Live With David Allen: GTD Principles in the Age of AI

TL;DR — I just spent 49 minutes on Substack Live with David Allen, the guy who has shaped how I think about my own work for the last 25 years. Getting Things Done turns 25 in 2026, and the question I had walking in was simple: does the framework still hold up in a world full of AI agents? David’s answer was sharper than I expected. AI didn’t really change the underlying principle, it just raised the cost of ignoring it so fast that you can feel it now in a way you couldn’t ten years ago.Outline(00:00) – Welcome David Allen and the one-paragraph version of GTD(02:00) – Mind like water and the strategic case for a clear head(05:00) – The accidental career and how the five steps came together(09:00) – Why AI didn’t change the principles, just the volume(12:20) – Channel creep and the new pressure on knowledge workers(15:00) – Decision support, not decision making(19:00) – The Tesla farmer-strike story and AI already inside your life(22:00) – Critical thinking as a muscle AI quietly atrophies(26:00) – Pen and paper still wins, because your phone is a black hole(33:00) – Addiction to ambient anxiety and why GTD doesn’t stick(38:00) – Journaling as creative capture(40:00) – One integrated system, no home/work split(44:00) – Moral Ambition by Rutger BregmanA Few Things That Stuck With MeDecision support, not decision making. Honestly, this is the cleanest mental model I’ve heard yet for what AI actually is in a leader’s workflow. David put it this way: “I use ChatGPT three or four times a day. Where’s the local place to buy the best old cheese here in Amsterdam? It’ll give me a lot of good data.” That’s decision support. Then he turned the screw: “Trusting it to be able to make the decision about what to buy for mom’s birthday might be the inappropriate thing to do.” That line between the two is where most leaders quietly get into trouble, because they start treating decision support like decision making and forget that they still have to be the one who chooses. (If your AI never disagrees with you, you’re using it wrong.)Channel creep. Look, this is the one I’m still chewing on, and David coined the term live. The volume of work hasn’t really changed that much in the last 25 years, but the channels have multiplied so fast that most leaders are now checking five or six different places just to make sure they’re not missing something that matters. Slack. Outlook. Asana. Google Meets. Two phone notification streams. He asked me on camera how many things I actually have to check to feel like I’m seeing the right stuff, and I rattled them off without thinking. That’s the diagnosis. (Start 2026 with an AI tool detox.)Your phone is a black hole. Here’s the thing. David has been doing this for 40 years and he still uses pen and paper for capture, and his reasoning lands the second you hear it: “For most people, their phones are black holes. They throw stuff in there and they don’t process it. They don’t deal with it.” I caught myself agreeing with him out loud. My own setup is a double-tap on the back of my phone that fires dictation into my email, because the second I open the screen for any other reason, I’m gone, and so is the thought I was trying to keep. The phone is genuinely the worst place to put the thing you most need to think about later. (The complete Second Brain blueprint.)Addiction to ambient anxiety. Honestly, this was the answer to a question I didn’t know I was carrying into the conversation, which was why so many leaders read Getting Things Done, get clear for a weekend, and then quietly fall off. David’s line: “Be aware of your addiction to ambient anxiety. Your comfort zone is a lot more comfortable than being out of your comfort zone, which is having absolutely nothing on your mind.” Read that twice. What looks like a discipline problem from the outside is almost always your nervous system getting bored of feeling calm and going hunting for something to worry about, which is a much harder thing to coach somebody through than a missing checklist. (Don’t outsource your thinking, even to AI.)If you’re a leader running on adrenaline and you can feel it showing up in your decisions, that’s the work I do one-on-one. Start the conversation here.When you check your phone right now, is it because something actually needs you, or because you’ve gotten too comfortable being needed?Watch the full conversation above. If anything from David landed for you, go subscribe to David Allen on Substack and read Getting Things Done. 49 minutes with David is the cheapest leadership coaching you’ll find this year, and the book is the next one on top of it.Written by a human, for humans.Thank you Lynn Jericho, Claire Machado, Stephen V. Smith, Duncan The Sage, Erika Legara, and many others for tuning into my live video with David Allen! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe