David Allen is the author of the global best-seller “Getting Things Done” and multiple follow-up books, most recently “Team: Getting Things Done With Others.”

“Getting Things Done” has sold over 4 million copies, has been translated into 28 languages, and is considered the single most influential Personal Effectiveness book of the 21st century. Allen’s simple process has transformed how millions of people do business and life. His work has been praised by luminaries like Daniel Pink and the Wall Street Journal’s former workplace culture guru, Sue Shellenbarger. 10 years ago, Allen and his wife Kathryn moved from Southern California to Amsterdam where they now reside.

I was studying American intellectual history in graduate school in Berkeley, and then I got more interested in instead of studying people who were enlightened, finding my own I said it was headache times to do that. So I said I dropped out of graduate school, decided to go look for myself, God, truth in the universe, and studied martial arts and meditation and spiritual stuff, gurus and all kinds of things, which was that was a heady time to be doing that kind of stuff.

Welcome to the MY FOURTH ACT PODCAST. I'm your host, Achim Nowak, and I have conversations with exceptional humans who have created bold and unexpected lives. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on any major podcast platform so you won't miss a single one of my inspiring guests, and please consider posting an appreciative review. Let's get started. I am absolutely delighted to welcome David Allen to the MY FORTH ACT PODCAST. David is the author of the global bestseller, getting things done and several follow up books. Most recently, team getting things done with others. Getting Things Done has sold over 4 million copies, which is staggering to me, has been translated into 28 languages and has transformed how millions of people do business and life. David's work has been praised by some luminaries who I just adore, Daniel Pink and the Wall Street Journal's wise and sadly now retired. Sue shellen Barger, 10 years ago, he and his wife Catherine, moved from Southern California to Amsterdam, where they now reside. Hello, David.

Hello. Achim, delighted to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Oh, my pleasure entirely before we get to the book you wrote, and also, in my mind, the movement that it spawned. I'm always curious when you were a little boy growing up, and you know, mom and dad asked you, Hey, David, what do you want to be when you grow up? What were you thinking about?

Well, frankly, I would not been particularly aspirational about it. I kind of didn't know what I want to do when I grew up. My dad died when I was young. I was only nine, so my mom pretty much raised me, but I wanted to be an actor. She gave me acting lessons when I was 11, and I became sort of the child actor in Shreve, where I grew up in Louisiana, and I played several roles. I was John and Peter Pan. I was Lewis and the king, and I, I was the kid in Waiting for Godot. I was the kid in wilderness. So I love that. I love the theater. I love that. And of course, my mom was like, Well, David, no, come on, you got to get the you have to get a degree, you know, because she'd been raised in the Depression, so she was quite security conscious about the don't go risk yourself with that. But there weren't many other options. I mean, come on, when you grew up in the South, in Louisiana, if you were intelligent, you were either a teacher, a lawyer, or there weren't many other options if you weren't that intelligent, you sold insurance or cars, that was about it in terms of models. So I didn't really have any models out there to follow, relative to, you know, what I might want to do with my life.

You may not know this about me, but I was a professional theater director for 12 years, so as you rattle through your childhood credits, gosh, you got to be in some very cool place. That's wonderful. No, no, no, kidding, yeah, yeah. Now you're, I hope I can reveal your age. You're a fellow in your 70s. You wrote this.

I'll be 80 next year, so I'm turning 79 in December. So, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm up there. So

what strikes me is that when you wrote, getting things done, which, and I don't mean this in a religious term at all, is a Bible to many people that I know and love

you. By the way, I was 55 when I got published. That's where

I was going with that. Because I was thinking. And this may be an impossible question, but what experiences led you to write that book? Clearly, a lot of stuff happened that culminated in the author. Well,

I'll give you as short a version of a long story as I can. I got enthralled by history, intellectual history. So I was an intellectual history major in my strange little college in Florida, American intellectual history. I was fascinated by the American thought process. I'd been an exchange student in high school in Switzerland, so I'd lived with the Swiss Family for a year. So I had the chance to have. Another perspective, sort of American culture, when I came back, and this is the 60s, you know, Kevin, this is 6364 65 I got into graduate school American intellectual history, Berkeley, 1968 it's like, you know, I can imagine Berkeley in 1968 that was heady times to be there, right? And I enjoyed it. I very much enjoyed that study. I've always been interested in models. I got turned on to intellectual history by my history professor, who was an intellectual historian. He turned me on to spenglers decline with the West. First book I read that talked about cultures having their own psyche, their own DNA. The West was declining because it was whatever. But that was fascinating to me is that the thought processes affected science, art, math, architecture, you know, literature, everything, and they were very different in the different cultures, but you could find common denominators about all that. So I was fascinated by that stuff. Anyway, I was studying American intellectual history in graduate school in Berkeley, and then I got more interested in instead of studying people who were enlightened, finding my own I said it was headache times to do that, so I dropped out of graduate school, decided to go look for myself, God, truth in the universe. Studied martial arts and meditation and spiritual stuff and gurus and all kinds of things. That was a heady time to be doing that kind of stuff. But they weren't paying people to do any of that. So I had to make a living. Then I had friends who had their own businesses. They were little, small little businesses who were starting up, or whatever. And I said, Maybe I can help them. And they pay me to come in and help them out a little bit. So I wound up, that's where a lot of my if you read Wikipedia about me, 35 jobs by the time I was 35 just to explore. I just go in and look and say, How much easier can we make this? Because I just been Mr. Lazy. Okay, I'm the laziest guy you ever met. That's how I came up with all this stuff. This is okay. How much easier can we make things that we're doing? I wound up I'd help people sort of improve what Now they call that process improvement. I just said, How much earlier Can we leave today. Can we improve your systems a little bit? So I would help them do that, and then we'd fix it. And then I get bored, then I go find another gig. Then they discovered one day. They call those people something. They pay them. It's called consultants, like, oh my god, couldn't spell it. Now I are one, all right. So now 1982 hung up my shingle Allen associates. I started just saying, okay, maybe Can I just make a living by doing project by project with people that might help? I haven't really stopped doing that, but that sort of gave me the impetus to also, because I had a good bit of experience in meditation and by martial arts, sort of personal growth stuff. I discovered the value of clear head, yeah, not being distracted in your mind. So I said, Yeah, my life started to get busier. I was getting a good bit more work in my little consulting practice. I said, Well, wait a minute, I'm getting distracted. How can I help that? Piece by piece, I began to explore, just for myself, personally, what are the best practices, techniques that I could use to keep me focused on meaningful stuff and not be distracted by all that other stuff? I didn't wake up one morning with this whole methodology. I was a long string of epiphanets essentially for over 234, years, and I had a couple of mentors who taught me various pieces of this that were useful to me. And so I found, wow, I started to implement these techniques for myself. Created more clarity, more focus, more control, more space to focus on meaningful stuff. So then I started to turn around and use those for my consulting clients. And it turned out those techniques for them did the same things, more control, more focus, more space to focus on meaningful stuff. So, wow. So that became sort of the core of a lot of what I was we didn't call it coaching back then. I was just consulting with people who were doing business, you know, small businesses, the head of HR and a big corporation saw what I was doing. He said, David, we need that result in our whole culture. Can you design a training realm, what you've come up with? I said, Well, I'll try, and it turned out to be highly successful, probably the most successful training, I think, that they did. And this we trained, did a pilot program for 1000 executives and managers. This is Lockheed, 1983 84 I found myself thrust into the corporate training world. Who'd have thought you told me, as an American intellectual history major at Berkeley in 68 that I was going to be in the corporate training world. I said, What are you smoking? Come on, give me a break. And so there I was thrust into that world. But it turned out that was the world that was the hungriest for what I come up with, and they were willing to pay me for it. So I wound up in the corporate training world. And. The US primarily, and wound up, never did any marketing. It was all referral based. And people would say, wow, you know, my wife and my husband works in this other company. I think they need what you're doing. I wound up training hundreds of 1000s of people, actually in the sort of in the corporate training world. And back then, that was the, this is the late 70s, 80s, early 90s. The corporate training world in the US particularly was the hottest place for education, really, for adult education. They were people, especially the HR people, or the training and development. People were very hungry for cool stuff, you know, that helped people do what they were doing better, and then, etc, etc. So I wound up in that world could have fooled me, and a lot of my consulting turned into, then what we now call coaching, where people mid to senior level, people would see what I was doing or heard about me and said, David, could you sit next to me, desk side and help me implement what you've come up with. And so I wound up spending truly, 1000s of hours desk side, one on one with some of the best, brightest, sharpest people you'd ever meet, actually implementing what I'd come up with. And that's where a lot of it got refined. A lot of it got honed, and so forth. And then at some point I went, Oh God, what do I do with all this? That's and I just had some good friends and business people that said, David, you ought to write the book. How do you write a book? My first action was to get three books about how you write a book. 1997 I didn't. I'm not a Tada kind of person. I said, I have to really trust that this really will hold water against anybody. And I just needed to write the book, kind of, to get it out of my head. Case I got run over by a bus. Least I'd be able to have a manual, essentially, for what I had learned in my 2025, years of doing this work, you know, so intensely I wrote to I had no idea how successful it would be. I just needed to write it. So I wrote it took four years from the time I pulled the trigger, 97 till 2001 when the first edition of getting things done was published. Took that long, but I was working at the time with one of the companies that would probably be one of the most challenging companies you could ever walk into try to teach them anything. You know, this is Goldman Sachs. So I had four years, and my stuff became viral inside of that environment. And so I went, Well, if they can't punch a hole in it, I feel then confident, you know, I could write the book. So I did. Then that sort of thrust me into a whole different world.

Well, I love that, you unabashedly, or that's what I heard salute the world of corporate training, which is a world I know well, because when we teach stuff there, it gets applied immediately, you know, so it's it's stuff that immediately changes how things are done, and the fact that you got to play there, and how that impact is spectacular to me. I also want to, for our listeners, just salute the fact, because I believe, as you do, when our work makes a difference, word of mouth does. The rest you talked about the power of word of mouth when I first looked into your process, what struck me immediately, and you already spoke to it in indirect ways. It's easy to, in my mind, to think of it, oh, this is about productivity and efficiency. But I went, this is very zen. There's a spiritual component and there's a very practical, common component. And I went, David has done this magical way of merging those two. And you start with clearing the mind, which already spoke about. It's the first act in your process. Would you just talk about this marriage between spiritual and practical and beginning with clearing the mind.

Well, probably my best example was the martial arts before people attack you in the dark alley, you don't want 2000 unprocessed emails hanging around your psyche. No, you need to be clear, clear, clear, clear. I think Microsoft, somebody did some studies. They said, Look, if you get interrupted by what you're doing, it takes 17 minutes to get back to whatever you were doing. Tell that to a martial artist. I don't think so. It's like here, you need to be clear to begin with, so that then whatever you're focused on, you're fully present with, and you can bring all your resources to that. I sort of, I'd been kind of a interestingly, I got attracted to Zen when I was in high school. I read Suzuki and watts and so forth. You know, by the time I was 17 or 18, I'd read their books. I loved the sort of Zen esthetic, sort of clean, clear, so that you could just focus and be present. You know, the mindfulness people now are that's become quite popular, but I learned that 40 years ago, yeah, like, clear your head. You know, you get hit in some vulnerable place on your body, and it really hurts. You sit and focus on your breathing. So I learned that 40 years. Go, you know, the kind of, in a sense, nothing new about that. Achim so you say, how did I marry? Those two things? They were just, they came married. Was all sort of the same stuff.

Well, related to this, you, you use this wonderful phrase of mind, like water,

yeah. Well, I stole that from Bruce Lee's and say, Yeah, you know who I think coined that term called, hey, Bruce, you need to be like water is. It's calm, it's it can be powerful, it can be whatever, but it's, it doesn't over or under react. I use that term, and I use that idea that if you're taking work to home in your mind, or home to work in your mind, you're not in a mind like water state, right? I thought that, well, that's a that was a good reason to then implement this methodology that I had learned about. How do I take something that's got my attention and get my mind off it? How do I do that without finishing it? But I need to then clarify what it means, organize the results of that thinking in some trusted external brain that I trust I'll see in the right context or time, and then it's off my mind. So I just learned that algorithm several years ago.

A big part of your process, as I understand it, is what you just said, which is clear mind, but then organizing thought and information and knowing what to where and where to put your attention. Would you elaborate on that just a little more

well? I, you know, I discovered four years ago, your minds for having ideas, not for holding them. Now, in the last 10 years, or 15 years, the cognitive scientists in their research, have proven the number of things you could actually hold just in your head without some external system that you can then manage being reminded of them and manage the relationship between them is four. That's it. As soon as you have more than four things on your mind, you're not going to take a test as well. You're not going to be as present with your kids as well. You're not You're not going to you're not going to be there as well as you could be, because your brain did not evolve to remember, remind, prioritize or manage relationship between more than four things. It does that very well, by the way, and you're doing brilliant things right now. You say, Well, those are eyeglasses. That's a computer. That's a thing. You're using long term history and pattern recognition to recognize all kinds of stuff. And that's how you stayed alive for, I don't know, millions of years, but you go to the store for lemons, you come back with six things and no lemons. You know what happened? You were trying to use your head as your office. Your head is just a crappy office. It doesn't do that. It didn't evolve to do that. Don't shoot the messenger, by the way I'm just, you know, reiterating what the cognitive scientists have now proven. A lot of what I did, you know, over in my methodology, was to say, how do we externalize all of this that has our attention? And then what do we do with it? Then the mind doesn't have to be, keep, remind being reminded of it,

you use a wonderful phrase, it's on your website, which I encourage everybody to check out about how getting things done supports. I'm going to say working, but I would say just showing up in life in general, with more ease and elegance. Now I get the ease part. I think everybody wants ease of elegance. But I'm curious like, what does elegance mean to you? That word, that choice of word, was interesting to me.

I know. I know. Well, I don't know. I think it's such a lovely word. Elegance is kind of like, Look, if you had nothing on your mind right now, I think nothing you know. What would you do then with your thinking, where would you point it? What would you do? Would you paint? Would you write? Would you work? What would you would you rest? Would you meditate? What would you do? And to me, that's the elegance is like the freedom to then, you know, trust your intuitive judgments about what to do, as opposed to being driven by latest and loudest, driven by latest and loudest is not elegant. What's elegant is to have the freedom to put your focus where you want

it. You're an American who lives in the Netherlands right now. I'm I'm a German who live in the States for many years. I live in Portugal right now. Since you do write about work, I can't help but think that different cultures have different constructs around how you show up for work, what work possibly means. I feel like in my city in Portugal, notice how people relate to work and to being present, which you talk about. And yet my sense is that getting things done transcends all of these cultural narratives around work. Would you just talk to that a little bit?

