because you can do anything from almost anywhere. Now there are some places where that is not true. I cannot record this podcast from anywhere. Yeah. I guess technically I could, I could pack up my gear and bring it up to door County and we could record an episode there. But for the most part, I know when I'm going to record an episode, I'm going to be in my office. Yeah. But the application of that context, if you want to call it that for me, is simply a

calendar event. And then if I need to, I'll put a location. I don't put a location for focused recording. I know where that's going to happen. And I just inherently know I got to be at home at this time on this day so I can record with David. Other than that, I don't really have any context anymore. Yeah, I agree. And I think this is where a lot of people broke the faith with GTD. It's like context doesn't mean anything anymore. So therefore, GTD is dead to me kind of thing. And I would say, if that's your attitude, take a step back. We tried to break it into its component pieces.

There are things in GTD that are still useful to you. For me, context has evolved. You know, I think software does inform the systems we use. And I continue to use OmniFocus, which, you know, is just a great app for managing tasks, but it was born out of GTD. I mean, it's, you know, OmniFocus started out really as a GTD app, but it has changed a lot over the years to where I'm not even sure that's true anymore. But one of the things they did was they changed the term context into tag. And then all of a sudden, you could experiment with that.

So it's just giving you one more sorting criteria for each task. And it gives you a way to filter your task list down in different ways. Like one of my tags is weekly priority. I have another one called monthly priority. It's just a tag that I put on a few limited projects or tasks each week and month. So I remember what the big things are I want to move this month. And that's not a context, but I'm using the idea of a separate filter on each task to take advantage of that.

I've done experiments with them on energy level, you know, high energy versus low energy. That didn't take for me personally, but I do have some that still kind of work for me in terms of historical context. Like I have one called online banking, you know, online colon banking. And when I go to do the banking, you know, on the weekend, I'll pull up that context and inevitably there'll be something there that like I needed to transfer money to the kid's account or do something that I'd forgot about. But because I go to the context, I've got it sorted. I just pick it up and take care of it. So I actually do find some use for context,

but I'm not, again, religious about it. And if I don't have an appropriate context for a tag, I'm not going to, or a task, I'm just not going to make something up just to have something there. You know, I'm very flagrant with my use of these tags. And sometimes I put them in or I'll put several and sometimes I don't put any in. I agree. Tags are the natural extension of context. And that was a pretty brilliant move when OmniFocus added those, just replaced context with tags. I remember between version two and

version three, people were kind of wondering, like, what are we going to do with context? It's so important in OmniFocus 2. And they just renamed it to tags and made it more flexible. It's like, oh, this is exactly what we need. Prior to that, you get one context and with tags, you can have unlimited tags. Another one that I find really useful is I have one for all the people in my life. I have one for Mike Schmitz. I have one for my daughter. The people I work with and the people that

I interact with, I will put context stuff in there. Like the one with my daughter is a good example. We got a thing in the mail about registering her car. And, you know, when I had time to like do business, quote unquote, with my daughter, I said, Hey, uh, we got this thing here. You got to deal with, you know? And so it's a, um, it's a good way for me to keep track of that stuff without me trying to carry it around in my brain so i i still find

context useful to a certain extent i find tags way more useful like i i would not want a task management system where i couldn't use tag filters because it's just so useful i agree now let me extend this idea a little bit further though because if you're thinking about this from a task management perspective, you've got a task manager in mind. And you're probably familiar with the flexibility of tags that maybe you didn't have with the singular context. But there's another piece of metadata here that is associated with these different things that you need to do, and that is the dates, right? Whether it's a due date or a start date. Yeah. But that is another form of metadata.

