David Allen and "Getting Things Done" - Monday, September 9, 2019 3:10 PM
The Tim Ferriss Show, a podcast show from, well, Tim Ferriss – the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” – is a good show. He is one of the major productivity gurus of the last 20 or so years. I listen to his show every once in a while and the last person he interviewed was David Allen, the author of “Getting Things Done”: https://gettingthingsdone.com/. That book became a huge banger in the mid-2000s Silicon Valley arena, when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, and Dropbox were firing on all cylinders, and is still practiced today in many tech companies. Attached is the productivity flow chart distilled from the book.
David Allen is a crazy dude and I love him. Here’s his Wikipedia Early Life bio:
He grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana where he acted and won a state championship in debate. He went to college at New College, now New College of Florida, in Sarasota, Florida, and completed graduate work in American history at University of California, Berkeley. After graduate school, he began using heroin and was briefly institutionalized. His career path has included jobs as a magician, waiter, karate teacher, landscaper, vitamin distributor, glass-blowing lathe operator, travel agent, gas station manager, U-Haul dealer, moped salesman, restaurant cook, personal growth trainer, manager of a lawn service company, and manager of a travel agency. He is an ordained minister with the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. He claims to have had 35 professions before age 35. He began applying his perspective on productivity with businesses in the 1980s when he was awarded a contract to design a program for executives and managers at Lockheed.
Here is an exciting excerpt from the show I listened to this morning with David Allen talking about next action decisions and to-do lists:
Tim Ferriss: I’d love to dig into next action decisions. This is a really powerful concept, and a really important distinction that many people do not have a whole lot of clarity on. So could you talk about next action decisions and how they, perhaps, differ from what a lot of people put on their to-do lists?
David Allen: Sure. Well, when we talk about next actions, that means as granular as, “Where, physically, visibly, are you going to go to do what to move the needle on this thing, on this commitment?” Is that at your computer to write an email? Is that at your computer to surf a website? Is that at the hardware store to buy nails? Is that at your life partner to have a conversation? What is the very, very next thing you need to do to get clarity on Mom’s birthday, or increasing your bank credit line, or hiring a vice president, or getting a life? What’s the very next action? If you had nothing else to do but that, what would you go do?
People avoid that decision like the plague. They do. You could’ve fooled me. When we coach people, it takes one to six hours for them to identify all the stuff they have attention on, and then the rest of the day or two to go through each one of those and say, “Okay. What’s the very next thing you need to do about cat food, about vice president, about get a life, about should you get divorced or not? What’s the next thing?”
And it takes — people actually have to think to make those decisions. It’s not hard. There are actually two aspects of getting clarity that I have to tie together is, what’s the very next action? And, if one action won’t complete whatever this commitment is, what’s the project?
If you look at most people’s to-do list, you see things like, “Mom” and “bank.” It’s like, “Yeah, well, I’m sure you had a mom, so why is it on the list?” “Well, her birthday’s coming.” “What are you going to do about her birthday?” “I don’t know. I think it’s coming.” Yeah, right.
So taking something like that and then, well, you captured the idea, great. That’s step one. But then step two is you need to then clarify what exactly you’re going to do about that, and what’s the final outcome? so “Give Mom a birthday party” goes on my project list, and, “Call my sis to see what she thinks we ought to do for Mom’s birthday,” is the next action.
As simple as that sounds, outcome and action are the zeroes and ones of productivity, but most people have not actually identified the outcomes and the specific actions of the things that have their attention. You could’ve fooled me. But there are very few people that are exceptions to that, and most people have tons of stuff. Anybody listening to this right now, just pull out your to-do list and I’ll show you what I’m talking about.
Most of the things on your to-do list are not the very next action you need to take about those. And probably the things on your to-do list are not the complete outcome that you’re trying to achieve by whatever action you need to take. So it’s funny that the zeroes, ones of productivity, people are avoiding. I mean, Getting Things Done, you need to know what “done” means. You get to mark it off as complete when what’s true and what does doing look like and where does it happen? “Oh, that’s a phone call,” or, “That’s a thing to buy at th
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