It is altitude like a non-fly up for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I also do a personal question? No, I will do a single book by the time I am. I'm a cybernetic organism, living to show where nethert is going.
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This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Good day, good evening, good afternoon wherever you may be. My gorgeous little Maguagui. My guest today is David Allen.
You may know of him, the man, the legend. You may worship his systems or you may not know who he is. So I will tell you who David is. One of the world's most influential thinkers on productivity.
David's 35 years experience as a management consultant and executive coach have earned him the titles of Personal Productivity Guru by Fast Company Magazine and one of America's top five executive coaches by Forbes Magazine. The American Management Association has ranked him among the top 10 business leaders, Full Stop. His best-selling book, Getting Things Done, Subtitled The Art of Stress Free Productivity has been published in 30 languages and the GTD methodology as it's known that it describes as become a global phenomenon. Being taught by training companies in 60 countries, probably more at the time of this reading.
David, his company and his partners are dedicated to teaching people how to stay relaxed and productive in our fast-paced world. You can find him on Twitter at GTTI, GTTI, GY, and at www.gettingthingsdone.com. And without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging, very unexpected, in some aspects conversation with David Allen. David, welcome to the show.
Kim, to be here, thanks for the invitation. My pleasure, and it has been a very, very long time since we've had any contact. We were chatting before we pressed record. It was probably just a few weeks, maybe a month after the four-hour work we came out in 2007, I found myself being interviewed by someone alongside you virtually on the phone, and I was a nervous mess.
I was very intimidated because I felt like I was stepping into the arena with the literal and metaphorical black belt in the productivity space, and also at that time in 2007, GTT, getting things done, was ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. It was the talk of the town and 43 folders, Merlin Mann and all these other outlets, Life Hacker, that seem to talk about GTT every day. So it's nice to have a conversation where I feel more comfortable asking questions. Catching up, well, folks like you at any time, time is somewhat irrelevant.
And that's what good friends are for. It's like you show up and go, hey, what's new? I don't do years, 10 years. Yeah, exactly.
I was thinking back to that time frame, 2007 was a very important inflection point for me, if I want to look at it that way. And around the same time, somewhere between now and say 2007 and 2009, a friend of mine actually interviewed you at South by Southwest in a format that is very difficult, I think in some cases for both sides. Inside a car, his name is Chase Jarvis. Oh, I remember that.
He's a phenomenal guy, brilliant photographer. And he was trying to do his best to squeeze out, and of course you're very good at providing this, but some type of nugget that he could extract in say a minute or two minutes or however many minutes it was. And I thought we'd begin there because the answer is I remember it was your mind is made for having ideas, not for holding ideas. And I think this is so important.
I would love to hear you just expand on what that means. Well, your head's a crappy office. And most people are still using their head as their office. And your brain did not evolve to remember, remind, prioritize or manage relationships with more than four things.
That's new cognitive science data, by the way. So how many people are trying to keep track of more than four things and manage the relationship between them and prioritize between them? It's like, excuse me, how about 10,000? 1,800?
Oh, God, no, it's how I'm doing. And I just uncovered years ago more practically and just on the street how critical it was to empty your head. And the early days of the new cognitive science field, they called distributed cognition, called get it out of your head. And so I discovered that and then discovered, not only just get it out of your head, but there are other things you need to do to clarify.
Dr. Peter Drucker defined what the work is that you're getting out of your head and what your case is to it. So I spent 30 to the last 35 years trying to figure out what that algorithm is. And then spending thousands of hours, there's probably no desks on it, but some of the best and brightest and busiest folks on the planet, actually implementing that process and watching this transformation happen.
You know, come on, if you've done a ton of coaching and advising, I'm sure. And the best advice is not to tell people what to do, but ask them the right questions. And find out what's going on in their head and help them frame that in a way that's useful. And so I just figured that out.
And how long I'm going to be preaching this to them? Folks, your head is not, don't do that. Don't leave your stuff in your head. It's such a huge habit.
I think it's because people have this. I think it gives people a false sense of control to keep it in their head. And control is the master of addiction. So you've got to feel vulnerable left to unload everything that has your attention and take a look at it.
That's daunting, I guess, for most people. I'll jump to that next. I'd love to hear you describe what you do with a corporate client, past, present, hypothetical. When you come in to meet with say executives and they're individually very high performing, people nonetheless carrying far more than four items in each of their heads.
And you sit down. What are the first questions you ask or exercises you do when you sit down with high functioning, but nonetheless overwhelmed people to work with them? What are some of the first things that you do with them? Well, aside from establishing rapport.
Right. Which is, you know, high. And why do you bring me in here? What is your presenting issue, especially if you can describe it?
And here's a little bit of who I am, kind of what we're going to do. But ideally, and over the years I discovered that less I tell people about what we're going to do the better. Surprise. So if I just walked in cold, the tablet rosa here is the first thing I would do, Tim.