Yeah. And so I don't want to talk a whole lot about Obsidian because I know some people are tired of it. that just continually blows my mind and makes me so happy when I am using Obsidian is that, yeah, I've got the tags. Yeah, I've got the dates if I'm using the daily notes. But there's so many other ways that you can use bidirectional links and YAML metadata to connect things

in new and interesting ways. And that's really the beauty of something like tags over context is you have a whole bunch of different things that you can classify a certain way, right? And then you can click on that tag and you can see all the things that are tagged with that specific thing. Well, extend that even further and play with that for a little bit. And you'll see there's tons of different combinations that you can come up with, whether it's status for an article

or in my case, using the DataView plugin rating for the different books that we read for Bookworm. I get an insane amount of joy in figuring out different ways to leverage this metadata. It's the same sort of concept, but this is really the future for this, I think, is defining for yourself how you want all these different bits of information that are attached to these different things that you may or may not need to pay attention to at any given moment and figuring out new and interesting ways to connect them so they surface in the right place at

the right time. And every time they do, it feels magical and you're like wow i can't believe my tool just did that for me yeah i mean i did the same thing with omni focus and that um there is a status flag for each action and project and so every project that like i'm tracking from x sparky is either paused or active you know like a podcast that you and I are planning next month right now is paused. I'm not doing any planning on it. So I can push a button and see a perspective that shows me every active project right now. And then I can use links to, you know, get to the various bits of data that I want on that.

But that is another, that's another criteria. It's another vector. You could also do that with tags if you had an application to use tags you could just have a status tag you know status colon active status colon pause but with omni focus they just turned it into pushing a single button but you can do that in obsidian you can do it you can do it anything and and um i i really think you're right though i mean once you start to slice and dice tasks and that's one of the things that i think i took away from gtd is the idea of getting your task list just down to the stuff that needs to be in front of my face right now i mean that's what

you get from the 43 folders that's what you get from several pieces of this system is like, give me what's actionable right now and don't worry about the rest. And I think any way you can build a system like that, it's a good idea. And you may not be following GTD anymore, but that's still, I think, a legacy of GTD that I think a lot of us are still using. Absolutely. And the same tools are available for any other system. I mentioned building a second brain and how I kind of view that as like the new GTD for a lot of people. And there's a whole PARA method, right?

In terms of projects, areas, resources, and archives. And those could be folder locations. Those could be tags, right? But the tools that we have available to us now and i i gotta be careful here because i don't necessarily recommend that people start with something complex and an extremely powerful and flexible like like obsidian sometimes you just need a structure to start with something basic just add a few tags here and there and let your system evolve from there. But if you are feeling like I was, I guess, about the restriction of a specific system, again, back to what we're talking about

at the beginning, figure out a way for this to work for you and then push the envelope because the tools that we have available to us now allow us to slice these things in ways that we never would have dreamed were possible even five years ago. Yeah. And I really believe that the idea of context and GTD, while it was a good one, it's way too simplistic for what we can do now. And like if OmniFocus still said, yeah, you can have tags, but you can only have one tag and it's a context, I wouldn't be using OmniFocus anymore. You know, you can have tags, but you can only have one tag. And it's a context. I wouldn't be using OmniFocus anymore. You know, I would have moved on long ago.

So the technology can serve us better now than I think it could have when GTD was around. Agreed. My hobby horse of GTD, my favorite, I think this is probably my favorite takeaway from it. Something that I wasn't doing before that I still do, whether you call what I do GTD or not is the review process. And, uh, the idea of a systematized review of active projects to me was such a game changer. This for me was the, you know, was the brain dump. It was like, ah, yes, this is what's been missing for me. And, you know, the GTD canon is to go through all of them every week. I've never done that. I never adopted the way you're supposed to do it. I've always had a way to do it incrementally. With OmniFocus, they have a

built-in mechanism. You know, when's the next review date on each project? Some of my projects get reviewed every six months, not every week, but some of them do get reviewed every week. It just depends what I'm working on and what's hot right now. But having time set aside to go through that review flag to me has saved my bacon more times than I can count. I love this feature. This is the killer feature for OmniFocus for sure. Yeah. I have also never been one to review everything every week. And I felt like I was doing it wrong for a long time because of that. I never really established a good review habit, I think, because of that. of that. However, I compensated for that, I guess, by building my personal retreat framework that I do every couple of months. So every couple of months, I do a giant review of everything and

