Getting Things Done, with David Allen – Episode 439 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Author and productivity consultant David Allen covers how he valued “clear space” even as a kid, the benefit of writing the reviews before the book, reverse engineering your intuitive skills, why his system works just as well on Jupiter as on Earth, his time with Drew Carey, the listification of all of life’s tasks, why one of the biggest issues out there is addiction to ambient anxiety, his “2 minute rule”, and how organization gives you the freedom to be stupid.

About David:

One of the world’s most influential thinkers on productivity, David’s 40 years experience as a management consultant and executive coach have earned him the titles of “personal productivity guru” by Fast Company and one of the top 5 executive coaches by Forbes Magazine.  His bestselling book, the groundbreaking “Getting Things Done” and its methods, commonly known as “GTD,” spawned a movement with millions of practitioners and fans around the world. His methods of staying relaxed and focused in our fast-paced world are now being spread by certified trainers and coaches in more than ninety countries.

Learn more at GettingThingsDone.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Adam Outland
Hello Action Catalyst listeners! Today’s guest is someone whose work personally impacted me as a young man, and whose work continues to be spun out into numerous editions and versions, printed in dozens of languages, and implemented across the globe. We’re speaking with author and productivity consultant David Allen, perhaps best known for 2001’s groundbreaking book and time management method, “Getting Things Done”. And David, you’re joining us from Amsterdam today?

David Allen
I lived here nine years.

Adam Outland
How did you end up in Amsterdam?

David Allen
You know, we just wanted to become more global in terms of both our work and our interest in our focus. We love to California where we came from. And we saw people slightly older than us looking a little more sedentary than we wanted to be. So we said, you know, come on, let’s throw a dart. Let’s time for an adventure could have been anywhere as long as I was near a good airport. But we’d been here a couple of times. We love the city. I mean, it’s under eyecandy. City. It’s we’re just in we’d love the Dutch. We’d love the culture. And we’ve since we’ve been here, we’ve kept falling in love with it.

Adam Outland
Are you a cyclist now?

David Allen
I’m not like one of those guys dressed for the for the kill, in latex. Adam, where are you now? Where were you talking from?

Adam Outland
Texas.

David Allen
I know it well, I grew up in Shreveport. So we traveled around Dallas and Houston doing debate tournaments. And I had an I had an uncle who was had research chemist for Texaco for many, many years. And he lived in Bel Air.

Adam Outland
So you know, part of what I think brought up this connection was I was interviewing Nick Sonnenberg. He had just come up with a book kind of a his take on time management strategy. And I brought up this idea, my first exposure to time management at all was your book, getting things done, and I read it when I was 21. Because I had an interesting path in college where I was selling educational books and running a sales organization during my summers between college. That’s how I paid for school. But it required a tremendous amount of organization. And that was my worst functional trait as a human and picked up your book read it. And it was very transformational.

David Allen
Well, I’m always delighted right across people where some of this sticks. I never know what sticks. Good for you.

Adam Outland
Yeah, thank you. And when I was combing through some notes about you, it was just so interesting to hear your initial life story. I mean, you just mentioned growing up in Shreveport, how does one go from Shreveport to hold on a magician, waiter, karate teacher, landscaper, vitamin distributor, travel agent, I can’t even say them all.

David Allen
I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I grew up. And you know, I didn’t grow up with deep pockets. And so I had to, I always had the work to make spending money to do whatever I wanted to do. So it banged around a whole lot then got very interested in, in my school got very interested in liberal arts sort of expanding my vision. Also, I was the sort of child actor in Shreveport, I had two or three significant roles as a child in the community theaters, I had an opportunity to experience a lot of people and things that were kind of outside what you might consider the street port culture early on. My mom was quite open to having me just go experienced whatever I wanted to experience wherever. So that’s what I did.

Adam Outland
I’ve got to ask to you. I mean, early in your life, I couldn’t help but wonder like, was organization time management something you consider a strength back then of yours?

David Allen
No, I, I’ve always been somewhat organized. I mean, I I always like, what I had my own room in my little house in Shreveport, my mom had someone come in and build kind of a wall to wall desk, you know that I can do my homework, and I can do other things. And I’m always was like that. I’m just a lazy guy. I don’t like to have to look for things, you know. And so I’ve always been attracted to just clear space. I don’t like to be distracted. I don’t like to have to do stuff. I’m just Mr. Lazy. And don’t don’t make me work or think any more than I have to, you know, I didn’t have that as a conscious notion. It was not a conscious process.

