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.

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Southwestern Student Coaching

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?

I lived here nine years.

How did you end up in Amsterdam?

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.

Are you a cyclist now?

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?

Texas.

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.

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.

Well, I'm always delighted right across people

where some of this sticks. I never know what sticks. Good for

you.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, couldn't agree more. By the way, that's

that's exactly how that works with people with my methodology.

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.

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.

How did so how did you know the first draft didn't

work?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I wanted to ask are you still doing some one on

one work?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, you're gonna change out of pain, more than

inspiration, you'll change out of both, but the pain wins by

far.

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?

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.

That's right, with methamphetamine or something?

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.

And you live in Amsterdam. That's amazing.

Well, come on, the Dutch don't do that. It's only

the tourists that show up and do all that stuff.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The 1619 project.

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.

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?

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.

Yeah, love it. Again, appreciate your time and

being on here and thanks for the impact.