take stock of all of the different things that I'm committed to in my life. I'm not sure if that's cheating to list that here under the review section, but that's the thing that gives me the clarity to know that these things that I'm looking at in the next couple of days, couple of weeks, couple of months, these are the ones that I should be looking at. Yeah. Well, I find this, uh, this is, this was a takeaway that I, that really benefited me from GTD and it, the further away I get from GTD over the years, I don't think a review process will ever be entirely lost to me. I mean, I just, in fact, I know sometimes when I start to feel like I'm losing track of threads, it's because I haven't been doing review. If I stop and review things, I always feel better afterwards. And I think this is the one I preach about the most because I think

it's easiest to ignore. I think a lot of people who claim to be kind of really into GTD don't do it because it's hard, right? And it's tedious. It's like, why aren't I just working on a project rather than sitting here dragging my eyes through this list and considering you know, considering it and it just solves, but the review process solves so many of the problems that we identified with GTD earlier. It's like, it is in the review process. Often they'll say, Oh wait, this was a dumb idea. I'm not going to do this at all. You know, delete or, or, Oh, wait a second. You know, I totally lost the thread on this one. Or I, I'm going to, you know, turn up the heat. This is more important. This is really in line with the things I want to happen in my life. And it's only by reviewing them

that I get that benefit. I just don't know why more people don't do it. Sure. Now, when you're talking about GTD style review, that's essentially looking at the things that you are committed to and making sure that all the information around those projects that you're going to be working on is correct. Do you do any sort of review of what you actually accomplish? Like I know that's a feature in OmniFocus. You can see all the things that you have gotten done. Does that get into your review process at all or is it just merely for planning purposes? No, but I also, and maybe this isn't part of GCD and I've just forgotten over the years,

but I also question, does this need to exist? That's the first question I ask when I do a review. Like, does this project need to exist anymore? And a lot of times it won't. You know, something I started with good intentions, you know, may change at some point. Like I had a, um, this is a very simple example, but I had a project to rewrite, uh, Apple scripts for a bunch of Apple scripts for the, uh, the application Hazel. I mean, a field guide on Hazel,

it's an app where when it scans documents for you, it can do a bunch of things, one of which it can run an Apple script. So I wanted to rewrite some Apple scripts I had written for it to like create tasks in OmniFocus or create calendar events, you know, making it easier when you scan a bill to make sure that you remind yourself to pay the bill or it goes onto the calendar or whatever. Well, those scripts that I wrote over the years have broken because, you know, changes with Apple script changes with a Mac, et cetera. So I had this project ongoing just over the weekend. I had that one on a slow burn. It was like a four month. It was like a four month review. And that project came up over the weekend. I'm like, oh, wait a second. Um, Hazel's developer added the ability to run a shortcut.

You know, shortcuts can allow you to add calendar events and create task list items. I don't need those Apple scripts anymore. So that project, you know, I hit the big X button and now it's out of my life. So the first question is, do I need to do this anymore? That was a very kind of like tedious example. I'm sorry, but it can be something like that. Or it

could be even more meta than that. It's like, you know what, that thing that I, the reason I was doing this project is no longer important in my life. You know, um, one that came up for me was, uh, cause I've just been, uh, retired as a lawyer now six months in a review I was doing a month or two ago, it came up to say, build a legal newsletter. Like I always had thought, well, if I had a newsletter for the law practice, I could send it out to the clients. It could be marketing, but it was something that I'd never really like done. And I put it on a six month review. So I guess last October ish, I had said, well, look, look at it again in six months. And then by the time the six months

rolled around, I was no longer a lawyer, you know? So that one went away, you know? So I really, you know, those are easy examples, but even more like, you know, hippie stuff where it's like, this really isn't where I need to spend my time anymore. I will kill projects on that ground alone through that review process. So my first goal is to try and kill it in the review. And then if I'm going to keep it, is this active or not? And that's where I apply that active flag. I talked about active versus pause. Well, I try to keep my reviews primarily to the active stuff.