Adam Outland
Right? You do graduate work in American history. And so I’m trying to get the transition to all these automated jobs. And then all of a sudden, boom, business productivity in the 1980s for Lockheed.

David Allen
You know, I dropped out of graduate school, I was sort of, I was studying people who were enlightened and decided that one of my own, so I dropped out to try to just sort of discover who I was and come up. This is the 60s in Berkeley. And so that’s, that’s when sort of self exploration and whatever. So a lot of experimentation, a lot of exploration, martial arts, meditation practices, who are the gurus out there? What are they doing? What are they teaching? What can I learn about any of that? So I was kind of engaged in that. Of course, they weren’t paying people to do that. So I had to pay rent. What I like to do was go in and see what people needed, if I can help them and those weren’t my areas of expertise. I would just go in and say I was kind of a good And number two guy, I’d say, Well, how much easier can we do this, and then I’d wind up doing that, and then get bored. And then I go leave and go find another gig, then I discovered they pay people to do that. They call them something. So that’s what I hung up my shingle in 1982 and said, Okay, let me just see if I can sell myself on a project by project basis. It’s, that’s what I seem to do. And I didn’t want to be hung up with anything. And so that just became, we didn’t call it coaching back then. But that’s kind of really what it was, was Yeah. And then that threw me thrust me into the corporate training world, and they were the ripest audience. So, you know, at a certain point, you know, come on, Adam, it took me 20 years to figure out what I figured out, and that nobody else had done it. And then it was bulletproof. So I had some good coaching, somebody said, Well, you should write the book, I never wrote a book, the first edition of getting things done. Published in 2001, I had no idea whether anybody was gonna buy it or interested in and I just had to get it out of my head.

Adam Outland
You know, one of the things that we often talk to leadership about is the four levels of competency, the beginning of anything new that you endeavor, you’re unconscious, incompetent, and hopefully, you became a conscious, incompetent, meaning you’re at least aware that you’re not good at this. And then you become a conscious, competent, and eventually an unconscious competence, where it’s so natural that it just becomes easy for you.

David Allen
Yeah, couldn’t agree more. By the way, that’s that’s exactly how that works with people with my methodology.

Adam Outland
Yes. Well, I I’m a case study for you. But you know, one of the things that I think is the hardest to do is to reverse engineer it. And this is what I wanted to ask you. Because I imagined just hearing kind of your a lot of the stuff came naturally to you, personally. And so I see you is at the end, especially in the earlier part of your careers and unconscious competent at this stuff, right? You were doing it, what I find so challenging sometimes is to go backwards and become a conscious competent again, because that’s what we’re required to write the book you did, it’s you almost have to like, consciously realize the steps that it took to get you to where you are.

David Allen
Actually, that wasn’t quite my path. I don’t, because what I figured out was the methodology and started to implement it. I knew the methodology work. So I didn’t have to reverse engineer that I just said, How do I describe that methodology in a way that people could get it? That’s right. And it was kind of agonizing to write the book because I wanted to give people the model, or I wanted to give them how to implement the model. But I also wanted to tell them all the and the old by the ways, the subtle stuff that’s going to happen when you actually do this. And I tried to lump that all together, kind of the way I did seminars, it didn’t work. It took me a year to write the first draft and the first rep didn’t work. It was it was the way I did a seminar, but you don’t read a book the way that you go through a seminar. That was my big learning about what to do with what I’d come up with.

Adam Outland
How did so how did you know the first draft didn’t work?

David Allen
I was getting feedback from people that was giving sort of early versions of this. And they said, Oh my god, David, you nailed me in your first paragraph. But it takes three chapters to get to how to do it. Okay, jeez. And also, you know, Adam, you know, I’m a big believer in affirmations, and visioning, and so forth. And the first thing I wrote, before I started writing the book were the reviews, I wrote the reviews my anticipated best case reviews that people would write about the book I’m about to write. And that raised the bar internally for me hugely.

