EffTD Interview Part One: David Allen

Right before last month’s GTD Summit, I had the opportunity to chat with the surprisingly reasonable and like-minded David Allen.  I say this only because prior to contacting him, I’d been of the mindset that he was a staunch anti-supporter of Eventualism and EffTD.  Quite the contrary, as you’ll read here – seems as if he’s given EffTD his own seal of approval!

For those of you unfamiliar with Allen’s work, I have two things to mention:

1. He is the creator of the popular productivity system and accompanying book Getting Things Done (or GTD for short – it’s an acronym).  His latest book is entitled Making It All Work and it expands and refines what he’s been preaching for the past several years.

2. Do you even get what I’m doing?

And now, the first installment of my discussion with David Allen.

MV: David, it is truly an honor to have the chance to speak with you today.  I trust you received that heated seat cushion I sent to you and are sitting upon it as we speak.

DA: Mike, it’s one of the best things you’ve given me.  I hold on to it and try not let people see me with it, snuggling with it.  We all have our little quirks, and I want to thank you for helping me with mine.

MV: You’re quite welcome.  Now, as the author of Getting Things Done , which is widely considered to be the must-read book about GTD, I find it striking that your latest effort, Making It All Work , seems to reinforce the ideas behind the aforementioned book.  Are we to understand that the message behind GTD may not stick with one in perpetuity?

DA: You know, if it did I probably would have written the book and then crawled off and did something else.  But the truth is, people didn’t seem to sort of “catch it” right away in terms of what it was all about.  By the sixth or seventh reading people actually start to get what a Next Action is and what keeping things out of your head is all about…so rather than make people look stupid by re-reading the same book over and over again, I decided to put another book out.

MV: And the new book is longer – it’s 400 pages or so.  I noticed that right away.  It’s heavier.

DA: Yeah, it’ll help keep people more engaged in this stuff.

MV: I find it interesting that if you remove every word but the verbs in your latest title, the book’s title reads “Making Work.”  That being said (and therefore proven), would you say that this book actually makes work rather than un-makes work?

DA: Gee, that’s a good question.  I’m going to have to ponder that; get into a meditative pose and reflect.

The truth is, it’s all work – or none of it’s work and it’s all play.  If you’re going to get stuff done you can call it work, you can call it play, you can call it whatever -  but I think we’re all here to do things, to express things.  But making all of that work is the whole thrust here.

MV: What is the typical start to a David Allen day?

DA: Waking up, then coffee.  Two critical points I’ve found.  Actually, those are pretty much the only two things I do consistently.  Check the “hard landscape,” find out what will “die” if I don’t do it today, try to have some reflective, contemplative time and let my intuitions take hold and find out where my focus should go from there.

MV: Me, I simply “meditate in” for as long as possible.  David, you seem to be all about “capturing” things – which, to be truthful, kind of scares me a little – and you encourage people to get things out of their heads and capture them either n paper or some other device.  I find that, for me, the more I keep in my head the smarter I appear.  Umm, I just forgot what my question was and I don’t have it written down so if you could just comment on that I’d really appreciate it.

DA: You actually make a very good point there.  You don’t want to go capture stuff that you don’t want to have anyway.  As a matter of fact, if it just breezes through with no residue…who cares?  You know, I should probably rewrite that because it’s not so much about capturing but it’s about recognizing what some very inefficient part of you can’t help but capture.  For example, if you think “Hey, this is a great restaurant. I’d like to come back to” you start hanging on to that.  So what I really mean by capture is to start recognizing what your mind is hanging on to and get it out of there.  This is the kind of stuff that you’re collecting in an objective, “not you” kind of place, otherwise if you start to be like the old cartoon character Pig-Pen with just this cloud of “stuff” stuck to you.  So if something comes through and it doesn’t cause a ripple…you don’t need to capture it.

MV: That’s a great point.  I’ll have to write that down.  You’ve made a few changes in “Making It All Work” – such as the wording from Review (meaning to view once more) to Reflect (meaning to “flect” once more).  This change seems to allow more creative and abstract thinking to take place during the process, or so I’m told.

DA: Absolutely,  It’s more “right brain.”  You’re right.

MV: Did you find that there were other aspects of GTD that you felt needed tweaking?

DA: I also changed the word “collect” to “capture” because the truth is if you hired me to coach you or help you, we will be collecting things but what we’ll need to do is grab the things that need to be captured.  So you could really interchange the words, but there’s a subtle distinction there; that’s why I wanted to change the word.  I mean, if you’re trying to get control of a situation you don’t necessarily run around trying to collect things, but what you do need to become is conscious of the things you need to grab that are pulling you out of control or out of focus.  Capture’s probably a more universal word to use here than collect.

Tomorrow:  David talks about how productivity has taken the Internet by storm, the Horizons of Focus, the GTD Summit and his endorsement of Eventualism.

Tagged as: book, capture, EffTD, eventualism, focus, GTD, lifehack, Productivity, summit, work