What am I actively working on? And does this need to continue to be active? Maybe this is something I want to keep, but I want to pause it for a a little while and then i get into what's left to be done i don't get too hung up on what i've already done sure okay uh this isn't really part of gtd because it's all preemptive and then the fifth stage is the the one where you actually do the work but uh i know for me one of the things that I wanted to measure initially was what are the things that I was actually able to do, the things that I was actually able to ship

and the projects I was actually able to complete. And that I think maybe fits under this review header. Like I said, it's not canonical GTD, but it's worth calling out. I think that that part has changed for me as well. This is kind of where journaling comes in. Sure. But I don't focus anymore on like, what did I do? I focus on the effort, not the output. And that's based off of the daily questions format that I got from Marshall Goldsmith in his book Triggers.

I found that really helpful. And we talked about that last episode in the deep focus section, but for folks who aren't familiar with that, I just answer, how did I do, did I make an effort to basically, and then the different areas that are, are important to me. And they're all areas. They're not specific projects, but that has eliminated a lot of the guilt that I would feel about the bad days when I wasn't quote unquote productive. As long as I made the effort, you know, I give myself a good score and that has made a world of difference for me. Yeah, that makes sense. And I also have a pretty detailed review process in relation to weekly, monthly, quarterly reviews, but I don't really consider that the GTD legacy.

That's just kind of a result of journaling and navel-gazing. The GTD stuff to me is much more tactical. It's on a project-by-project basis. And it is something I find useful. Even like I ran a test for a month of running tasks out of Obsidian, like you, Mike, and I had added a deferred date task

to a bunch of projects, review this project. So I just kind of coded it into obsidian because the obsidian task plugin has a way to set a defer date so you can kind of roll your own if you're not using something like omni focus to do this but um to me that maybe this is another reason why i am much kinder to gtd than other people is i i think this was a really good idea. And I think no matter how you manage tasks, some sort of review process will pay dividends. Yeah, I agree.

Since you brought up Obsidian, maybe we should go to the next section on software because that's where most of mine lives. Yeah, and the reason I added this is I feel like the software you use does really affect how you use a lot of the principles we've talked about today you know and software has evolved i mean when omni focus came on the scene there was an app called igtd at the time i remember was pretty good app but

there wasn't much task management style software on the mac and it was before the kind of explosion of web-based task apps. And like now there's, there's like a whole movement towards focus apps. Maybe we need to do a show on that at some point, but there's all these apps now that combine a calendar and task manager, whether it's software, but quite often it's web-based stuff where they try to combine it all to help you focus on the important stuff. You know, the things we were talking about at the top of the show today. But the software tools you pick do impact on whether or not you continue to do things like this.

And I was thinking the fact that I've held on to OmniFocus for so long means that some of the GTD stuff has stuck with me, like the review process and the tags. I think those are a direct result of software features. Absolutely. 100% agree with Obsidian, or with OmniFocus specifically. I do think that there are ways

to cobble things together in different applications, but don't try to make something work just because you saw somebody else do it. Like one of the things that I've seen, you mentioned the task managers and calendars being combined, but I've seen it a lot with emails and calendars that get combined because for a lot of people, work happens in email. That sounds miserable to me, but I understand why you would want those two things side by side. For me, everything happens either in the calendar or in Obsidian. And then the one exception to that would be the things that have a specific due date. I just really want to be nagged about it to make sure I don't forget

about it. Like publishing a podcast episode, for example, those will be recurring reminders inside of the Do app just because it's going to nag me until I finally do it. And I need that sometimes. But it's interesting to me with Obsidian. I'll shut up about Obsidian after this, but you can really cobble together any system that works for you. You mentioned task management Obsidian. That is what I'm doing at the moment. And we're talking about review. There's actually a review plugin where you can say, I want to review this note on this date. And then it shows up in a review section on your daily notes. It's for some people who are working all in an Obsidian like I am, that is a very frictionless workflow for people who aren't used to that. That may feel like, I can't believe anybody works that way. I would never see that.

