A Q A With “Getting Things Done” author David Allen on how to
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Dean Takahashi has been a journalist for almost 19 years, most of it covering technology business news. For about 12 years, he has been covering tech news in Silicon Valley. Currently, he writes a technology column, TECHTALK, and he has also covered chips, video games and Microsoft. He started his current stint at the Mercury News as a hardware writer in 2002, but this is his second time around. Previously, he was a senior writer at the Red Herring magazine from 2000 to 2002. His favorite game is Halo.
David Allen is one of the more interesting self-help speakers I ve encountered in my wanderings, and his message seems to resonate well among tech executives in Silicon Valley. The Ojai, Calif., productivity expert wrote Getting Things Done in 2001 and the book has grown through word of mouth. It is consistently on Amazon.com s bestseller list and its basic message is appealing. Allen argues that if you can get control of your life through proper organization, you can eliminate distractions and spend more time doing your best creative work. I heard him speak at the Under The Radar conference at Microsoft in Mountain View and followed up with a phone conversation afterward. Here s a transcript of our interview.
q: I m late. Sorry for the loss of your productive time.
a: (Laughs). No sweat.
q: This book has been a consistent bestseller on Amazon.com for a while.
a: It was published in hardback in 2001.
q: What explains this?
a: I frankly don t know. I ve got some guesses. First of all, I think that the pain factor is increasing with people not doing this. Second, there is so much drivel that has paraded itself as useful advice in time management and productivity and a lot of it doesn t work. It took people a while for people to believe it works. You hear about it once and you go yeah, maybe. You hear about it more. By the sixth time, when you meet people you trust implementing it, then you start thinking maybe I ought to do that. I took a while for that to reach critical mass.
I think there must be a lot of self-help cynicism out there and you have to overcome that.
a: And I think too there has been a serious buy-in in the tech world for this. There are several reasons for this that are obvious. Someone told me, David, you created subroutines.' When this happens, you can run this routine on it and it fixes it. The whole
idea of open loops … Wired magazine wrote about a new term of open loops as something that came out of my book. That it s a closed, functional system. I think people with a technology-bent like that this is a closed, knowledge work system. It makes sense and is system independent. So it gives us a way to turbo-charge whatever your cool gear is. Tech people are early adopters. The whole tech industry is based on an enabling thought model. It s a non-tech meme that has spread into the tech world. All the press the bloggers have given it have helped.
q: What s the scope of the cottage industry that has grown up around Getting Things
Done?
a: I don t know myself. Somebody did an analysis that said there were over 60 software programs that purport to use the GTD model. There is a whole lot I don t know about. We get an email today about someone designing a system.
q: Can you summarize the message of Getting Things Done?
a: It is about the best practices for how you get control and perspective on your life. It gives you a cogent perspective of what is going on. I think I uncovered some of the
psychic mechanics of why your mind hangs on to a commitment or idea. If you haven t dealt with it, then a part of you starts taking energy away to maintain it. It starts to pull on your energy. I can t prove that except if you start to write stuff down and deal with it
objectively, you ll start to feel better and have more creative bandwidth. It will be easier to focus on what you are doing and it will be easier to eliminate stress.
q: So your mind plays tricks on you and you can play some back here?
a: The mind was designed to have ideas, not hold them. If you had 15 phone calls to make and try to keep them all in your head, you will lose perspective on all of them. You can keep about ten in your head if you are good. The short term memory is not designed to do very good retrieval. Your mind will tend to retrieve things based on how recently they happened or how much emotional content you hvae attached to them. That s not a functional way to run your life. But most people have over half their life in their head in terms of trying to keep track of stuff. They trust their minds to remember and remind them of what they have to do. But because it doesn t do a very good job, people wind up being buffeted and blown around by what is loudest or latest. That tends to be your prioritizer.
q: I read the book and it is interesting because it is not about organization for organization s sake. It s organizing so you can eliminate distractions so you can be more creative.
a: Hello. That s not to get you organized. It s to keep people from hitting you so you don t have to worry about it and you can think about other things while you re driving. (Laughs). Getting Things Done s structure is to create freedom and expansion, not the other way around.