Let's make sure you have an entry, a physical entry. We have some place to throw stuff until we can make decisions about what it means to do about it. But we need to collect a bunch of stuff first. So that's what we're going to do first is get some sort of a material version of collection or capturing stuff that has people's attention.
So we just get a big stack of printer paper, a paper pen or pencil. So I'm down and say, okay, what's talking about? What has your attention? Oh, I need cat food.
Oh, I need a life. Oh, I need a new vice president of marketing. Oh, our next vacation is coming up. Oh, my cell phone just, just crap out.
The printer broke. Daddy, Daddy. And we literally start writing. They write each one of those items that has their attention on a separate piece of paper.
And they toss that into their entry. You'd be surprised by the way, first of all, how many people don't have an entry or if they do have one. It's petrified because it's just been sitting there with crap in it for weeks. So we need to have some sort of clear space to just collect all that stuff to begin with.
That process, Tim, takes usually in my experience over all these years for the mid to senior level professional that we actually coach with this process. It takes one to six hours just to capture what has their attention, not to organize it, not to prioritize it, not to make decisions about it. Just to identify it. Yeah.
It's so impressive and horrifying at the same time. And I was doing prep for this conversation. I found one paragraph that struck me as important that's related to this, I think, in some capacity. This is from an older piece in Wired, but it reads the following.
So at a seminar, Alan has to try to capture all their stuff by writing a list. At the end of a few minutes, it tells us to look at the list and think about the way it makes us feel. He guesses that our feelings include, and feel free to fact check any of this, by the way. A mixture of grief and relief.
It suggests it comes from this simple fact of making the list, but where does the grief come from? And this is the quote that really caught my attention. These items represent agreements you haven't kept with yourself. Alan says, what happens when you break an agreement with yourself is that your self-esteem plummets.
Could you speak to this a bit? Because I would imagine a lot of folks would say, I feel guilt, perhaps, about all the things I haven't done for myself or for other people. But this grief and agreements that you haven't kept with yourself struck me as important. At least got my attention.
Could you speak to that? Well, I'm going to reverse engineer it a little bit. And come back to the fact that your breaking of the agreement is because you're keeping track of it in your head. And where you keep track of that has no sense of past or future.
So that part of you, that little sub-lump part of you, thinks you should be buying cat food 24 hours a day. My president 24 hours a day, that's my way to go in three gawking order. Oh, cat food! Oh, my goodness!
Because that thing has no sense of past or future. So because it doesn't, you can't do it all. You can't do it all in one thing at a time. And so there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing all of that all the time.
So talk about it. It's a ton of broken agreements. Yeah. But you don't have to finish the thing to keep your agreement.
You do need to get it out of your head. See, agreements, and this is one of the things I learned back in their own personal growth days. You know, agreements, there's an automatic price you pay when you break an agreement, is you just have to break trust, either with other people or with yourself or both. So if you don't want to have a broken agreement, you have three options.
One is don't make the agreement. Call no. I'm not going to do that. Move it to somebody maybe or something.
Keep the agreement. Go buy the cat food. Go hire the VP. Go finish the thing.
Or most importantly for most people is renegotiate the agreement. If I made an appointment today, for instance, Tim, as people may hear ambient noise out there, there's construction going on, if I was too loud, I would probably have to try to renegotiate or reschedule this talk with you. And then I don't have a broken agreement if I don't do it, because I really appreciate it. But you can only feel good about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing.
So most people just have just made so many more agreements than they're aware of. So all we do, our coaching is get people aware of what are all the agreements you made. What are all the wood coach should need to do is opt to. And that's one of the reasons people feel good when they make a list.
They look at me and go, well, gee, I can't do all this right now. No kidding. Right. And so, you know, that's the, that's the, it comes back to externalizing stuff out of your head.
That's why it's so critical to do that. And most people, I don't think I've really understood or certainly managed themselves with an understanding of that dynamic. I'd love to underscore and maybe dig into a word that you used that I'm certainly my own life trying to pay more and more attention to, which is renegotiate. Could you share perhaps any recommendations that you give or perhaps language you use yourself or renegotiate when need be?
What do you say to someone, whether it be an email or otherwise, when you need to remove a commitment, whether it's forever or simply for another time? Do you have any particular suggestions or thoughts related to that? Well, there's probably, I think it probably doesn't. But one of the most interesting ones and useful ones sometimes is to make it really politically correct.
It's like, wow, you know, what you're asking me to do or what I've committed to do is going to require so much more attention than I have the bandwidth to actually give it the attention it deserves right now. So, I think that's the way that I negotiate that in terms of whether it's due or how we're going to make it happen or if I even need to do it at all. So, that's one way to do it. It's just say, hey, that's a cool thing.
I don't mean this is not bad about you, not even bad about me. Life changes. And sometimes we just have to renegotiate stuff in that way. I think it's important to tell yourself.
As I say, you can only feel good about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing. That's why in order for me to be on the call with you, I'd be present here. Tim, go ahead. Look at every single thing I might do what you should be all to doing today.
If they know this is it. Maybe I made a mistake. We'll find out. It leaks for now.
