Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - David Allen: Getting More Sh*t Done | E21

Episode Date: March 11, 2019

The GOAT of productivity returns! This week Hala interviews famed author David Allen for the second time. You may remember him from episode #5, where he covered the five steps of The Getting Things Done (GTD) system in great detail. If you want a refresher or never listened to that episode yet, feel free to go back and check it out. This time time around Hala is yappin’ with David about his general productivity principles, and learning more about how he became the GOAT or Greatest Of All Time when it comes to productivity. Take a listen to learn how martial arts and new age thinking inspired his productivity approach, understand the importance of having a clear head and discover why there are no problems, only projects. Want to connect with other YAP listeners? Join the YAP Society on Slack: bit.ly/yapsociety Earn rewards for inviting your friends to YAP Society: bit.ly/sharethewealthyap Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Shopify. Shopify simplifies selling online and in-person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash profiting. Hey guys, the team here at YAP has reached a huge milestone. You may have heard of YAP Society on Slack. It's a community where our listeners go to networks, share resources, chat with the guests that come on our show, and help us make decisions on the podcast. If you're

already in YAP Society, we just launched a new referral program called Share the Wealth, where you can earn rewards like YAP Mugs and T-shirts for inviting your friends to our new community. Check out YoungandProffiting.com I share the wealth to get started. YAP Society on Slack is sponsored by Compass HQ, a Slack app that gives insights to help your team work better together. Use Compass HQ to get detailed analytics, visualize communication patterns, and run surveys to collect input from your team. Visit CompassHQ.com to learn more. You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. I'm Halitaha, and today we have a returning guest on the show, David Allen.

You may remember him back from episode 5 where he covered the steps of the GTD or getting things done system in great detail. If you want to refresh or never listen to that episode before, feel free to go back and check it out. This time around where Y're yapping with David about general productivity principles, his thoughts on things like the law of attraction and Zen Buddhism, and how he became known as a goat or greatest of all time when it comes to productivity. Hey David, welcome back to Young & Profiting Podcast. I'm delighted to be here, thanks for the invitation.

So you are the first guest that I've ever had to make a second appearance on YAP, and I'm pretty sure we're going to call this episode the Return of the Goat. So you are most known for the five step GTD or getting things done system, which is a productivity methodology we covered in great detail back in episode five. We'll touch on that again, but this time I'm hoping we can focus the conversation more about your general productivity principles, and I also want to get a better understanding of who you are as a person and how you became the success that you are today. Does that sound okay?

Sure, fine. Okay, so you've had a very fascinating life. It's a known fact that you've had 35 professions before the age of 35. You were a magician, a karate teacher, a cook, a travel agent, so many different titles, all seemingly unrelated. You're into new age thinking and Zen Buddhism, and nobody would have guessed that you would become the business guru that you are today. So tell us, what was life like as a young adult for you? By the way, I would not have guessed I would be doing this either.

Trust me, believe me, I was an American intellectual history major in graduate school in Berkeley in 1968. And if you told me then, I was going to wind up thousands of hours with executives and corporate trading and some of the biggest companies in the world I would have said what are you smoking? You know come on who what that's not me So yeah, it's been a very interesting path in retrospect I look back and I can see and say that there were some common themes that actually ran through all of that But yeah, it's a long story. Again, that 73 years,

I've been graced with having just a ton of different experiences, which have been quite valuable in my life. Yes, so why did you end up taking on so many different career paths? Was it hard for you to determine what your true calling was? How did you land on productivity? Oh, yeah. I didn't know what I wanted to do when I grew up. For a while in college, I thought I was going to have an academic career. So I was a history major and what else can you do as a major in history other than being an academia maybe right or whatever. But then I started studying people who seemed to be enlightened and then I got kind of hungry to find my own.

And I didn't experience graduate school as a place that I could get that. This is the 1960s in California. So I decided to hop off and jump into personal growth, personal exploration, spiritual work, meditation, martial arts, all kinds of things, mostly to sort of explore God truth in the universe. You know, what was it that we couldn't see that seemed to be affecting all of us? So that was basically a common theme as I looked back. I couldn't have told you back then. But as I looked back my first job, and they weren't really professions, those 35, they

were just different jobs that I added up. And my first job was actually being a magician at age five in Palestinian Texas on the sidewalk. I charged a nickel for my magic show. Well, that's kind of interesting because I looked back and they go, oh, magic was sort of the, gee, if you could kind of make things move without having to physically do it, wouldn't that be cool? You know, I'm Mr. Lazy, so I was always interested in trying to find out what were the key drivers of our experience and how to get a hold of those. Because if you get a hold of those, and if they seem to be really affecting

everything tremendously, I said, well, that'd be a neat thing to do to be able to find out what that truth was. So it was really more of an inner exploration, but they're not paying people. I, you know, rice bowl and cave was not my style. I like good wine and good-looking women and, you know, things like that. And I didn't want to kind of give up this world, but again, not knowing what to do as a profession or a career at that point, I just had to pay the rent. So it turned out I had a number of people that I knew and friends and so forth that seemed to know what they wanted to do. So they were starting their own businesses or running small businesses themselves. And so I just helped them out. I became a really good number two guy. I helped a couple of

friends start a New Orleans style restaurant in West LA. I ran a vitamin distribution network for some friends. I had a good friend who ran a landscape company in San Fernando Valley and I wound up sort of managing a lot of his crews. So I was just basically helping them, but I would just show up and look around and say, well, how much easier could we do this?

Because I'm Mr. Lazy. I was always looking for how could we get stuff done with as little effort as possible. Now they call that process improvement, but I was just, hey, you know, come on, can we make this easier? And then I would make it easier in terms of their systems and whatever they were doing, and then I'd get bored. Then I'd leave and go find something else. It was more interesting. And then I discovered they actually pay people to do that. They call them something consultant. So 1981 I hung up my shingle, Allen Associates. And I started my own little consulting practice. I said, okay, well let me see if I could just kind of sell myself on a project, my project basis. So that's what I started to do. Also I got very hungry to say, well, okay, if I'm going

to be a consultant, it'd be nice to know what consultants do. Now, again, I'll be self-disclosing here. I've never had a traditional business, psychology or time management course in my life. All of my stuff was from experience. And just seeing what worked, what didn't work, how could we work it better? And so I started looking for what are some models? Is there a procedure that in case it's not clear,

what I could do with a client or a customer to improve their situation? What if I had something in my back pocket I could pull out as a process that would improve their situation? So that was one vector that caused me to start looking for those kinds of things that were universal no matter what the business was, no matter who it was, if they applied these principles or these techniques, they would improve their condition. At the same time, because of my inner work, I was very attracted to clear space.

In the martial arts particularly, a very practical reason, lots of really good techniques. Now they call it mindfulness, you know, focus on your breathing, but I did that 40 years ago, in the martial arts, because that's how you get present and clear your head. For people to jump you in a dark alley,

you don't want two thousand on processed emails banging around on your head. You need to be totally clear. So how do you get clear? So I love the idea of clear. So a lot of those kind of things came together and I wound up one of my first mentors and as I started my consulting practice,

was a guy who had been in the consulting business for quite a number of years. And he kind of took to me, and he wound up sharing a whole lot of his techniques with me, and we did several clients and work together. But he had come up with some stuff that helped executives that he worked with clear their head so they could focus on the organizational chains they were interested in doing, whereas if they were distracted and had a lot of old business hanging around, it's kind of hard for them to make those kind of changes. So Dean had come up with the technique of getting stuff out of your head and then deciding next actions on all those things that had your attention. And he did that process with me and I wasn't in pain, I was pretty organized guy, I kind of had my act together. But I said,

well, okay, let me see what that process is. And he took me through that process. And I went, oh my God, this is so wicked cool. Because it suddenly gave me a sense of clarity, a sense of stability, a sense of focus and control that I never experienced before. So I went, well, that's really cool. So after then we were using that with clients, and then I turned around and started to use some of those same techniques with my clients and it produced exactly the same results, more clarity, more space in their head, more focus, more control, more stability. Well, that's really cool. And then at one point, I had a human resources for a big corporation, Lockheed, saw what

I was doing and he said, wow, David, those are the kind of results we need in our whole culture. Can you design a training program around this instead of just one-on-one sort of model that you're using in your consulting? So I said, okay, so I spent a couple of months and designed a two-day personal productivity training program. We did a pilot program for a thousand executives and managers in Lockheed in 1983 and 1984.

And it worked. It hit a nerve. Wow, they thought this was the best thing since sliced bread. I didn't know what I'd come up with. It just suddenly hit this nerve. And then I found myself thrust into the corporate training world. And that also forced me to hone what I had come up with and uncovered as a set of best practices into a more rigorous, well-defined sort of model, just so that we could do that in training seminars. So that's kind of how it all started. but then it took me another 20 years to figure out what I'd figured out.

Nobody else had done it and that it was unique and that it was bulletproof. That's when I wrote the book Getting Things Done. So it was a long process, literally thousands of hours. My coaching and my consulting really turned into one-on-one work with a lot of executives, senior people in these organizations that wanted to implement this methodology themselves personally. So that's where a lot of this experience came from, a lot of what I wrote in getting things done and the model itself really came from those many, many years and thousands of hours I spent just doing this work. Wow, that's very cool. Thanks for sharing that whole background. I hope I didn't bore everybody to tears.

No, that was great. You know what? I've been doing research on you and everybody always focuses on GTD, but I think it's important to understand how this even came about because there's lessons within that itself. So you earned a black belt in karate around your college years. You briefly mentioned your interest in martial arts and we spoke about how you're also interested in Zen Buddhism. So can you talk about how those interests help shape your perspective on productivity and

maybe some of the core concepts involved with Zen Buddhism? Well, I didn't go out to implement Zen and I'm not a rigorous practitioner of it. If you know people who are real practitioners of Zen that sit for hours and meditate and do all that good stuff. Lovely stuff. I had read a lot of the Zen writings, you know, Alan Watson and Suzuki and those folks back when I was even in high school. So I've always been attracted to the aesthetic, which is sort of minimal stuff that transmits something rather interesting and powerful. My wife under our big Japanophiles, I mean we love that aesthetic of the simple and ordinary that's down to the simplest forms that have an elegance to them. And so I think I've always been attracted to that in a way. So maybe that's what helped a lot with me trying to just find what is the minimal amount of stuff you could do to be as organized as you need to be, to give you the freedom you need. Because I'm a real freedom guy. To me, a lot of people think that I'm an organizing freak. And I'm actually not asked my wife.

I only get organized so that I don't have to rethink anything. So that I'm so lazy, I'd like to not have my mind bothered with trying to remember and remind. So I'm organized just so that I got clear space. So it's kind of like Zen or a lot of other people came up with the same conclusions I did. So it wasn't like trying to take that and put that into some form.

I just did the form that was attractive to me and then I looked around and go, wow, I guess there's a similarity there. Yeah. Okay, so let's spend a little bit of time for GTD. For all my listeners in episode five, we went through this five step process in great detail, but for those who haven't listened, could you give a high level explanation of what GTDS?

Sure. Well, it's about how do you keep yourself from being distracted in your mind? Because your mind did not evolve to remember, remind, or prioritize, or manage relationships between more than four things. We know now, given cognitive science research, that if soon as you try to keep track of five, six, seven, eight things in your head, not to mention the dozens, to keep track of 5, 6, 7, 8 things in your head, not to mention the dozens, if not hundreds of things, most people are trying to keep in their head. You're going to be driven by latest and loudest and not by strategy or intuitive intelligence.

So, the whole idea is being able to empty your head and then get all that into an external brain. So, there are really five stages we all go through. First of all, you capture stuff that has your attention, what's on your mind, write it down. Then you need to clarify what does that mean. You wrote down mom, what does that mean? Well, or birthday is coming? Well, what's the next step about that, and what's the outcome you're committed to? So, outcome and action are the two key things that most people still need to think about and decide about the things that have their attention. What's the action I need to take? If that won't finish, whatever this commitment is, what's the commitment? What's the project?

So clarify is the step two. So I've captured stuff that has my attention. And then I start to clarify those things. What I'm going to do about that, what am I committed to finish about that? And then step three would be to organize that. If you can't do those activities right then, then you need to organize some reminder about them. What are all the errands you need to run?

What are all the things you need to talk to your life partner about? What are all the things you need to do at your computer? What are all the websites you need to surf, etc. And so just then creating appropriate, for the most part, lists, reminders of work that you've already defined that you need to do, putting those in some appropriate trusted system, which is the organized step. So you capture, clarify, then you organize,

you're thinking in appropriate places. And then step four is to then make sure you're looking at your errands list when you go out for errands. Make sure you're looking at all the 35 or 82 projects you have on some maybe weekly basis so that you make sure you're not letting something fall to the correct, it's important. And that step four is a reflect a review stage.

Step five is then to engage. Once I've captured, clarified, organized, and reviewed all of these different commitments of these multiple levels, then if I decide to take a nap, if I decide to write a business plan, if I decide to, you know, cook spaghetti or, you know, whatever the heck I decide to do, it's because I've looked at the whole game and said, this is the best thing to do right now for whatever reason. And so moving yourself into a trusted choice place that you're trusting what you're doing is really the end game of GTT. And just for everybody listening, GTT is the most popular productivity methodology out

there. David has like a cult following. So he released this book GTT back in 2001. He's had another iteration of that. But if you're interested in that, go check out his book, go check out episode five. So a little birdie told me that you're having a GTD summit in Amsterdam, June 20th and 21st. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. This is not something that we do regularly as a matter of fact, we did an early version of this 10 years ago in San Francisco. By that time, the book was popular enough that I just had some really classy people that were champions of my work. And I thought, wouldn't that be cool to kind of raise the flag and have them show up and present just their own experience, their own points of view and so forth.

And then see who's interested in the GTD world out there. And we had about 30 presenters, and we had about 350 people showed up. And it was really quite a unique event. The people attracted to GTD, or fascinating, the people that needed the least. There's some of the most already productive and positive and aspirational people you'd ever meet.

And so a good friend of mine said, David, don't do another one of these. This was such a unique event. So I agreed. I said, no, I don't want to do another one of these. It's a lot of work, put all that together. So I didn't. But then fast forward, you know, come on, that was 10 years ago. Now in the last 10 years, we partnered with licensees and franchisees all around the world and certified master trainers for this work. So this is the GTD movement is quite a global movement out there

right now. And I said at 73, I'm probably not ever going to do another one of these, but maybe it's time to kind of bring all the troops together, raise the flag again and kind of see who salutes. And Amsterdam, my adopted city, is just such a great place for these kinds of events. It's such a global city and such an open and very productive place to begin with. So it's a perfect place to have this. And so we've got people now coming from all over the world. My first invitation to my sort of a list of people that might be interesting as presenters, we got oversubscribed almost right away for these people coming on their own dime.