You really have to be all in with the app. And Obsidian has so many other uses for me with the creative process. And really, its primary function, I would argue, is as a writing app. But because of that, it can be extended in a whole bunch of other ways. But I would encourage people to think about, again, what is the outcome? Whatever system you're trying to use, whatever form of the principles you're trying to apply here from GTD, remember that the goal is to get clarity and engage with the work. Remember, the goal is to get clarity and engage with the work. So whatever the shortest path to that is for you, just use that. And don't constantly be looking for the new shiny. You'll know if there's a friction point there for you.

And if there is, then you can try to solve for that specific problem or optimize around that specific problem. But don't try to solve a problem that doesn't exist for you. Yeah, and the flip side of that is if you're trying to use some of these principles more and your current software stack doesn't support it, stop trying to pound a square peg in a round hole. Just get something that does the job for you and move on. But it is a... I do think software, because that's the thing that GTD kind of missed out on the technology discussion.

In fact, as you said, they, they kind of removed it, the technology discussion, but I think technology really impacts where this stuff becomes actionable and where it's useful. And you have to consider it. If you're going to try and do this stuff with technology, I guess if you're going to do the whole thing with a pen and paper, then it doesn't matter. But I don't think there's many people doing that anymore. Although that wouldn't necessarily be a bad place to start. Because with a pen and paper, you could do anything. And then from there,

you can figure out how to scale it digitally. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Indeed. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Indeed. What is one of the greatest feelings you can have as an entrepreneur? It has to be when you start building a team with people who care just as much about your dream as you do. And they have the skills to make it happen. If you want to find those people faster, then you need Indeed. Indeed is a hiring partner where you can attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Instead of spending hours on multiple job sites hoping to catch lightning in a bottle and find candidates with the right skills, you need one powerful hiring partner that

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dot com slash Focused. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right, Mike. So we've gone through the key pieces of GTD in our opinion. If you disagree,

we've got a forum. Let us know what you think the key pieces of GTD are, how useful they are for you at this point. But I wanted to kind of get meta for a second and remove the emotion of whether I'm off the wagon of GTD or I'm still on it or somewhere in the middle. But where do we see these types of principles going forward with productivity and focus? Yeah, that's a great question. I was preparing for this is that it seems to me that GTD was a solution to the time management problem. But I think we kind of talked about this at the beginning, the bigger problem for a lot of people and the reason the Focus podcast exists is that it's really more of an attention or maybe an energy problem that a lot of us have. It's not that we don't have the time to do the things, although it can manifest that

way. But if we really dig a little bit deeper, we've got time to do something. We can even put the time on our calendar, but then we don't feel like doing it. We're completely drained or we're distracted when the time comes and the thing doesn't get done. For the things that tend to be important but not urgent for us, I'm kind of curious, do you agree or disagree? I think you're in the ballpark. I think if GTD has a failing is that it's very easy to interpret it 100% tactical, you know, not tying and not compass looking. Yeah. What do you think about the major problems that people are trying to solve?

Do you think that it has shifted from simply a time management problem to more of a attention or energy problem? And I guess if you do agree with that, where do you see that as we go forward? Yeah. Is it an evolution maybe as people have got better at the tactical that they're becoming more aware of the big problem? Possibly.

I do think we're kind of in uncharted territory when it comes to the sheer amount of information that we have to deal with in any given day. I was thinking the other day actually about the ritual of reading the newspaper in the morning. And that's very appealing to me actually. And I remember seeing my parents read the newspaper every morning. And I was reflecting on that, realizing that a long time ago, that was the only way that you were able to get information. But the rest of the time, I mean, maybe you talk to somebody on the phone, but you didn't just dial up the internet and have access to all of this information and how that changed the way that we worked. And in some ways, it kind of makes me wish that the whole world could just agree

that from these hours where you are at work, you're just not going to be looking for new information. You're just going to be engaging with the things that you had intended to do, but that's not where we find ourselves. So how do we create a system where we're able to do that as much as possible, especially for people who want to or need to create for a living? Yeah. And the first thing you do is you listen to the Focus podcast and then you stop taking inputs at a certain hour. But yeah, no, I agree. Yeah, that's an interesting thought. I do think you're right, though. The problem now is focus. That's why we made the show.