This is the coolest thing to do. It's the best thing to do. It's the only thing to do right now. But I just looked at everything else.
It's hard to do if you haven't seen everything else because you don't know what everything else includes. And so you're not quite sure what you're not doing. And so most people then can't truly renegotiate with themselves because they're not sure what are all the things that they would could should ought to do. That's why I mean it to another point.
But it ties very closely to it. When I'm not doing anything else, I'm cleaning up my backlog to zero because there's a surprise coming to me. I can't see. And when that surprise hits, and it could be good, better and different.
But when that thing hits, if I've got a big backlog of unclarifying, uncaptured, unorganized stuff, I'm going to be disturbed by any input, even if it's good. Because I don't know what else I'm missing. That if I decide to put my attention on that new thing, what's going to be missed, what's going to fall through a crack somewhere. So that's why I'm keeping it clean, keeping the backlog as minimal as possible.
It's just a fabulous way to just make sure that you're clear about what are all the agreements that you have renegotiated with yourself. Yeah, that makes very good sense. Whether this will turn out to be the best use of your time, give me a half hour to disappoint, we'll see how it turns out. On the backlog, as minimal as it may be, where does that physically live for you currently?
What is the holding pen for that for you? Primarily two and a half places. One is obviously email right now, just because of some other stuff that's going on. I have about a screen and a half full of email, which is a little too much for my comfort zone, but that's okay.
I'll clean it up a little later. My physical entry that I'm staring at right now, which happens to be empty. While I was waiting for the construction site to slow down a little bit out there, I was processing a bunch of receipts that my wife and I collected in the last 24 hours, putting them in the quick. That's all zeroed out right now.
The other half place is my little note ticker wallet that I carry around with me that has a one note in it that says chiropractor. I'm just throwing that into my entry right now. Those are the places I capture, really. I don't capture much digitally.
I do have an iPhone digital capture called BrainToss, a great little program that two GTDers, and they actually built. Because what it does is it doesn't put it into the black hole in my iPhone and automatically transfers it to my email. So if I care to digitalize anything that I'm capturing, some thoughts, some idea of what our picture I'm going to take or something, whatever, it automatically goes to email, which then I clean up like a clean up email regularly. But those are the main places.
What are the benefits of minimizing the digitizing, so to speak? Are there benefits, is it simply a habit that you have continued over time since that's where it started? Or are there features to using physical? Well, yeah.
And that's two sides of the coin of the digital world. First of all, it's a great time to be alive if you know what you're doing and you've got a little discipline. If you don't, it's a black hole. And you're likely to throw stuff in that you uncovered a month later, oh my god, I should handle that.
And it's, did you put it in Dropbox? You just didn't ever know what you want to put it in Outlook? You want to put it in WhatsApp? Like, well, we're going to stick this stuff.
So the plethora of options has made it almost more work. You know, come on. I don't know if you've seen all the studies that say that basically productivity hasn't gone up at all, though technology has gone through the roof. And a lot of that is because the technology hasn't necessarily improved productivity.
It's actually complicated. I know a bunch of high tech people that are going back to paper planners, especially the ADD and ADHD type, because they're too many clicks. And outside out of mine, and I've got a Thunderbolt screen, but I still don't have the real estate on there that I used to have with my time-design paper planner. You can't beat it.
Because you can see all that sort of relationship to each other much easier. There's no clicks. There's no battery. No, life I required.
It has all the downside. I'm kind of a high tech end user anyway. I like all that stuff because of connectivity and so forth. But if you really need to know what you're doing, otherwise the tech world can really be quite overwhelming.
And I think what I'd love to do is rewind the clock a bit to get a better understanding of how you became the current version of David Allen. Could you describe where you were in high school, what you were focused on at the time, if anything, and what you wanted to be, what you thought you would be when you grew up, or what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yeah, well, I'd have to rewind quite a bit. Let's see high school.
Well, first of all, I was an actor as a kid, like before high school. And I was 10, 11, 12 years old. I took an acting lessons and actually became sort of a child star. And free court was the other way.
I pretty much grew up years. And so that was always kind of a love was that the high school I became a debater and state champion debater, regional champion debater, whatever. So I enjoyed it. I loved debating.
That was fun. Standing up and trying to make it up while you're on your feet. And I thought it was, you know, come on, we're talking the 50s and early 60s. And then free court was going to, if you had any brains at all, you were either a lawyer or a teacher.
You know, if you weren't necessarily, you know, in that line of things, you either sold cars or insurance or something like that. That was pretty much it. You know, there were a whole lot of other off-consultant. What's that?
You know, actor, no, go get a degree. So they have a job. So there weren't a whole lot of options, basically, in my head. It turns out I actually had the opportunity.
We had an exchange student at our high school that I was going to go from Germany. And that kind of, that was of interest to me. And so I actually applied to the American Field Service, AFS.S. And back then, there were not many Americans that foreign families or international families would actually take an American from the U.S.
Usually the Americans went for the summer. But I applied for the whole year. I said, what the heck? And it turns out, I was able to, I got chosen by a family in Zurich.