They just wanted to come hang out and participate and give their thanks for how much this is affected. And it's such a broad range of people Everybody from Marshall Goulsmith who's probably the top executive leadership coach in the world to Katie Coleman who is the first women Astronauts, you know, who's a huge GDD fan. She was even coached by one of our GDD coaches while she was on the space station Just all kinds of people from all over the world actually. So we expect to have maybe a thousand folks in an absolutely fabulous place in the Northwest of downtown Amsterdam. So I'm excited about it and sort of terrified about it. It's like a lot of work and to pull it all together, but it's already coming together pretty fast. Very cool. So anybody who's interested, it'll be a one-time event, believe me, that'll be quite memorable.

Yeah, so you just mentioned about your guest speakers, and that's one of the things that intrigue me, it's the diversity of all your guests. You have this former NASA astronaut, a singer, some authors, a US major general, and everybody connects with the good stories. So can you walk us through how some of these people have used GTD and maybe some of the results that they got from it? Wow, I should really leave that to them, you know, to tell those stories. I'm afraid I couldn't do it justice, but well, I mentioned Katie getting coach while she was, we have to stop the coaching when she got on the other side of the planet because we lost communication. So she had to wait until

she came back around to keep going with it. Randy Fullheart, he's a retired now major general in the US Air Force. Randy is now running the cadet program in the University of Virginia and he has used this for years for all of his subordinates in the military and made sure that getting things done was a book every one of them had. He brought me into Maxwell Air Force Base to do keynote speeches for officer training there. So Randy's into a huge, huge, huge fan of this, made a huge difference in his life to do that. Brian Robertson, who's, you know, one of the founders

of the Holocaust Movement in terms of new self-organizing organizational systems. And Brian came across GDD and he kind of got religion to that and it inspired him to say, well, how can I make an organization sort of have a mind like water on a clear head? And then he wound up developing something that I've been using for the last seven or eight years, which is an organizational model called Hologrosi. And Brian's there, as long as with his partner, Tom Thomasson, who's now got a company

called ENCODE, which is sort of restructuring how power works in organizations, in terms of how do you work with the legal and financial and compensation, all that kind of aspects of having a self-organizing organization. I could go on and on. I mean, any one of those people, Ove Kenneth Nelson is one of the top performers in Norway and Scandinavia, producing movies, producing music videos.

He also is a teacher of the Brazilian martial arts and he runs the largest GTD meetup group in the world in Oslo. And he would tell you this just opened his creative spaces like crazy. Well, you must be really proud that your system has impacted so many different people. I've been really graced to have uncovered something. It was a long time coming.

I mean, come on. I was in my late 30s before I actually figured out what I might actually start doing my life. So anybody out there any younger than that's wondering about it, relax, you got a lot of time. That's good advice. Yeah, just kind of let it emerge as it emerges, but I've been very grace to have something

that does no harm, sort of Google us in that way. There's absolutely no harm done with anybody gets any of this methodology and you don't have to implement the whole thing, you can implement any part of it. If you just keep a pen and paper by your bed, it's not you'll sleep better. Any one thing that you might implement out of this methodology

will help you feel more clear, more relaxed, more focused. So it's been wonderful to be able to do that and also then have this incredible network of people now globally around the world that are attracted to it and have become part of this network. Yeah. So I read that there's going to be two main themes at the event. And I thought that both of them would be great discussion points. So the first is the strategic value of clear space.

And the second is there are no problems, only projects. So let's break these down starting with the strategic value of clear space. Now this is fundamental to GTD. It's something you always talk about. I've heard you say in one of your books that productivity is directly proportional to one's ability to relax. You preach that your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them, and you advocate for a mind like water. So tell us more about the importance of Clear Space. What do you mean when you say mind like water, and what's your best advice for achieving a clear head and a relaxed mind.

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Well, all of that could be wrapped together just to be present. A lot of the mindfulness stuff these days is just about, how do you get present? How do you keep yourself from running into the future or regretting the past? How do you get present? That's my focusing on your breathing is a key element for that kind of practice. It wasn't for me the martial arts as well because your breathing is present. If you can just focus on your breath, you're not in the past or not in the future, you're right here right now. And that happens to be the most productive state to be in. It's the best state to hit a golf ball from best state to cook spaghetti from best state to have a difficult conversation from if you need to do that, is to not have your brain distracted

or pulled away that you have essentially all of your cognitive resources available to you in the moment for where you want to put it. So you can't have nothing on your mind if you're conscious, but what you want is to have what you want on your mind, on your mind, and not have it distracted by 60,000 other things that are likely to pull you away. And most people are not that aware, frankly, of how many things are potentially distracting to them. And you really won't find that out until you actually go through the GTD process and unload

everything that's got your attention, little big personal or professional, and get it out of your head. It creates quite a different experience for most people once they actually do that. And then building into practice so that that becomes your normal state. A lot of people get into their zone, but they don't know kind of how they got there and then they fall out of it and don't know how they get back into it again. But being in your zone, that is where you're totally present, there's no difference between work or play.