Adam Outland
And it’s so incredibly challenging for many people to get their thoughts on paper in a concise way in a relatable way. To many people try and write a book for everyone. If you just think of one person you’ve coached and how you speak to that one person, you find your voice a little bit easier than trying to talk to everybody.

David Allen
Yeah, well, the same is true. If you’re, you know, I’ve done 1000s of presentations for hundreds and 1000s of people out there just in terms of my work. I may be talking to 5000 people, but I need to talk to one. And then they all get that I’m talking to them, because I’ve stepped myself down to being personal, you know, an authentic?

Adam Outland
Yeah. And so I actually did buy the revisited updated edition with, you know, the upgrade of technology. And honestly, I think the book was written down. I don’t know if the right phrase is technology agnostic, just meaning that it’s applicable, regardless of upgraded technologies. As long as you lean into the principles.

David Allen
You’re still going to read that book when you fly to Jupiter in 100 years. You still need an in basket, you’ll still decide next actions, you still need to then park the reminders of those things in some sort of system that the right people will see at the right time that you then reflect on and notice the status so that you can get to Jupiter or get off Jupiter. So we made it as evergreen as possible with that. That’s the cool thing about it was I uncovered something over all these years it was totally evergreen. That’s universal.

Adam Outland
I wanted to ask are you still doing some one on one work?

David Allen
Every once a while, some pro bono I’m doing and if somebody wanted to engage me for a whole year, which I did with a Drew Carey you know, when I first you know several years ago, he hired me for a year.

Adam Outland
Oh, wow. With some of the applications just for listeners, the aspects that I felt were valuable personally, were the concept of separating your task list to make it more consumable, right? Because I think everybody can relate to the pain of seeing 150 things on their to do list. And it’s a combination of at home tasks, work tasks, no, no understand this concept of splitting those tasks into the relevant geography that they belong to, or the right next action folder. If you split this to do list into these different folders that are more based on when you can tackle those to do items so that you’re able to just dive right in when you have time. One of the challenges that sometimes I run into personally with clients is that the job or position that someone’s in or their their world may not be so cleanly separated as some of the examples that you give. So it’s just curious how you guide people now as to maybe what you find to be the common and best practice next action buckets?

David Allen
Well, probably the best way to start that would be to have somebody list all 120 things on one list, we’ll say, does that work for you? And say, Okay, how would you split that out? It should be pretty obvious that errands should be its own list, it should be pretty obvious that stuff to talk to my life partner about should be its own list, it should be somewhat obvious here, the websites I need to serve want to have a good internet connection. For me, it was important to distinguish between stuff I could do when I had a good web connection and stuff like on a plane when I didn’t. But maybe let me reverse engineer this back for you, Adam, to say how this all started. This all started back in 1983 or 84, when I started doing public seminars around us with handing people public planners that we had found when the best planners to do this, and then printing a list called next actions and a list called projects that we just, you know, sort of the basic categories. And then at some point, this weird thing showed up called a mobile phone. Until then, pretty much all the actions you could take would be done, you know, in pretty much one or two environments, Max. That’s right. So soon as the mobile phone showed up, guess what was possible, you could make calls from almost anywhere. So I went, wow. So what I did was I split my own next actions list into next actions, calls and all the rest. Because that made sense. Because now while I’m at with a phone, I can’t do any of the other stuff. But I could make all these calls. And then I was doing a seminar, they had a great old friend, he was semi retired, and he had a sailboat. And he took my seminar, he said, wow, David, there’s a lot of stuff I need to do at my sailboat, not about my sailboat, because a lot of things I need to do about my boat, I need to go to the marine store and buy X, Y and Z assembly, there are a lot of things I only like to do with my boat. So I created an app boat list. But that’s cool. So that’s how all this started. And then, you know, after all these years, we just gave people in my book, The typical categories that people up until that time anyway, found it useful or practical to separate things and just the computer phone calls to make stuff to talk to people about things I’m waiting for. But I’ve had people show up, they like to list their things. Here’s things that provide service to other people hear things that provide personal service to myself, hear things, and they organized it by emotional value.