So I went and lived with a Swiss family for a whole year. And that was eye-opening. How old were you at the time? 17 and 18.
Wow. Actually, 63, 64 hours over there when Kennedy was shot, which was quite traumatic for most of the Europeans anyway. You know, when that happened. But, you know, I went to basically the high school that the boys in the family went to.
It wasn't an academic program. It was more social. It lived with the family. See how they lived and so forth.
So I went to a reality in the housing of the community. Which happened to be a block up from the Kunsthausensurik that had Monet water lilies all over the walls. And I was three blocks from the Odion Cafe, which is where Dada is and started where Jung and, you know, so I was thrust into the middle of European history and culture just by being there. And that kind of opened my eyes a good bit.
Also, I had a half sister, much older than me, who had wound up marrying one of the intellectual chroniclers of the B generation, a man named John Cullen Holmes. If you ever looked up John Holmes, John Cullen Holmes, you know, he runs some very interesting books. And they lived in Connecticut. They were very, very hip.
My dad died when I was young and my mom, when I was nine, took me to visit her young, her husband. And so I got introduced to probably the hippest of the hip in terms of intellectual, you know, culture, New York City, Manhattan, beat. As a matter of fact, my brother-in-law John and Carol, I coined the term beat together, you know, watching somebody kind of beat themselves down the central part. Anyway, so I got introduced early on to a whole new different world of sophistication and culture really back then.
So I wasn't kind of blindsided by the fact that the world was a lot bigger than, you know, my world I was growing up in was Yana. So I kind of wanted to get out of there as soon as I could. Nothing against that. I still love Louisiana.
So going back and sort of seeing the culture and the food and the bi-use and so forth and all that. But certainly my world had expanded by that point. And, you know, I was interested in sort of pursuing that. So I didn't know, I thought law maybe to begin with, but then after being in Switzerland, being around that culture, the interest in the liberal arts philosophy and so forth was more interesting to me.
So when I got into college, that was my focus. For those of you who aren't familiar with the career path, so to speak, what did that look like? Well, I'm crazy little college in Florida that designed your own education, no grades, independent study, no new college. And I got bored by the philosophers.
They wound up proving their original hypothesis using their original hypothesis. That kind of circle thing. But what was more interesting was the philosophers themselves. And I had a great friend.
He turned out to be, he was my academic advisor, turned out to be a good friend, who was an intellectual historian, history of thought. So he turned me on to history of culture, history of thought. I thought that was really cool. And we didn't even use the word paradigm back then, but that's what I got introduced to.
I read Oswald Spingler, The Decline of the West, which is one of the earliest books, you know, 100 over 100 years ago, talking about cultures having their own psyche, their own geist, and how that affected art, philosophy, math, science, medicine, you know, and everything because there was kind of a thumb print or a signature in the various cultures that you could see through all of those things. So I was fascinated by that. So I guess that was kind of the early stages of me being interested in models, you know, understanding a model. If you can understand a model that can help the world make a lot more sense.
I've always been somewhat attracted to that. It's always also been attracted by how the invisible effects are visible. So if you look back in my career, you know, my first job was a magician at age five on the sidewalks of Palestine, Texas. I charged five cents for my magic show.
So you know, you can trace it, you can stretch a little bit, but you can trace it all the way back to there. You know, I always been fascinated by how, if we could understand what's going on invisibly, that's affecting everybody and get a hold of it. That could make a huge difference in how you manage your life. And it seems like you tried your hand at many different types of jobs.
And we certainly don't have to trace through all of them. But how did you end up teaching, say, corporations or productivity, which I would share. And that may not be the, yeah, how would you? Well, I'll make a very long story, very short.
You know, I got into graduate school in American intellectual history. Now, again, this is Berkeley 1968. They say if you can remember being in Berkeley in 1968, you probably weren't there. So, but that was heady times to be there.
Then, you know, at some point I realized, wait a minute, I really wanted to get my own enlightenment instead of just studying people who had theirs. So I just figured that academia was not the place for it. And so I jumped ship, you know, left that, said, okay, and then I got my own personal exploration path. You know, lots of things, you know, lots of drugs, but also martial arts, spiritual stuff, you know, this is the 60s, this is Berkeley, you know, in the early 70s.
So as I studied all of that, I was more interested in finding out who I was and finding out about God truth in the universe than having a job. But of course, rice, bowl, and cave wasn't my style. So I said, okay, I gotta pay the rent. So how do I do that?
Well, so then I had several friends who themselves kind of knew what they wanted to do and they were starting their own businesses and running small businesses. And so I wound up being a good number two guy. So just have a job. I helped, I helped two guys start a New Orleans style restaurant in LA.
I helped a friend run a landscape company in San Fernando Valley. I sold mopeds. You know, you could read the list and look at the idea of a lot of stuff that I did, but I was just basically I would go in and see, well, how can I help them do what they're doing and how much easier can we make this because I'm just a lazy guy. And then I'd help improve their, now we call that process improvement, but I was just trying to not have to work so hard.
