Adam Outland: 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?
David Allen: I lived here nine years.
Adam Outland: How did you end up in Amsterdam?
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: Are you a cyclist now?
David Allen: 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?
Adam Outland: Texas.
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: 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.
David Allen: Well, I'm always delighted right across people
where some of this sticks. I never know what sticks. Good for
you.
Adam Outland: 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.
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: 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?
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: 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.
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: 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.
David Allen: Yeah, couldn't agree more. By the way, that's
that's exactly how that works with people with my methodology.
Adam Outland: 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.
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: How did so how did you know the first draft didn't
work?
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: 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.
David Allen: 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?
Adam Outland: 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.
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: I wanted to ask are you still doing some one on
one work?
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: 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?
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: 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.
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: 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.
David Allen: Well, you're gonna change out of pain, more than
inspiration, you'll change out of both, but the pain wins by
far.
Adam Outland: 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?
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: That's right, with methamphetamine or something?
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: And you live in Amsterdam. That's amazing.
David Allen: Well, come on, the Dutch don't do that. It's only
the tourists that show up and do all that stuff.
Adam Outland: 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.
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: 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?
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: The 1619 project.
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: 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?
David Allen: 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.
Adam Outland: Yeah, love it. Again, appreciate your time and
being on here and thanks for the impact.
David Allen: You got it, guy. Delighted.