q: I suppose the problem is most people don t have a good system and they spend their time trying to get organized. They can t stay on top of it and never get to that point here
they have a lot of freedom.
a: Right. And for the wrong reasons. Most people are trying to rearrange piles of incomplete stuff. They think they say let me sit down and get organized. But what they haven t done is grab everything that is commanding their attention to begin with so that their mind gets freed up to truly focus on that pile. They also haven t decided what the actions are and the meaning of the stuff in the pile is. If you are just rearranging piles of incomplete stuff, it just gets worse. You feel tired because you know it s not all there. You brain has to subliminally remember things that you can t really remember. And your system doesn t record decisions that you ve made. You write down vacation, but you don t know what you re going to do about that. Once you do these stages in the book where you collect stuff and then walk yourself through all the material and make decisions about it, now you start to grab the real content that then needs to be structured and organized. You decide that is a phone call you need to make. That s a major habit change for most people. There is a thought process that must be applied first so that personal organization works and isn t more trouble than it s worth.
q: On the creativity front, if Picasso had used your system, would he have painted five Guernica' masterpieces instead of just one?
a: Who knows! Organization is not the essence of creativity. It s following your creative hunches. Successful executives are the ones that have solved bigger problems than
they have created. That doesn t mean you excuse the ones they create. The fact that Picasso created that … who knows why. Was it because he was organized and stayed focused, or because he was disorganized and stayed focused? If you want to be a struggling, starving person so that it helps your creativity, be my guest.
q: There is all this comedy about being disorganized. Why?
a: I m not quite sure. But comedy is tied to tragedy, and most people feel real bad and ashamed about how they are not managing this.
q: The pain factor you mention is there.
a: It s something. A guy wrote a book about the value of a messy desk and he was
trying to counteract the fact that most people are walking around with guilt and shame. I m not voting for guilt and shame. But most people don t say they are in control and on top of things. People feel insecure about it. Nobody has defined the game. So people feel like they re not winning it. I defined the game so you can play it or not play it. At least you know what the game is so you can get it clear.
q: I ve talked to some of your readers. There is enthusiasm for the book but also some guilt about what level of implemenation they have done. How fully have they embraced it?
a: It s challenging. But it s simple stuff. Write things down. It s not hard to have lists. It s not hard to review that stuff. It seems silly that people don t hop on board and get there. It s like any habit. You have to change. You have old grooves in there. It s very seductive for your mind to keep hold of things. There are other reasons too. Most people don t
have a reference point for having things off your mind. Once you taste that, it feels so
uncomfortable keeping that stuff around. Most people haven t gotten to that point. I clean up my inbox for the same reason I take showers. The scuzz factor gets to high if I don t do it.
q: It looks like there varying levels of adoption you have with the book. Some come away with a few ideas. If there are a few you would quickly suggest, what would they be?
a: Get everything out of your head. Write it down. Then decide what the very next actions are you need to take. Anything that takes two minutes or less, do them.
q: I like that two-minute rule. Where did you come up with that?
a: A mentor trained me to do that. Years ago.
q: The idea is you get that distraction out of your head, you can be freer?
a: It s pure efficiency. If you re ever going to do an action, and that action takes less than two minutes, it would take you longer to stack it and track it than it would to simply handle it the first time. It s silly to waste time by stacking it up. Once you do that, you find that a lot of the stuff that comes in can be handled that way. If you handle things
at the front end, it can be done right then. You feel better having completed things. You send the ball back so it s not sitting in my court. A lot of the value of Getting Things Done is you start moving forward and completing a lot of little subroutines. At the end of the day, you don t have to wonder what the hell you did. You don t have to finish a big project, but you keep it moving forward so that you feel like you re keeping agreements with yourself. That is the key. It s hard to do if you don t sit down and figure it out. Most people don t challenge themselves to figure out the next action.
q: What have you learned about behavior? What makes people unproductive in the first
place?
a: That s a good question. Productivity is relative. It depends on what you are trying to produce. If you go on vacation and your goal is to relax, that s an unproductive vacation.