And then I went fix and then I get bored. So then I go find another job. And then I discovered one day they call those people something. They pay them.
They call consultant. So I'm not my single Allen, but I said, couldn't spell it. Now I are one. So then I said, okay, well, let me see if I can sort of just throw myself out there project by project the people and make that work.
But then again, because I didn't want to have to work so hard, I felt, well, I'm really interested in models that would work in case I can't see, you know, obviously, how to help somebody in their process. It'd be nice if I had a model in my back pocket to pull out and be able to help them. They would somehow improve their condition. So I got very hungry for those models also because of my meditation, spiritual work, martial arts work.
I really love the idea of being clear in my head. It's sort of been a lot of training in the martial arts about how to clear your head so you can fight properly. But then my life got more complex. And I was kind of screwing up my clear head.
So both my interests are keeping a clear head as well as good models to help people have me start to get attracted to and pull in piece by piece. And fast forward, all the stuff that became ultimately GTD. I'm getting things done 20 years later. But there was no grand epiphany.
I was just a little small epiphanets along the way that I began to cobble together in a systematic approach. And I found stuff that worked for me. I had a couple of mentors teach me some of the key elements of these things. And I went, God, that's really cool.
And then I turned around and used those techniques with my own clients and it produced the same result. We're clarity, we're focused more meaning in space in their head. And I felt, well, that's cool. So that became a key part of my own consulting.
We didn't call it coaching back then, which is consulting. And then, you know, head of HR in a big corporation, saw what I was doing. He said, well, we need that in our home company. David, can you design a training program with this methodology?
So we can reach a lot of people with this stuff. So I spent a couple of months and designed it to do an update. Personal productivity training. We did a pilot program for a thousand executives and managers in Lockheed in 1984.
And I worked in a nerve. And I found myself thrust into the corporate training world. God told me as an American intellectual history major in Berkeley in 1968 that I'd be in the corporate training world. I'd say, well, you smoke.
You kidding? But it turned out that they happened to be the audience that was most attracted to what I had found out. Because the world, you know, the mid to senior level professionals were just starting to get hit with stuff like email and the tsunami of stuff that was starting to hit the corporate world. And they were also the clients that were interested in actually paying for training and coaching and so forth.
You know, that would assist, you know, people in those roles. So that's how I, that's a very short version of a very long story. I appreciate the background. I would love to hear a bit more about your mentors.
Are there any particular mentors who were particularly important to the formation of GTD? There were two. And I just had them on stage with me an Amsterdam because I invited them to, you know, we just did the GTD goals on it. And I wanted people to sort of hear some of the original DNA of where GTD started.
One was Dean Atches and the other was Russell Bishop. And Dean was a, had been a 25 year consultant in executive consulting in organizational change. And he had, he had uncovered the techniques that were critical to be able to loosen people up so they were able to make changes and having a lot of old business prevent them from being able to do that. So the whole idea of a mind sweep, getting stuff out of your head, I learned from Dean.
He had figured that out, that that was absolutely critical for executives particularly because, you know, they had all this old business spending around their head for them to buy into a whole new goal and vision. It was like swimming in quicksand. So he discovered that getting that stuff out of their head and having to make next action decisions, the very specific next action. So I learned the mind sweep and the next actions from Dean.
And those are still core, core elements that anybody needs, you know, to get clarity, you know, get your head clear, you know, in terms of your commitments. And Russell Bishop was the co-founder of Insight seminars, which was the sort of personal growth self development thing that I got involved in in 78. And, you know, I love that. I love that training.
And a large part of that training was about commitments. So I learned about commitments there and how powerful that was. And it was a transformative experience for me. And then I actually became a trainer of Insight seminar working with Russell.
And we were designing some sort of personal productivity workshops and we were being brought into the corporate world. Back in the 70s, late 70s, early 80s, a lot of the corporate world was starting to be interested in sort of what the personal growth had to offer. Actuosations, life-spring, insight, you know, things like that were suddenly being brought into the corporate world. It was a little dangerous because, you know, you had to be a little vulnerable and most corporate cultures were.
Not, you know, not that open for all of that kind of stuff. But it was an interesting experiment for me into that world. And so I worked with Russell. We created the Insight consulting group and we started to do, you know, what I had learned both from Dean and my own work.
We started to do versions of this stuff in the corporate world. And that's where Russell was my partner for many years. That's where a lot of that started. I'd love to dig into next-action decisions.
This is a really powerful concept and a really important distinction that many people do not have a lot of calls. I have a lot of clarity on. Could you talk about next-action decisions and how they perhaps differ from what a lot of people put on their to-do lists? Sure.
Well, when we talk about next-actions, that means as granular as we're physically, physically, are you going to go to do what to move the needle on this thing, on this commitment? Is that at your computer to write an email? Is that at your computer to search for website? Is that at the hardware store to buy nails?
Is that at your life partner to have a conversation? What is the very, very next thing you need to do to get clarity on mom's birthday or increasing your bank credit line or hiring a vice president or getting a life? It's very next-action. If you have nothing else to do with that, what would you go do?