It does anybody who's got a busy life that wants to have more room to focus on more cool stuff can relate to this. So I've. Ever seen? Yes, there are some slight differences culturally, you know, because the Germans are yes, we have to have the English rules and regulations. The South Koreans are the Southeast Asians are going to go, No, we have to be polite about everything. You know, we can't say no to anything. So there in Italy, it's like, hey, Manana, or Spain, you know, come on. And maybe even Portugal, too, I don't know. So there's slight differences in terms of the uptake, maybe, but I've never seen any differences for people who are really, really busy in their lives. The funny thing Achim is the people most attracted to. What I came up with are the people who need it the least. They're already the most productive, positive, aspirational, positively focused folks. They already know the value of a system. They already know the value of that they could create, because they that's what got them there right to begin with. They just run out of room. It's the people who've run out of room that said, if I had more room, I could do even cooler stuff. Those are the people who are probably most attracted to what I came up with. The people who are most need this. Don't even think they need it. Just like, why should I bother doing anything else in terms of my work and life, but other than that, to your original question, I don't think there's any difference in the cultures. There's probably more difference when you and your next door neighbor than you and the culture next to you.

Yeah, I just really appreciate the phrase of we just need more room and the ability to create more room that's so beautiful that we articulate that now you and your wife moved to Europe 10 years ago, and in a way, that's a fantasy that many people have. Many people never follow up on it. You did it. What drew you to Amsterdam, I'm curious. And what's it like to be there now after 10 years?

Oh, it's a terrible city. You never want to come. Stay away. It's awful.

22:12

Well done. David,

no, well, we had a lot of choices. I just need to be near a good airport, given the work that I was doing. We don't have kids. We saw people slightly older than us looking a lot more sedentary than we thought that we needed to be. We're both healthy, active. We said, Okay, let's throw a dart. Let's Let's have another adventure. And could have been Milan, could have been Stockholm, could have been Kyoto. We we're big Japan files. We would love Japan. That just killed us, just too far away from everything. We said, okay, Europe. And where in Europe? Well, we've been to Amsterdam two or three times, a beautiful place, obviously. And the skip Hall Airport, you know, was right in the center of everything in terms of being able to connect to anywhere on the planet. My work was becoming more virtual, more global. So we said, okay, let's throw it out. That's where we landed. It's about as far north as my wife wanted to be. You know? She said, you know, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, a little too cold, too gray, a little too dark, but Amsterdam, can I just write? It's about as far north as it could be, and obviously it's a beautiful place. It's an eye candy city, and it's relatively safe and comfortable and highly cultural and global, very much fit kind of our lifestyle and where our interests were. Here's where we landed.

I know that you and your work with your wife, and I have a bunch. It's fueled by the demand you have an academy you train coaches and other trainers and how to work with the Getting Things Done methodology. But what that got me thinking about you mentioned, you're about to be 79 and I'm always curious what keeps you going around work and maybe related to it. What do you go like, Oh, I want to keep doing more of this, or maybe I want to be doing less of this. As you think about how you spend your time,

it's an interesting question. Okay, frankly, I just can't stop doing what I'm doing. I was graced by the powers that be to have come up with a methodology that does nothing but improve people's condition, no matter what, personally, professionally, anything, anybody starts to implement, anything, any suggestions I have, or any of my what I came up with, it improves their lives. So how could I ever stop doing that? Until I can't do that so I can't. I couldn't stop if I tried. I just get a lot of what my work is. Now you say fourth chapter, my fourth chapter is really just responding to things like you, people who ask people who want more of this. And I couldn't stop doing it if I tried. I've done over 2000 podcasts since 2001 since the first. First Book was the first edition was published. I couldn't stop doing that, so I'm happy to spread this. You know, my mission, essentially, you know, professionally anyway, is to create a world where people perceive problems as projects. They get out of complaining in victim mode and move into, okay, what do I do about this? If I can do anything about it, and they move into that context. And so I couldn't stop doing that. If you held a gun in my head, I was like, No, that's it. Until I can't the body, you know, I have new eyes, new ears, new teeth, whatever. You know, they start to fall apart certain point. But as long as I keep doing it, that's what I keep doing. A lot of what I'm doing is just responding to people who come back to me at least one or two emails a day from people saying, Wow, you changed my life 10 years ago. David. What about X, Y and Z? And then I just respond to that. I don't turn down any requests for this. That's what I'm doing. If i i Suddenly, if the if suddenly the world got all of this so didn't need me anymore, then I just become a waiter in a good restaurant. That's my second choice of profession. I love being a waiter. It was great.