Adam Outland
Yeah, it’s less rigid, right? It’s yeah, it’s really taken that consultative perspective of yourself or another person that you’re helping and saying, you know, what’s important to you? What is your life segmented into, and then help them batch accordingly? And I guess you’ve probably experienced this working in a coaching relationship with anybody for a year, you realize that it’s that change is hard for people, right? And part of what makes change so can be so difficult, is that how rooted they are in habits that they’ve done their entire life. So I just was kind of curious, your most difficult scenarios of breaking someone’s bad habits and what you found helpful in getting them attached to this new way of showing up.

David Allen
I haven’t done that so much myself, frankly, I am not an expert at changing habits. I’m not. We know now that obviously follow up. And so we have a lot of coaches around the world, we’ve certified them a lot of what they do is do follow ups or they do coaching and like eight sessions virtually with people so they can work with them and then check with them in two weeks and say how you doing whatever. So there’s a lot of the Keep it going stuff that helps build those kinds of handouts. The biggest issue that most people have is their addiction to ambient anxiety. They’re willing to be waked up at three o’clock in the morning about something they can’t do anything about it. Yes. How do you change that? My job has been demonstrating what it’s like to walk around and have nothing on your mind. No matter how busy or whatever you’re doing. That’s kind of how I live my life. I think we got round David, you look so relax, what’s going on? What’s going on? Keeping you relaxed, what do you need to do about that, that you need to do to get that off your mind. So that’s not spinning around you in some inappropriate way. So you can trust, you’ll see that thing in front of the door you need to take to the office tomorrow, as opposed to trying to remember you need to take that thing. Why don’t you build systems that remind you of stuff when you have to do so you can become a dumb and stupid like me most of the time, because I’ve just already made my decisions, then I have the freedom to become a dumb and stupid and have fun, and then still do effective stuff. As simple as that sounds. That’s it? Yeah, that really, that really is it, to what degree someone buys into that what to read, someone integrates any of that, if you just write a few more things down, then you wouldn’t normally you’re going to improve your life, if you just decide what’s the next action on something a little bit sooner than when it shows up, instead of when it blows up, you’re gonna improve your life, if you just implement the two minute rule, anything in your email box right now that you could actually complete and get rid of in two minutes or less should not be there that’s going to improve your life, you just have to decide how much of that you think you need.

Adam Outland
We’ll ask people on a scale of one to 10, you know, how do you feel like you are with your time management and what kind of outline what a 10 means, and a one means to most people, and you get a lot of people answer 456. And the interesting question after that is, you know, it’s really the ones that I don’t worry about too much. Because if you’re at rock bottom, and time management, like I was when I was 21, and bought your book, you know, there’s only one direction to go from there. And life’s gonna get hard real fast unless you change. But in the middle, you can live your entire life without realizing what you’re capable of, and be mediocre at something. And that’s how a lot of people they don’t haven’t lost enough to where they really want to make change.

David Allen
Well, you’re gonna change out of pain, more than inspiration, you’ll change out of both, but the pain wins by far.

Adam Outland
You know, we hear people who’ve had so much success in life, and it’s really easy to go well, if they always had it, they always did it. Life was like a Disney movie. And there were no bumps in the road. Right? And that’s rarely ever true. And so I guess my question to you is, what were some of those bumps in your your Disney movie have a story?

David Allen
Well, we had to make a decision at some point when the book was successful about whether we should try to scale the GTD methodology education any further than say, I could have just stopped everything. And just with the success of the book just had a career of speaking. But I had, by that time, 30 or 40 people on staff, and they were we were doing work in doing coaching and training around the US are quite a good bit. And I said, Come on, guys, should we do this? And they said, Yeah, we should do that. Okay, how do we scale this kind of business? Because to a large degree, it was based upon me and my really well trained facilitators that could inspire people to do this one on one. But how do you scale something like this, and so trying to figure that out, and we’re still working that out. So that was the big decision to make that decision to begin with wasn’t painful, but it was challenging. Couple of big mistakes that I’ve made in the process were because I’ve made some decisions before I should have without doing due diligence, about whether that was the right decision. So hiring a senior person that didn’t work out, it was expensive and painful. Making a deal with someone to partner with me in in one of my book deals that I shouldn’t have done then that they’re getting a lot more value out of this than I could have had some other people who are closer to me that could have made, you know, a lot more money that would have been more fun if they’d been involved with that. So a lot of these were decisions that were made, because people were pressuring me, okay, what do we need to do? Or I was pressuring myself that oh, yeah, I need to make that decision about that. But, you know, live and learn, it’s hard to denigrate shown rungs of your ladder. I mean, I got a great life and lifestyle, you know, so hard to say that all those were learning experiences and things that I had that I went through, and then I learned stuff about, you know, obviously, it’s pretty big challenges before, back in my, in my 20s. But that was a lot about, you know, a lot of experience I had but drugs that was not, that was exploration, I wasn’t escaping, I was exploring, I was back in the 60s with like, wow, what’s out there, what’s up there, what’s whatever. And so, but that didn’t help a lot in terms of my nervous system and my physiology or whatever. And then I ran it, and then I got kind of ran off the rails for a little while. And so kind of understanding how that happened and what I needed to do about that, and then how to I could come back to a level of cooperation with my world, you know, that work. So that was pretty big. That was a big change.

