046 Reflections on Getting Things Done (GTD): What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part One – ProductivityCast

This is episode eight, Reflections on GTD: What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part One, and our second-to-last in our nine-part series on the Getting Things Done (GTD) personal productivity methodology and eponymously-titled book, from the perspective of the ProductivityCast team–as long-term practitioners, critics and observers of GTD. In this cast, Augusto, Francis and I discuss what we wish we knew when we first started or came across Getting Things Done, the book and methodology, as we tried to understand and/or implement it. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://productivitycast.net/046 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part One Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade Show Notes | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part One Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen Perfect Time-Based Productivity by Francis Wade Getting Things Done for Teens: Take Control of Your Life in a Distracting World by David Allen, Mike Williams and Mark Wallace GTD Fast audio program Top 6 Mistakes GTD’ers Make Raw Text Transcript | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part One Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place productivity cast the weekly show about all things productivity here, your host re Sydney Smith and a goose open out with Francis Wayne an art gallery. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:16 Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm recently Smith and I'm joined here today with acoustic burnout. And Francis Wade. Good morning, gentlemen. Good morning. Good morning. Morning. We are going to be talking today about what are the things that we wish we knew when we first learned about and attempted to implement getting things done getting things methodology, this closes out our series on the Getting Things Done methodology. It's certainly not the last episode will have about it. But it's certainly in this particular series, we wanted to close that we can pass along to you about getting things done. So that if you are just going getting started, or if you've been chugging along and having some level of success, and some two steps forward, one step back with getting things done, you'll hopefully learn a thing or two along the way with our conversation about how to get moving forward, get that momentum around areas that you might be having some problems. This topic was proposed by Augusto So, okay, so why don't you kick it off for us? Why don't you tell us a little bit about what brought this topic to mind. And your first thought about what you wish you knew when you started becoming a GTD practitioner, Augusto Pinaud 1:38 it took me a while to to get into a solid system of getting things done. And there is a lot of things about the methodology that I think are extremely powerful. So so I want to start there because I don't want this to go into all this is your having this topic because this doesn't work. Because has nothing to do with that. I just wish that when people start reading the book, and when people start implementing, there were certain things that they were aware. So the process gets to be a lot less first training and a lot more productive. With that said, I would like to start with what David Allen called the Black Belt because at least to my knowledge, there is a lot of things said about what being a black belt means what you're going to experience what you are going to do and not do. But there is not that much information about the price. And the time that is going to take to be black belt, David Allen assumes that most people will read black belt and understand and will understand on it that it takes a significant amount of time in order to read there. The other thing is, there is no stages, you know, towards black belt. So you are a blowout, no belt, okay, then you read the book, now you are a white belt. And then suddenly, you need to end on a black belt. And I understand why he used that analogy. I wish that he will have spent a lot more time so people understand how they're progressing on on being how they're progressing and implementing getting things done. Because what happened is on the way it is right on the book, it is almost as well you read the book and you will be black belt. And that's not true. And, Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:43 and I and I want to just poke in here just quickly to say that the the belt concept was something that really wasn't fleshed out in the book at all. And it was something that he he talked about in seminars and he talked about in many of his other media and and it comes comes from the fact that he had a martial arts background. He was a karate teacher. And so for people who had some experience with the martial arts this really resonated with them Case in point myself. So since I had that background, it was very in Chinese martial arts, which is where my background is my brother is a Chinese martial arts teacher and I had that background and we have sashes not belts but it was very easy to translate for what he meant by this concept of grading up by leveling up your system. But he never created a clear cut line between what was a beginner and how you made your way up through those levels. So I fully agree with you a gusto would would have been helpful to know what things allowed you to take your system to the next level where you should start and where you should finish he gives you kind of the the acceleration lane which is the the weekend project of the mind sweep and getting everything out of your system. And then going through the workflow diagram step by step. But he doesn't he didn't give you you know, after the weekend. What do you do the day after? Augusto Pinaud 5:10 Well, by experienced you fell off the wagon. Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:14 Francis, I wanted to I wanted to turn the conversation over to you. When when you first learned about GTD, what was your first experience with it. And what did you wish you knew when you came across that I picked up Francis Wade 5:26 a another system actually taught another system in the early 2000s and use it heavily. And one of the key precepts was to put everything all of your all of your tasks in your calendar and thought it worked pretty well. Stop teaching the program trigger the you know, I was already baked. And then when I moved to Jamaica, from Florida ran into all kinds of problems, because I had way more demands on my time than before. So I think that the problem we're looking for a solution and I ran into GTD downloaded the app for look and figure based on what the book was telling me that I was doing everything wrong. So I went from scheduling everything to using the multiple lists that GTD talks about I was you know, after reading the book, so by must have gotten it all wrong. And things became worse. As a result. It took me about six months to a year to try as much as I could implement GTD it so I quit after about a year, went back to putting everything back in my schedule, figured out what was wrong with the way I was doing it, and then sort of sailed on from there. So I ran into GTD a bit late in my sort of productivity game. And it wasn't until much later on that I really could explain why I did what I did, and why people make the kind of mistakes I made in implementing a fixed set of practices, which are sort of meant that when they're shared, their they're sort of written as if this will, this will last you for the rest of your career to go from that point to seeing them as just a suggested set of behaviors that are only temporary and that at some point, you have to change them for a number of reasons to get from that point to the next. I'll show you that in the next. And so but that's my introduction to GTD Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:22 for me. I feel like I entered GTD at exactly the right moment in my life. I don't know why. But it was a felt need that I didn't yet know how to express but when I came across the book, it filled that that need at that very moment. And so you know, my The first thing that I wish I knew about getting things done was that it's akin to, again, going back to the martial arts. And Bruce Lee's system that he developed was called g condo. And one of the primary tenants the G condo was to take of systems that which worked and get rid of the rest. It was this absolute utilitarianism of martial arts. And so it said, if this if this punch worked, if this kicked worked, if this block worked, if this strategy work, let's use this, but if it doesn't work, then let's cast it aside. And that became g condo. And with that martial arts analogy, I really wish I applied that to getting things done. Because I tried to use everything that GTD offered right out the gate and in reality and applying it to every aspect of my my life when in reality, GTD is in a way classified for me in the in the area or category of organizing, helps you organize the things you're not doing. And then after that,...