It's just what's next. So there's no distinction about work-life balance. It just balance, period. Because balance may be working 23 hours a day. Maybe that's what you need to do in order to get clear. Who knows? So GTT doesn't tell you what your content should be. I think what's unique about GTT is that it

focuses on where you are, not where you should be. Because if you can't handle where you are and where you are is somewhat out of control or unstable, trying to focus on where you want to go or what things you should be doing is just going to create more guilt and frustration. So getting control of where you are, getting clear where you are, is going to open up a lot more space to be able to focus on the more meaningful things that are more meaningful to you. And you could do this from an artistic or creative standpoint. We have a lot of the people in the creative industries that would tell you that GDD was absolutely critical.

I mean, people who've made public their championing of GDD or people like Will Smith and Robert Downey Jr. and Howard Stern. These are all big champions of my stuff. And of course, they're all running, you know, rather significant business enterprises in addition to their artistic and creative endeavors. So opening up space and just being clear, nice place to be, you know, and, you know, once you taste it, if you're like me,

you just do whatever you need to do to get back there. Yeah, so what do you mean exactly when you say mind like water? Well, that's a metaphor that's from the martial arts and I think Bruce Lee's Sinsa was the one who gave that to him and the idea is water looks like it's kind of weak, but it's very powerful Once it's harnessed in the right way and also water doesn't overreact or underreact It's totally appropriately engaged with its environment. It may be rushing. There may be a calm pond Whatever it is. It's not confused

It may be rushing, it may be a calm pond, whatever it is. It's not confused. So the analogy then is your mind clear enough that you're not over or under reacting. Are you taking one meeting into the next in your mind? Or are you taking home to work in your mind or work to home in your mind? Then you're not into really a mind like Water State. If you're going to the soccer game to watch your girl play soccer, but you're on your smartphone because you're distracted by all that stuff, come on, how un-present are you? And some of the most dramatic testimonies we have are for parents. Oh my god, I can actually watch my kids play soccer and not be on my phone.

How cool is that? So all of those are just examples or just different lenses at looking at being clear and being present. Okay, so you're all about clearing your head, having nothing on your mind, so you could be mindful and present in the moment. How about your external environment? What do you feel about organizing and decluttering your external environment? I know something really popular right now

is the Kunmari method. Have you ever heard of that? Sure, yeah. You know, you can't fault that. Your car is gonna drive better if you clean your trunk. You know, there can't fault that. Your car is going to drive better if you clean your trunk. You know, there's just something psychological about having sort of clean and clear space. If you play golf, it's nice to have your golf clubs clean. If you paint nice to have your paint brushes organized and your painting table clean and

neat. If you're trying to be a top chef, me some plus, you know, the French chefs, you know, there's a whole book about that. Basically, before they start, they get everything clean. Everything is cleaned and cleared up because it's going to get crazy. In a way, your most creative time is when you have the freedom to make a mess, but if you're in a mess, you can't make one. That said, I know a lot of people with a clean desk that have a very cluttered head, and

I know people with a cluttered desk that have a very clear head. So there's not necessarily a one-to-one correlation between lack of clutter and a clear head. Generally speaking, I'd say, yeah, for sure. My wife and I tend to not keep books around once we've read them. We turn them back into the use bookstore. Whenever we buy new clothes, we try to get rid of old ones so that we keep it kind of a lean footprint. And I think that's healthy. Certainly, one of the biggest industries out there is the storage industry, because people are just accumulating crap like crazy.

I don't think that's necessarily ecologically sound. And even psychologically. Yeah, I think that this idea of Konmari is sort of like the external version of what you do for the mind. So if somebody were to pair up both, you would be probably a very good situation. Yeah, yeah. But I wouldn't push up against anything you didn't want to get rid of. See, I don't tell people to throw stuff away. If they have attention on it, they throw it away and they said,

yeah, but what if I need that? Keep it. I have a rule of thumb. Wendend out, throw it out, and windend out, keep it. Take your pick. There's no right or wrong about that. Sometimes if you throw stuff away and you didn't want to throw away, you'll have more attention on that.

So you have to be careful. Most people, for sure, everybody probably involved, has a lot of old stuff that at some point was useful where it is, but now if you get rid of it, it opens up more space to think and be more creative. Yeah, so let's talk about this second theme for your upcoming event in Amsterdam. You talk about there are no problems, only projects. What do you mean by that? Yeah, well, that's a toughy for a lot of people because a lot of things show up as problems,

but you only consider something a problem if you assume that it can be fixed or should be fixed or improved. So you didn't wake up this morning, probably probably and say, gee, gravity really sucks. It's really terrible. It's killing people and it's causing body parts to sag, right? Because that's what gravity does. But nobody really complains about gravity because you know you can't do anything about it. So, what do you do with gravity?