If people avoid that decision like to plague, they do. It could have fooled me. But, you know, it takes, you know, when we coach people, it takes one to six hours for them to identify all the stuff they have attention on and then the rest of the day or two to go through each one of those and say, okay, what's the next thing you need to do about cat food, about vice-president, about getting a life, about should you get divorced or not sure, you know, what's the next thing? And, you know, and it takes people actually have to think to make those decisions.
It's not hard. There are actually two aspects of getting clarity that, you know, that have to tie together is what's the very next action and if one action won't complete whatever this commitment is, what's the project? You know, if you look at most people's to-do lists, you see things like mom, you know, in bank. I'm sure you had a mom, so why is it on the list?
Well, your birthday's coming. What are you going to do by birthday? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's coming. Yeah, right.
So, you know, so taking something like that and then, well, you capture the idea, great, so that's step one, but then step two is you need to then clarify what exactly you're going to do about that. And, you know, what's the final outcome? So, give on the birthday party goes on my project list and call my sister C, you know, what she thinks we ought to do for mom's birthday is the next action. As simple as that sounds, outcome and action are the zeros and ones of productivity, but most people have not actually identified the outcomes and the specific actions, you know, other things that have their attention.
Good of all me, but there are very few people that are exceptions to that. And most people have tons of stuff. Anybody listening to this right now, just pull out your to-do list, and I'll show you what I'm talking about. And most of the things on your to-do list are not the very next action you need to take about those, and probably the things on your to-do list are not the complete outcome that you're trying to achieve by whatever you actually need to take.
So, it's funny that zeros and ones of productivity, people are avoiding. I mean, getting things done, you need to know what done means. You get to mark it off as complete when what's true and what is doing, what, like, and what does it happen? Oh, that's a phone call or that's a thing to buy at the store.
That's a conversation I need to have with somebody. So, I know it's kind of a duh, but it's something that most people need to train a cognitive muscle to answer those questions about stuff, because it requires thinking. Thinking is hard. It also requires a sort of a reframe as to what an effective to-do list or next action list looks like, even the label itself, right?
Should I be using the term to refer to mom, bank, etc. as a to-do list? What does that actually mean when applied to bank in all caps? In our case, it would just be your capture list.
You've captured those. Good. Then you need to throw those in your entry and then go through this decision-making process. Is it actionable?
Yes or no? If no, it's either reference or trash or incubate. Yes, then it is. Okay.
So, what's the next action? And if one action won't complete it, what's the project? So, as simple as those questions are, that's how you get your invest getting empty, not by finishing everything. Yeah, anything you can do it two minutes, you should finish right then.
That's the two minute rule. But otherwise, you just need to clarify it. So, I'm going to step three. We'll be organizing reminders in some of our replies.
I would love to talk about, and please feel free to rephrase this or take a different angle, if better, but sort of top down versus bottom up systems. And specifically, I looked at a number of listener questions that were posed in. One was related to after doing a minesweep and sorting the results into do it to start a delegated defer it. Some people still having an extremely large list after discarding aggressively and not being sure of how to then eliminate more if there are tasks or items that they can simply discard, things that are not worth doing.
I was just going to say how you help people too. If they say I don't know what is important or I'm not sure how to prioritize things, if you have any advice or thoughts for those people. Sure. I got a bunch.
One way to think about it is from a hierarchical standpoint of priorities. One of the things that I uncovered over all these years is the six arises. We actually have commitments and they're at different levels with different content. The top horizon would be what your life purpose or what's the purpose of your.
You can do this iterate, iterate it on your company or any enterprise you want, but let's talk about personal. So why are you on the planet? What are you here to do? What's your purpose?
Obviously that's going to set your priorities, right? You don't want to be off purpose. So that's the top level. Of course, knowing your purpose is not going to help you decide which email to write first, a little bit.
But then the next level operationally, and I say down, not as less. It just means it's more operational. What's the vision of your purpose being fulfilled successfully? Five years from now, ten, what does your lifestyle look like?
I'm sure living in New York as opposed to Silicon Valley was some part of a vision that you had as opposed to day to day. So you had some sort of picture about, hey, if I really want to do what I want to do, here's what it looks down and feel like. So that's the vision level that people have. In companies that be three, four, five year long term plan or vision.
In terms of what it's going to want to be. Now knowing the vision that you have in terms of life and career and lifestyle, does that help you decide which email is most important? Yeah, a little bit more. Then there's the next level operationally, which is down from that, which is goals and objectives.
So if you wanted that vision to actually come true, what do you need to accomplish over the next three to 24 months? That'd be usually what people talk about in terms of annual plans and so forth. Yeah, well, I need to make sure my kids get into college. I need to make sure that we set up this new division.
I need to, you know, I want to publish the book, whatever those things are. Those would be goals that emerge as a way to get to your vision. So purpose would be Horizon 5, Horizon 4 would be, you know, vision, Horizon 3 would be goals and objectives. Horizon 2, importantly, is all the things that you need to maintain that are important to you to maintain so that you get there, that you're balanced and you're moving in the right direction.