I chuckle, because I always say, if things were to fall

26:19

apart, I would go back to being a waiter because I find it

at least satisfying, and

because of people don't understand it. Oh, you get to be elegant. You get to be in the background. You get to be service of people. You get to, you know, it's we always said, Look, anytime we ever hired anybody, they should be a waiter first. Yeah, because that would teach them a lot of stuff about what you just mentioned. Yeah.

So I'm curious, when I get so strongly how just how deeply animated you are by the work you do and and how blessed you are to have the impact you have now you and your wife when you don't work, what do you do for fun? Do you travel? Do you go to good restaurants in Amsterdam? Like, what do you Yes,

all the above. Yeah, we love good food and wine. We explore. We had last night, we had an incredible discovered a brand new restaurant called Hollandaise in Amsterdam. Oh, incredible. The chef grew up in Kurdistan, but then became a French chef anyway. So yes, love discovering that we have two little Cavalier King Charles Spaniels because our dogs walking them, taking care of them, managing all of that. You know, they're like little kids. You have to take care of and all of that. And we live in a lovely place, right where a breast of a of a beautiful garden in Amsterdam, like, how much better could it be? Yeah,

I was just thinking, when we fully love where we are, we don't need to go to lots of places.

Well, we do travel. I mean, we've done a good bit of business travel. Usually we extend. We're going next week, we're going to Milan and to Paris, because we have some new partners in Italy and in France. And so we built in an extra day in both places, food and wine. And come on, Milan and Paris, how cool can they be. We still like to do that, you know, as we can. But I'm getting a little old to like travel a lot. I spent most of my professional career on planes, 1000s and 1000s of miles, you know, going back and forth. So I love travel. I love the it's a great experience to sort of pretend you're somebody new when you show up somewhere new and whatever. And Lisbon got what a lovely place. Been there a couple of times.

Final question, if you had the chance to whisper a few words of wisdom to a younger person who was charting their life and deciding what to do and where to go based on what you learned in your journey, what would you like to say to them,

yeah, I didn't okay well, until I was in my 30s, I didn't really understand the idea of intuition and that there's a still small voice inside of everyone that loves you, that cares for you, that has nothing but your highest good. You know, you know, as their context, learning to listen to that voice, or to even start to pay attention to that, even start to say, there is that voice. What is it telling me? I didn't learn that until my 30s, or late 30s, and I think that's what I would that's what I would have told my 25 year old. Hey, David, pay attention to the inner voice out there that's telling you where to go, what to do. I tended to follow it, but unconsciously, just because it kind of followed my nose in terms of what was next and what showed up and how to take advantage of it. But learn how to access that. And then I. Don't do I still, I'm still training myself to listen. Gee, David, what do you think you should say to Achim right now? Right

that question. So thank you so much for the gift of this conversation and the gift of the beautiful work you do. I usually ask my guests, where would you like to send our listeners that can find you, but you're everywhere. But if you were to direct folks to a resource, a website, people who want to learn more about you, where should they go?

Yeah, well, getting things done.com. You know, that sort of has, I guess that's kind of the anchor place you could then go from there, lots of different places. If you go getting things done.com/youtube you'll see all kinds of snippets that I've done, three tedxes and and Two Minute Tips and whatever. There's all kind of, if you like, to just snack on, you know, whatever I come up with that's a good place. That's a good place to go. Otherwise, follow your intuition.

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to speak with you. David,

yeah, mutual, mutual, this was fun.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The my fourth act podcast. If you like what you have heard, please like us and leave a review on your preferred podcast platform. And if you would like to engage more deeply in fourth act conversations, check out the mastermind page at Achim nowak.com it's where fourth actors like you engage in riveting conversation with other fourth actors see you there and bye for now. Bye.