You accept that ignore or play with it, which is what we do with gravity, right? So, the things that people tend to complain about, things that are bothering them, there's something off, there's something, whatever, it just means, okay, well, what would you like to have true about that? And oh, well, I got a problem with my neighbor and they're complaining about that, we planted a tree too close to that,

and any any any any any, well, what would you like to have true? Well, I like to get this resolved with my neighbor, fabulous, now you have a project, you know, optimize resolution with neighbor relative to tree, right? My great. And then what's the next action? Oh, God.

What is the next? Oh, I don't think anything. And so most people do, they're using complaining as a way to avoid hopping the driver's seat and actually doing something about the things that have their attention that they think ought to change. So this is really a tough admonition because it gets pretty subtle. You know, should I get divorced or not?

How do I handle my mom's elder care that's showing up out there that we need to manage? How do we deal with this depth thing that we're trying to resolve, you know, whatever? And those things become pretty subtle. You need to say, okay, what's my desired outcome? See, outcome and action are the zeros and ones of productivity? What are we trying to accomplish? And how do we allocate our, reallocate our resources and our focus

to move the needle toward getting resolution on that? So all it is is just making sure people hop in the driver seat about all that stuff and it makes a huge difference. We do in our training programs, in our second level of GTD trainings that we do. You know, worldwide has a lot to do with focused on getting people to really identify the things that really ought to be identified as projects for their project list.

It's quite powerful when they do. Yeah, cool. That sounds very interesting. I think both topics that you're centered on are really important, meaty topics. It should be a great event. So let's get into some more general productivity themes. The first one is pretty much fundamental to everything you teach. It's your bottoms-up philosophy to productivity. Many productivity methodologies are top-down. So they start with

really deep thinking. They focus on values, really big goals, and stress the management of our priorities. But you say spending too much time at the top won't get us anywhere and that we need to master the mundane. What's your argument for that? Well, as I said earlier, what this methodology does it starts with where you are not where you should be? If where you are, is it these high horizons? Absolutely, we'll start there. Wow, I am trying to figure out what to do with my life and my career fabulous. You know, what would your desired outcome be? And what's your next action? So it's not that we only deal with the mundane. It's just that if you don't tie whatever you're thinking is to the mundane, then it's just blue sky stuff.

And you know, it's not grounded. And so we tend to start with where people are. I guarantee you, by the way, we've trained thousands of thousands of people around the world. And one of the exercises is actually initially in the first seminars is to get people to actually empty their head and just write all the stuff that's got their attention. And it's funny, I often times ask, I say, how many of you, in the first 10 things you wrote down, wrote, fulfilled destiny as human spirit on the planet.

And everybody laughs. I mean, that's not what they wrote down. They wrote down, get a new babysitter. They wrote down tires in my car. They wrote down, hire the vice president. They wrote down, increase my credit line. They wrote down, deal with mom's birthday. That's where they are. So that's where we start. No matter how sophisticated or subtle or high up, the horizon is that you're focused on. So you're a strategic plan, your life purpose, your core values, your short-term goals, your job description, areas and your life that you want to maintain. All those are appropriate commitments to identify.

We just tend to start with where you are, so you get control of that. And then you're able to then lift to any higher horizon, much more easily, with a clearer head. OK, so while GTD is a bottoms-up approach, you just mentioned that you don't always start from there, and you're actually a strong proponent of visioning. So how does visioning work with a bottoms-up approach? Can you share with us some best practices for visioning and outcome thinking that you've

acquired over the years? Well, how would you like this interview to wind up? How would you like lunch today? How would you like this leap tonight? How would you like this interview to wind up? How would you like lunch today? How would you like to sleep tonight? How would you like your conversation to go? So we're out come thinking all the time. That's how you get dressed, how you walk out of the room. You see yourself out of the room and then you match your picture.

So we're doing this all the time. It's not something new. You're visioning essentially all of your self talk are kind of pictures you're giving yourself and you're talking to yourself. I am too, about 50,000 times a day. I have no idea how they counted that, but you know, that's a lot. So you can't stop essentially focusing on something. So whatever you're focused on has a lot of power to it. So when we're talking about visioning or affirmation thinking or ideal scenes and those kinds

of things, it's just saying, okay, let me structure the advertisements that I'm giving myself in my own head. So it's kind of like writing your own billboard. You're looking at billboards when you drive down the street anyway, when you write your own. So I just discovered that back in 1981, I think was when I ran across those models, the affirmational model, and I've been using them ever since. Most of my life got created with drafting out and crafting some sort of a vision of how I'd like things to be, even though I had no idea how to get there. But describing the there was the first step.