And these tools are going to help you, but they're not enough to get you there. Right. And it's also because that is the problem, it's less cookie cutter, I would argue. Efficiency is not the thing to optimize for for a lot of people. And I think when you could optimize for efficiency, it was a lot easier. You could say, just dump things in this system and then don't worry about them until they

surface again. And that's exactly what I did at the beginning of my productivity journey. dump things in this system and then don't worry about them until they surface again. And that's exactly what I did at the beginning of my productivity journey. And like I said, that created some breathing room, but we got to the point where it just wasn't enough. And eventually you have to make the hard choice and say, no, maybe I'm unique here, but I have trouble saying no to things. I don't want to let people down, especially people that are important to me. And I worked with a family business for a long time, and it's even harder in that situation, I would argue, because you've got your dad, who's also your boss, and your brother, who's also your coworker. So it's hard for everybody

to just agree. Everyone can say, when we're at work, we're at work and we're going to separate the personal stuff, but that's not actually what happens a lot of times. So you get a request and you want to say yes and you want to make people happy. But the more that you do that, the less you're able to take care of the people who really mean the most to you. For me, that was my immediate family and ultimately myself. I would work myself to the point where I would get sick frequently. When I got sick, I got really sick. A simple cold would knock me out for a week because it wasn't just a simple cold. I would burn the midnight oil. I would get up early just to make sure that I could get the things done. And I'm sure I'm not the only person who struggles with

that. But my one piece of advice when it comes to that is as uncomfortable as it seems, you got to learn to stick up for yourself and you got to learn to say, no, I'm not going to do that. But, you know, getting back to your idea of, you know, working on the overall focus, the big emphasis of energy and attention versus the more tactical focus on tasks. I think one of the challenges are it's so much easier to be in the tactical than in to the big questions, right?

It's, it's a lot less personal investment to make a decision as to what the next step is to clean the garage, as opposed to what am I doing with my life? You know? Yeah, that's true. And I think that's one of the reasons why that's so hard for people, but it's the people that force themselves to go through that and, you know, just to kind of bang on the drum again against about journaling and some of the meditation, some of the other stuff we talk

about in the show, but forcing yourself to confront big questions is going to solve a lot of this problem for you. But I'm not going to tell you it's easy. Yeah. And then the other thing that is sort of tangentially related to that, but I don't really have a solution for how to get there from here, is you can identify this stuff for yourself, but then how does that fit in context of a team? yourself, but then how does that fit in context of a team? I see a lot of emphasis on team productivity. And I think it's even more important when you're not together in the same place, when you have to connect virtually, how do you make sure that your collaboration is effective and you're able to actually produce something? I guess the obvious example here would be a distributed team

of developers who are writing code and they're using Scrum in order to do that. But I feel like this is becoming the model for a lot of different businesses that never would have thought they were going to work this way. And so we have tools that are being developed like Notion, for example, that are trying to allow teams to collaborate and create something together more effectively. And I feel like we're just at the beginning stages of this. It's like it's 20 years behind individual productivity is what it is. I mean, Notion, all of these tools are designed around the tactical level task management. None of them are really about what's really important to this team, right? Yep. And then also we got to be careful we don't repeat the same mistakes.