So personally, this would be how's your health, how's your finances, how's your relationships, how's your spiritual life, how's your dog, how's your fun factor, whatever all those things are that you say, I need to maintain these. You don't finish that. You just need to make sure that they're up to par and just getting you where you want to go. So that's Horizon 2.
In your organizations, that would be your job description. What do they think you're accountable to do well? Asset management, staff development, customer service, project design, you know, yada yada. So that'd be looking at those levels there and saying, okay, well, once you defined your job description, once you looked at your aspects of your life, that's going to help you decide a little bit more about what's the most important email you need to send.
Then you get more operational and say, well, what are all the things you need to finish about any of those things above projects? And most people have between 1300, get tires on your car, handle the next vacation, hire the person, get a dog, research whether I can get my kids' grogly lessons or not, yada yada. So then that's the project level, that's Horizon 1. And then the ground level.
We use ground and then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, like elevators in Europe, as opposed to US, since we're still with international now, so we had to change. In my first book, I called 5,000, 50, 40,000, and so forth, but they don't use feet in Europe. And so anyway, so then the ground level is what all the things you need to do, that's the actions you need to take. And most people have 100 to 200 posts, emails to send stuff to buy the store, stuff to talk to people about, et cetera.
So when you say, how do I set my priorities and say, well, which one of those horizons is not clear enough to you, needs more work, or which one do you need to refer back to to, to then decide what's most important on your list? So that's a big conversation, as you can imagine, for most people, to try to figure that out, but I tried to get it as simple as I could, but I can't lie to anybody, that's the truth. Those are all things that are either conscious or not, they're still at effect for everybody. And so being aware of what your content is on all those different levels is going to help a lot.
On a more simple practical level, I just accept priorities and say, what's most got my attention? What's most got my attention right now? What most do I need to handle so I get the clear space again? And, you know, at this point in my life, I got that kind of simplified.
Let's talk about location for a second, because this is something that I'm certainly very curious about. And think about a fair amount. I'm in New York right now for writing, because I have a very set writing routine here in New York, and it's almost pretty isolated in rural New York. The move that I made from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, was certainly dependent on my answers and descriptions to those higher levels that you described.
And I'm sure this is written somewhere, but I didn't want to try to research everything before the conversation Amsterdam. Why did you move to Amsterdam? What were the drivers or the reasons behind that? Well, they're kind of a perfect storm of a lot of factors.
One is we want to get out of the US. We were a bit tired of the US's interest in terms of thinking. And we thought about, we love Kyoto. We love other places, but Europe seemed to be the place to go.
My wife and I don't have kids, and so a little freer to do that. My work was becoming much more virtual and actually much more global. And Amsterdam is much more at the center of my world, these days inside of Harvard was. And we've been to the city a couple of times and fell in love with it.
We love the city. It's an eye candy city. I'm just gorgeous. And it's lovely.
And we kind of naively thought, well, we spent three months there and six months in Milan and six months from whatever, because now my work was becoming so virtual. We had the ability to be able to do that. Of course, once we found out what it takes to be legal and get legal residency in any place, there's a lot of hoops to jump through. And it turns out that we just kind of threw it out at Amsterdam.
It was warmer and not quite as dark as Copenhagen or Stockholm. A little more foreign and adventurous than London. And everybody here speaks English, so that was easy. And once we were here, the quality of life here is just so wonderful.
And we just fell in love with the city even more so and still are five years later. So we intend to stay. It's not a fact we want to integrate. We love the Dutch.
We love the country. Now, it's just a waste of global thinking and openness of whatever. It's kind of rare in the world these days. It is definitely one of my favorite cities in the world.
You mentioned a lot of wonderful places, but Amsterdam really does check so many boxes. It's a marvel of a city. It really is. And it works.
We haven't had a car in five years. It just works. And we have, we both have two bikes apiece. We walk, gorgeous parks.
It's a very dog friendly city. Our favorite restaurants let you know, allow dogs. That's what the moving answer is to that. How have you found your state of being, whether it's your emotional state, mental state, if it differs at all, to differ being in Amsterdam after a number of years versus being in California?
Not really that much. Come on. Sam, Barbara's a gorgeous place. It's not exactly right.
Actually, we live at the heart streets of Ohio. Yeah, for 22 years. We love that. We thought we were going to be there permanently.
It was a beautiful place, a wonderful place, great people, a great style of a sort of a country place to live. And so it kind of surprised us that all of a sudden we just felt like we were done. I call it Darmacarma Destiny, whatever it is. It's like somehow just, you know, there are times in our lives when things are over.
And so we haven't missed anything at all. It didn't really change. Quality of life here is just so nice. That's nice to do it.
There are no straight people, no straight dogs here, as opposed to California. Was it a lingering desire over time? Maybe we should move? Or was there an event or a day or a conversation where you just said this is it?