So speaking of affirmations, in your second book you say, a change in focus equals a change in results. An infinite number of things in the universe are held back from you only by your altitude and your attitude. So this led me to believe that you believe in the law of attraction. So what are your thoughts on that concept? I couldn't agree with myself more. That actually does work. It's kind of like, you don't get what you need, you get what you put out, which actually

is what you need. Because the universe is designed to give you feedback based upon the choices you're making and the focus that you have, and you'll learn from that. But learning how to craft that so you can kind of take control of it as opposed to just being driven by latest and loudest in your life, it works. If the results you're getting is absolutely fine, then don't worry, you're fine. If you want something different or something new or something expanded, then good idea to sit down and say what would that look sound or feel like if I had that.

And then see what happens. Can you talk a little bit about how energy attracts like energy? Well, I think it does. A good example. I mean, who do you take the most expensive presence to when you go to house warings and parties. The people who need them the most? I don't think so. You say, wow, they have a real nice house and lots of expensive things. We have to give them some more.

Why? Well, they've sort of created their entry price. I mean, why don't you take all those cool gifts you're going to give them and give them the money to people who really need it? You don't do that. People tend to attract. Whatever they're putting out tends to do that. People tend to attract. Whatever

they're putting out tends to be what they will tend to attract. And that's what people around them will tend to bring to them. So if you're an uplifted person, positively focused, you'll find the people doing that around you. It's kind of like you create your own barrier, you create your own entry price. That's why there are people in the corporate world, an organizational world out there, there are people who you know you won't walk into their office without your act together because their act is well together. So, you know, but you walk into somebody's out of control, unfocused, gut clutter all over the place, you'll drop some of yours there. I mean, where do you drop a gum wrapper on a clean lawn or one where there are lots of

gum wrappers already? Yeah. You know, that's why Disney, I heard years ago, Disney would fire any of their employees at past a gum wrapper on the ground without picking it up because they found it was so much cheaper and took so much less energy to keep it absolutely clean because then people don't throw stuff on the ground. Yeah, bam. If you're ready to take your business to New Heights,

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membership masterclass.com slash profiting. So there's lots of examples, I think, of where to like a truck's load. Very cool. Okay, so the next one is centered around focus. You give the analogy of putting things at the front door so you don't forget. So for example, if you're about to go on an international trip, you'll probably put your passport and important things at the front doors. There's no chance you'll miss it.

So how does this analogy relate to our minds and the assurance that we get the most important things done? Well, put them in front of the door. It's just not the door of your house. What's the door of your mind? What do you need to look at to orient yourself before of your mind? What do you need to look at to orient yourself before the board meeting? What do you need to look at?

What are the things you need to overview or think about or put in front of your face before you spend the weekend with your family? What are the things you need to look at? Basically, they're just maps. So orienting maps that orient you in space and time. If you or anybody listening to this is looked at your calendar on the last two or three days, you already did that. You looked at a calendar which lifted you

up to see things from a little higher perspective, look at yourself in space and time. So it's just those things. And so it's an infinite number of checklists that you could have travel checklists, any recipe that you'd cook with as a checklist. All of those things are just help you orient because your mind is really a bad office and it's really terrible that we're remembering and reminding. You don't until it becomes just totally habitual, the way you don't have to think about it. But until then, boy, I need checklist. I have dozens. And so any of those kind of things that help your brain relax and know that when it's in a certain context, it will be reminded of the right things at the right time. It lets it relax. Got it. And one of the other things that you often talk about is the need to do the best you can

in the moment. So what's your advice on understanding what the best thing we could be working on right now is? Just listen to yourself. What's the best thing for me to be saying right now? Again, I made the point when I wrote that essay is that trying to be the best, you're trying to be at your best. If you're just learning to cook spaghetti, how good can I be at my beginnings, spaghetti mix or sauce? You just want to be conscious.

It's really more just about being clear and being conscious about what it is that you're doing. It's probably going to be conscious. It's really more just about being clear and being conscious about what it is that you're doing. You know, it's probably going to be at your best. And at your best, maybe, what's the best nap I could have right now? What's the best way I could tuck my boy in that night when he goes to sleep? What's the best thing that I could be doing? And it's just a great little trigger and reminder that you don't have to hold yourself up to a standard of anybody else out there, just your own. And you've got your pointy. So one of the things that you actually get some pushback on with GDD is that some people say it's not conducive to getting into a creative state. But then you hear other sides of the coin where people say it's great for getting into creative state. So can you talk about some of your tips and tricks for getting creative and maybe some best practices when it comes to brainstorming and when it comes to creating

something specific? Yeah well I mentioned a bunch of them already. I mean it's the it's the French chef, me some plus, you know, get organized, get yourself out of a mess so you have the freedom to make a mess. Those are key elements to it. And we're all being creative all the time. You're producing what you're experiencing all the time. We can't stop being creative. I use the example. I said, well, what do you think about the line down the middle of the road out there?