Because any mistakes you would have made having an ineffective meeting, those are going to be multiplied when that meeting happens via Zoom. And it's even harder to tell whether people are engaged and contributing and things like that. So it's a very slippery slope, I would argue. And in some ways, it's really exciting because you have an opportunity to be a part of a team and not have to be in the same location. There's a lot of freedom if you have the skills and you've developed your own abilities to the point where you're in demand, you can kind of write your own ticket. But then on the other hand, you have to have a higher level of discipline and you have to

be able to craft your own system, whether it's GTD or not, figure out what are the things that are be comforting because you feel like you can be a little bit more invisible. But when you do that, the quality of the work that you're doing as a team is naturally going to suffer as well. with your team without having to be on call all the time and constantly checking Slack and email and things like that. It's an interesting problem to solve, but there's a lot of opportunities and a lot of new tools that give us the ability to do it, but we got to be careful we use them the right way. Yeah. Well, it is a challenge. I mean, that's something I'm struggling with right now as I'm working on my little team. And like one of the things that occurs to me is that an online task management tool is not going to cut it.

We need to have regular calls and talk to each other and figure out what's important. Where are we moving? And whether or not somebody did this task or that task really has very little to do with that. So getting back to the top of it, what is the state of GTD now? Whether or not somebody did this task or that task really has very little to do with that. So getting back to the top of it, what is the state of GTD now? I'm not sure.

I think there's definitely some things that are more applicable now than they have ever been. There are also a lot of ways where unless you figure out how to apply it for yourself, it's easy to say this is an antiquated idea and it's no longer valid. I don't think that's entirely true. It'd be great if there was an actual update to the book that talked about GTD in terms of the technological-based tools that we have available to us. And then specifically, I think, with team productivity as well. But if that doesn't happen, then you got to figure out how to make it work for yourself. And that can be a little bit of a challenge. Yeah. I feel like it's just like always, it's never been the only way or the way for pretty much everybody. But it's a collection of really good ideas, some of which are entirely still applicable.

And it's just up to you to decide if you want to use them or not. And if you decide that GTD is dead to you and none of this stuff works for you, that's fine. As long as you find a way to work that allows you to get what's most important to you moving. And that's all that matters, right? I still find pieces of this very useful. We just

kind of cataloged our favorites during the show, but I think I wouldn't write it off. Don't let somebody tell you that this is an antiquated idea and not worth your time anymore, because there's a lot of good stuff in there. I agree. And I would also encourage people to kind of diagram out your own individual workflow. Like I mentioned, my input workflow, I'll have a link to that in the show notes for people who want to take a look at it. But when you figure out how all these pieces connect for yourself, at first you might, like I did, look at it and be like, oh my gosh, this is so different. like I did, look at it and be like, oh my gosh, this is so different. I have obviously fallen off the GTD bandwagon or just decided that this is no longer relevant for me. But once you get

past that stage and you look at the actual components, you may realize, like I did, that actually a lot of this stuff is still there. I'm just expressing it a little bit differently. A way that works for you. Exactly. But writing it all out is the thing that made it click. Once I got that, that was, like I said, it was like a big weight off of my shoulders where, oh, this actually looks like a decent workflow and I don't have to worry about things falling through the cracks because I can see where all these different things are coming from. And this is kind of getting back to the very beginning of GTD,

that whole idea of emergency scan modality, right? You're constantly scanning the horizon to see if there's a fire you got to put out. That anxiousness, I was feeling that. And the minute that I codified my own system, it took about an hour to do, that was the thing that allowed me to release that. And so if that's what it takes,

putting the Legos together so you can see it for yourself, I feel like that's a beneficial exercise. And you do not need to write us to tell us that the plural is Lego. Sorry, I should know that. That is like one of the internet touch buttons. If you ever say Legos on a podcast, you're guaranteed to get like five emails.

Anyway, well, I'm with you, Mike. I think there's something to this, but I don't think this is everything. And it isn't to me, this is adjacent to the focus of our show. I mean, the idea of this show is to help you find focus. There's a tactical element to that. And I think that's where GTD is most helpful. Some of this stuff, but I still think the big questions of focus are things we need to talk about, but either way, there you go. We are the focus podcast. You can find us over at relay.fm slash focus.

Thank you to our sponsors, NetSuite, Setapp, and Indeed. We have a forum. You can find it at talk.macpowerusers.com. There's a special room there just for the Focus podcast. Go ahead and check that out. And we'll see you next time.