We're done. It kind of was a four or five year move from sort of someday maybe to, yeah, let's kind of start to see if we can get real about it. We had built our own little sort of jewel box office building in Ohio. So we needed to kind of unhook from that.
Our house that we bought in 1992 was so gorgeous. It was like Gaza, Lake, or out on the east end of Ohio. It was just a beautiful property. It had old oaks and it was so it was kind of a tear down house to begin.
We just couldn't afford to tear it down and rebuild. And we discovered the termites don't move that fast. So basically we just built a huge garden around it. We had one acre and we built an outdoor fireplace.
We had a stunning garden. We had a fabulous round of landscape gardener. So we just had great time. We just lived outdoors.
So that was wonderful. Then the termites started to win. And we said, you know, with Catherine and my style and our inclinations, we would have rebuilt it with glass and concrete and iron. You know, in that environment would have been just gorgeous there.
But we didn't have the money to do that. So we said, you know, let's just put a price on the house. And the market was crap at the time. We said, you know, probably nobody's going to show up.
But, you know, come on, let's just put a price on it. What the heck? It would be an emotional buy anyway. And we said, I figured, I have to be one or two years from now.
I don't know. It's two weeks later. Somebody walked on and said, I want it right for that price. I went, oh, this might be a sign.
So we got out from the other house. And we said, but we weren't quite ready to move to Europe at the time. There was still more work I needed to do sort of there locally with the business. And so we said, well, let's kind of get trainer wheels.
So we then got a townhouse in Santa Barbara that we were after three years. And, you know, we sort of got trainer wheels for Europe. We got Dutch bikes and we lived in a townhouse close to town. We could walk into town and so forth.
So that was kind of our transition move there. And then at a certain point, we said, okay, let's throw the dart. Time to go. And that's what we did.
Off you went. It is, it seems to be landing on the radar of more and more of my American friends as a possible home base. It's a really wonderful choice. It's a terrible place.
You never want to come back. It's full. It's full. They hate dogs.
Straight people everywhere. Really? There are certain decisions, at least in my life, I would imagine in your life that are our real chapter changes and end up informing many, many things that come thereafter. I'd love to ask you, what is one of the most worthwhile or the best personal investments you've ever made?
And I'll explain what I mean. That could be money, time, energy, anything else. So for instance, if I asked Tony Robbins that, he would point to a Jim Rohn seminar that he paid for at the time when he was working as a janitor. If I talked to Amelia Boone, who's a four-time world champion in obstacle course racing, she'd say the first time she cobbled together the fees to pay for one of the larger competitions, which then ended up showcasing how well built and designed she was for this sport.
Does anything come to mind as a particularly important investment that you made that had long standing ripple effects? There probably a dozen. But I'll tell you one that comes to mind. I don't think I've shared this with many people.
But as you mentioned, what pops to mind is I had a guy that became a very good friend of mine and a mentor of mine many, many years ago, and Berkeley. And he was the guy who offered to teach me karate. And he was quite an interesting guy. He was an Olympic fencer.
He was a formula racer. He had a black belt in karate. He was just a fascinating guy. He was also psychic.
He was studied by the University of Pennsylvania just because of experiences that he had and things that he saw and things that he knew. And back in the early days when universities were starting to study this, so I could get a phenomenon and where it came from. And Michael became a very close friend of mine. And as he started teaching karate, I found my life started to change.
And I suddenly, I kind of been doing all the things that were cool to do, and that were expected of me to do. I'd been a straight-a student. I'd gone to a very difficult college. Obviously I got into graduate school.
I didn't have to grade. Married a beautiful woman. I got a house in Berkeley. I mean, this was cool that life was one could have.
And then one day I woke up and realized this wasn't the life I wanted. There was adventure that I was holding myself back from, that there were things I wanted to explore and expand and so forth that I wanted to do. And that sort of changed me. One day I just decided to not go back to school.
And I have no idea what kind of records the University of California Berkeley has with me. But I just didn't go back. I said, not for me. So I left my marriage, left my life, left all of that.
And then embarked on an inner and outer adventure that was quite adventurous. I ran into a lot of stuff about me. I ran into a lot of false starts and a lot of things that didn't work very well. But it was all in my exploration.
It wasn't really escape. I was just exploring an awful lot of things. And then found more and more stable ways and more inner ways to do. But much more consciousness and stability than kind of random in ad hoc.
So I kind of grew up from that over the years. And my outer life became a lot quieter even though my inner life was still quite rich. So I suppose that was a hallmark that was for me to make that decision to sort of leave what people would probably consider. One of the best and coolest kind of lifestyles you would have and go on my own trip.
Was that a difficult decision? I mean, I hate to sound like a broken record. But was this a one day I'm done? Or was it something that developed over time?
A lot of people don't leave situations that feel the same. I don't remember exactly whether it was days or weeks or months, but it certainly wasn't. I don't think it was months. I don't think it was weeks that I had that thought.
But I'm just a approval sucker. I like people's approval. I don't like being the rebel and being out. I like people like me.