Adam Outland
That’s right, with methamphetamine or something?

David Allen
Oh, I did everything, I snorted heroin for a year and there were hardly any drugs that I didn’t experiment with. But it didn’t help my nervous system. Kind of fried it. I haven’t done any recreational stuff since 1971.

Adam Outland
And you live in Amsterdam. That’s amazing.

David Allen
Well, come on, the Dutch don’t do that. It’s only the tourists that show up and do all that stuff.

Adam Outland
So, you know, I think in retrospect, knowing and having gone through this journey that you’ve gone through, how would David Allen today, what kind of advice would you provide that 20 or 21 year old self, having been through your life already, right? Like, if you could go back as a mentor.

David Allen
I would say you have an intuitive voice that’s in there right now. It’s always been there, it will always be there. Learn to quiet yourself, and ask the right questions. And listen to the intuitive voice that loves you cares about you, doesn’t judge you, but will give you really, really good advice. I didn’t learn that for another 20 years in my life, probably at that point, I would say that and relax.

Adam Outland
It’s a great piece of advice. And just as a kind of a last maybe a couple of quickfire questions, what are the books that you’re reading, called in the last five or seven years that have been influential to you?

David Allen
I’m gonna give you two big ones. One is a book called humankind. Rutger Bregman is a Dutch writer, but it’s a fabulous book, even in English, it’s a lot about how actually good human nature really is. And it’s a big rant about the sensational media that’s made it out as if there’s so much bad going on in the world. He’s going, No, there’s not. And he’s got a lot of good data and a lot of statistics and stuff in there to prove the people in sharp when push comes to shove, they help each other out. They’re good people, there’s a goodness to the human consciousness. And thankfully, I read something this morning or yesterday, and they’ve done a study that short little pieces of kindness is a universal trait across the world, that people actually are very, for the majority of what they do, how they interact with people is helping people and being kind and being useful to them in some way. So this is not something you get when you read, read the media, and here’s another one.

Adam Outland
The 1619 project.

David Allen
So this is a compilation of some of the most elegant essay you can imagine about how slavery as an institution has impacted on the US culture, history, culture, politics, everything else. I was an American History major Adam, and I read this away, oh, my god, had no idea how much American history taught in schools ignores some of the key elements of how much of our culture was created by that institution. Yeah, it’s a page turner.

Adam Outland
Thanks for sharing all about changing perspective. And for people to be able to find you and some of the resources and tools obviously the book Getting Things Done. You’ve published two other books as well, correct?

David Allen
Yeah, ready for anything, making it all work. And then GTD workbook, and, and GTD for teams. So I’ve done a few of those. And we again, have a new book coming out for teams, and that’s going to be out first of the year. Ah, you know, all these years, people have run across my stuff implemented, oh my god, if I could get people around me to do this, it’d be so much cooler, it’s so much easier. And I’ve never had the bandwidth to really produce that manual. Now we have, I’ve got a fabulous co author Ed Lamont from from our partner in UK. It’s dynamite. And by the way, if anybody wants to just more of my stick, getting things done.com as website, you’ll see a lot of resources there, sign up for our newsletter if you want, but getting things done.com/youtube You can see my three TEDx talks I’ve done you can see tons of short little snippets of videos of tips and tricks or whatever, if you’re interested in a little more snacking.

Adam Outland
Yeah, love it. Again, appreciate your time and being on here and thanks for the impact.

David Allen
You got it, guy. Delighted.