Is that a constraint? Or does that allow you more freedom? So I think you only need to get as organized as you need to be so that it optimizes your freedom. So maybe that's Yen and Y yang, I don't know the best way to describe that model. But it's kind of like Einstein says, you need to get things as simple as possible, but no simpler. Right? So you want to get your life as simple as possible, but you need to have it organized appropriately to match the complexity of what you're engaged in out there.

So, you know, my system has changed over the years just because my life is a little less complex than it was 20 years ago. But I still have the same principles that I still apply. But I plan as little as I get by with. And then putting yourself in a context where you start to trigger creative thinking, also as a big key, I started acrylic painting about a year ago. So I'm staring at now a blank canvas in front of me right now as I look at it. And this sort of challenges me. big key. I started acrylic painting about a year ago. So I'm staring at now a blank canvas in front of me right now as I look at it. And this sort of challenges me, okay David, what's next? But I have it there. So again, it's like putting it in front of the door, which is a creative door.

Well, I think it was Picasso who said inspiration is for amateurs. If you really want to paint, just sit down and friggin paint. You know, don't wait to be inspired. In other words, write, but in-chair, boot computer, hit key. So any good writer was how you ultimately, that's where the creativity comes from, is getting engaged. So oftentimes, you just need to put yourself in a situation that makes it easy to engage before trying to just wait till you're motivated. Got it. Cool. Okay, so the last question we're going to ask before you go is about productivity blockers. So interruptions are, you know, one of the worst productivity blockers, they slow

us down by an average of 23 minutes each time they happen according to science. And it can take longer if an interruption has made us upset or excited. And one of your motto is, how ready for ready are you? So can you talk about why it's important for us to be able to refocus quickly and maybe some of your tips and tricks to reduce the amount of time it takes to be ready

to work on the next thing after an interruption? Well, there are no interruptions. They're just mismanaged inputs. You either should not be getting the interruption because it's not something that's important to you or you should because it is something you're committed to do in terms of either your job or you're committed to, you know, respond and communicate, you know, with people who are communicating with you. If you're in customer service, you know, or an IT consultant, you know, internally in a company, believe me, you're going to get

interrupted all the time, and that's your job. The problem is, the people get interrupted, and if you can't finish whatever it is that you're being interrupted about right then, and you have got a system for place holding that thing, so that you could leave it and then come back to it later on, then some part of you feels like I have to go do that,

but now you get all pissed off because you feel like, that's not what I should be doing, but you're going and doing it because you don't trust your system to manage it. So if you came in and say, hey, David, could you do X, Y and Z? If I'm doing other things, I'll make a little note or ask you, hey, send me a text or send me an email about that. I don't have the attention that it deserves right now. I'll get to it. But you have to trust that I trust that I'll get to it. But you have to trust that I trust, that I'll get to it. So once you're actually in that state,

you can switch tasks much more easily because your brain is not wrapped around the thing when you leave it. You've got a placeholder for it. So that's what kind of being ready for ready is really all about. That's why when I'm not doing anything else, of course, I'm cleaning up my in baskets

and my backlog to zero because there is a surprise coming toward me. Stuff I don't expect good, bad, and different, I don't know what it's coming. And so when that hits, I want as little backlog as possible in terms of uncaptured, un-clarified stuff so that I can evaluate the new situation from a much clearer space about whether to spend time on it, whether to put a place mark on it, or whether to just ignore it. So it's a lot easier to navigate those kind of things if you've got the sack together. Yeah, but when you're like upset about something, like how does that change how we should act towards it?

Because I think that's the most difficult is when something makes you upset. Yeah, well, let me go back to another. There are no problems, only projects. Why are you upset. Yeah, well, let's go back to another. No problems, only projects. Why are you upset? What do you want to have true? What's your desired outcome?

It may not be easy, but you know, if you're upset, it just means you want something to be different than it currently is. So what would different look like? Great. What's your next step? What do you need to do about it? Your motions are much more driven by your mental thinking than the other way around. If you get engaged, you don't have to like your life to get it off your mind. But it turns out that if you do start to get in the driver's seat

about these things that are either upsetting you or bothering you or that you consider problems, then you'll find it's a very different world. Awesome. Well, I think that is exceptional and vice. Thank you so much. So it was such a pleasure to have you on the show. And I hope to meet you out in June in person for your events. So looking forward to that and hopefully we'll keep in touch. Thank you so much. I appreciate the conversation.

Thanks for listening to Young and Propiting podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to write a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. Follow YAHP on Instagram at Young & Profiting and check us out at Young & Profiting.com. And now you can chat live with us every single day on YAHP's sidi on Slack. Check out our show notes or Young & Profiting.com for the registration link. You can find me on Instagram at YAHP with Hala or LinkedIn, just search for my name, Hala Tala. Big thanks to the Yacht team for another successful episode. This week I'd like to give a huge shout out to Timothy Tan and Julian for launching our Share the Weld Referral program,

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