Which includes checking off these things on my current Travel List:
- First month coaching sessions with a new client,
- Speaking at a Rotary Club meeting,
- Having lunch with one new business associate and coffee nearly every morning with others,
- And talking story in all these forums with people about the general state of working in business today.
What I’m hearing from everyone I meet with is this:
The more global we get in thinking about our world, and the more we agree that we want to be continually learning and seeking some greater good for ourselves, the more overwhelmed and frustrated we are.
Believe me, I hear you.
Those of you who travel on business will know that Travel List of mine is an extra list for me: Tucked into my folder for a stolen 5, 10, or 15 minutes here and there is my “normal” To Do list, which I fondly call my Managing with Aloha Master List.
Therefore, all of this also seems to be making this trip the perfect time for reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. Yep, I finally gave in and bought myself a copy.
As a management coach, I spend a lot of time in my early one-on-one coaching with someone trying to get to the root causes of wherever they may be stalled with their personal time management. We talk about their daily and weekly habits, for those discussions will arm me with significant background knowledge on two things: 1) how they spend the bulk of their time, and 2) where they may be stuck.
I know that we can’t get too deep into the finer points of Managing with Aloha until I give them useful, immediately impact-full help with their time management, helping them de-clutter their lives, and feel more productive than they presently may be. Helping clients with time management is a huge part of coaching.
With this as my own repeated experience, I am finding that David Allen and I agree on quite a bit, even though I am barely a few pages into his book.
The reality of a strengths and values-based management practice like Managing with Aloha is that it requires you to focus on “higher-level thinking.” Doing that can be very frustrating when there is still too much lower-level “stuff” clogging up those thought channels you want to otherwise direct. So believe me, I’m very open to the possibility that Allen has written something I can prescribe in the early stages of a coaching relationship, “Read this book and call me in the morning.”
So more later ” back to reading.