It s not about being a type A personality and working harder. It is about what are you trying to produce and are you doing that. It has to come back to whether you are clear about what being done means. Action and outcome are the keys. You have to clarify the outcome and care about what is being produced. It could be lots of reasons why someone is unproductive. The underlying reason is comfort zone. Often it means I have to learn something new and go outside the comfort zone. I don t approach it from any moral view, or right or wrong. If people are unproductive, they haven t gotten clear about what they want to produce or how they want to do it.
q: What have you done outside of your book?
a: We have several little businesses distributing this education now. I wrote the book to see how much the world would salute. The world keeps saluting and asking for more stuff. People don t seem to get it right away. We use a version of this education in corporate
training and executive coaching. That is the core of my business for 20 years. Live seminars for a day or two in the corporate world. We address issues of time management, stress management, productivity, prioritization, and personal organization. It s done firm wide, for new hires or senior people in many of our client companies. It has a universal appeal.
q: I would guess this is affordable to executives?
a: We do coaching where we do it one-on-one. That s more expensive because that is labor intensive on our side. Sometimes I have seminars with 200 or 300 people and that is not expensive per head. We have a membership program called GTD Connect. You get a CD, interviews, a journal, and a 24 x 7 exclusive web site for people who have bought into it. We launched that last year. We signed a partnership with training firm Linkage to build a train the trainer' program. We can have companies spread this education with their own trainer. We are also developing products, including me on audio and video. Cool gear as well. We designed a few things like a plastic-traveling folders or note-taker wallets with a little pen.
q: Does a software productivity program come close to capturing your goals in a digital work style?
a: You just want to have some flat lists that are easily accessible and easy to retrieve. We did work and partner with NetCentrics to create an add-in for Outlook so it s easier to create some lists. You can delegate and defer emails. There is an overlay. There are nice training wheels to help you with your tasks. We have some white papers on how to restructure Outlook or Lotus Notes to deal with it better. But there is no particular application. Palm is hard to beat because it just gave you 15 memo categories. The only reason I am using Lotus Notes is I have to be in a group where I share my calendar. I use Lotus for simple lists that I synchronize to a Treo.
q: I m hopelessly busy and hopelessly disorganized. I get maybe 3,000 emails or more in a month. What is your two-minute solution for me?
a: You need to clean up your email so you stop using your Inbox as your reminder system and reference system and trash bin. You need to use the delete key and dump the stuff you need to dump. You need to use the navigator folders in the left-hand margin and set up a simple little alpha system of plain folders of anything you need to keep. That will shrink it a ton. Anything that is left you can get rid of in two minutes. Then create two folders, one called action' and one called waiting for,' then drag things into it. Now you have an empty inbox. The trick is to pop open the action folder and stare at the 16 or so emails that are going to take you longer than two minutes to handle. Problem is once people get stuff out of the inbox, they never look at it again. It takes discipline.
q: Does any particular story make someone stand out in terms of disorganization?
a: Everybody has these issues. Some people are highly organized at 30,000 feet, and they don t have clean desks. Some people have the clean desks. It s a universal issue.
q: Do you run into a lot of people who still do everything on paper?
a: Yes. Not everything. The world is coming at you now in electronic ways. Very few people are not getting email. But there are a lot of people who find paper more useful in
reminders. I know a guy who manages 15,000 servers is using paper cards. It s hard to beat paper in rapidly viewing what is going on.
q: That is the challenge for productivity software. It has to overcome the utility of paper?
a: Yeah. Also its accessibility. That is why paper wins. I use paper to collect. It s a lot easier to capture an idea and put it in my inbox than it is to use a computer to capture
that idea. That will probably be forever easier on paper. In terms of reviewing lists, that s
a judgement call. A third of the people like paper binders or paper planners. Some people create lists on a computer and print it out. It s unique for everyone, based on personalities and work styles.
q: Do you come up to Silicon Valley often? What reception do you get?
a: Google is a huge client of ours. We are pretty popular in Silicon Valley. I have quite a reputation in the tech world.
q: Did the bloggers help that happen?
a: It helped. A lot of the PR about the book happened in the blogs and the tech world.
q: If there is a list of the top technology tools, do you have opinions on what makes you most productive?
a: I use Lotus Notes. Outlook is popular. Are they different? yes. Are they the same? Yes. It s like asking if any telephone is better than any other. I use the Office Suite. They just blend. I use Mind Manager. That is a great digital tool for perspective building and informal project management and taking notes. It is a good thinking tool. I use Active Words, a great little macro in the Windows environment. That s a date stamp thing. We use Lotus Notes for collaboration in our dispersed company. It s very useful to us. The task management and personal organization can be done by anything.
q: It s interesting some rituals can make you think better. You advocate this Friday afternoon weekly review.
a: No kidding. It doesn t have to be Friday afternoon. But anytime you can get time to go 10,000 feet up instead of down hugging the trees. A lot of people don t do that because
they haven t got it under control to begin with. These perspective builders. Management of your projects isn t easy to do if you don t have lists of things to do to begin with.
q: One person told me they used Google Desktop to find their emails when they search for them so they stopped organizing their emails.
a: That doesn t help you decide what action to take. Most of that is just speeding things up. Google Desktop doesn t help you decide anything. All it does is give you another
way to access your library of stuff. But if you have actionable things inside your library, it
won t find them for you.
q: Did you see anything at the Under the Radar conference that was interesting?
a: Lot of it is interesting. It wasn t earth shaking. I ask who has time to do any of that? I am not an expert in that arena. I didn t think Starbucks would take off. So I wouldn t
trust me. I didn t see much of anything that rings my bell.
q: I suppose Silicon Valley s answer is technology will solve your problems.
a: These are human behavior issues that have to be addressed. Technology can facilitate things for you. If you use technology to get you to do a weekly review, that would help. I keep trying to get someone to do that. How many people do a weekly review?
q: How do creative people react to you? Say, writers in Hollywood?
a: I get a lot of those individuals coming to my public seminars. I get as many right-brain people as otherwise. They like my system because it doesn t over-structure you. It gives you your paintbrush, your pallette. Once people are willing to taste it, they like it. A lot of people in Hollywood like it. The Screen Artists Guild brought me in for a seminar.
q: You mention in the book you were not an organized person and early in your life you went off on unstructured journeys. What caused you to move into this?
a: A lot of my exploration taught me one key principle: the strategic value of a clear space. A lot of my work in the martial arts or meditative practices has to do with how to
clear my head. There could be spiritual or practical reasons. If four people jump you in a
dark alley, you don t want to be strung out thinking about 3,000 emails. The clearer your deck is, the more you can focus internally or externally with more sensitivity and more subtlety.
q: Did something inspire you 20 years ago?
a: It just happened piece by piece. I hung out my shingle as a consultant. I focused on things that facilitated process. I was fascinated by how people processed things. I m one
of the laziest people you ever met. What are the things I can do so life works better.
q: What did your parents do?
a: My Dad died when I was real young but he was a sales manager for a petroleum company in Louisiana. My mother worked for the Social Security Administration.
q: Did anything about your background make you more organized?
a: Not really. I am not a naturally organized guy. I follow my intuitive hunches as well. It is something I learn and work at. I have to be conscious about the process is. At one point I tried to just go be. Without any structure. Problem is it is pretty easy to fall off the edge of a pier. I think some structure is not a bad idea. That is how I backed into this.
q: What are your big goals?
a:I have another book coming out. Ready for Anthing was the second book. This is the third book. Expanding our education to meet demand out there.
Great article, Dean, thank you.
While I m a great believer in paper (and have been helping paper intensive organizations better manage their paper with efficient color-coded labeling systems), I ve recently been advocating transferring paper into images for storage access.
That s why I wrote my ebook, Paperless Office, from Myth to Reality. It helps people organize their computer filing system and set up an efficient, fast way to file copies of paper without time consuming file naming conventions. I, too, work with paper but then quickly scan it into my computer for future access. Using new, inexpensive, two-sided scanners, you can take a file with 100 pages and convert it electronically to images in just 4 minutes (and the scanner is no bigger than a small inkjet printer). It s a great way to get paper off the desk yet accessible.
One of my problems is that I primarily work alone so I don t have anyone to delegate to unless I can get someone to do it as a favor . So whatever delegation I can get done, it takes a lot of effort.
Thanks for your article.
Peter Harnack
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