David Allen

Your People are Your Daily

February 10, 2011 by Rosa Say

They aren’t “a project.”

I must start this posting by saying that I greatly admire the gentleman I’m going to quote shortly. I’ve read all his books, and have implemented several of the suggestions he makes within his expertise of GTD productivity, blogging about them extensively in past years. However this beginning to his recent newsletter sent up such a red flag with me:

I decided to make it a project (and priority) over the last few months to sit down with each and every employee in my company. I heard feedback (positive, plus improvement opportunities) and a ton of creative ideas (amazing what others see who are positioned in a different way in front of the fire hose!) I am now culling all of that intel. and looking at a stack of creative ideas. Interestingly enough, dedicating so much time to that process threw the rest of my personal workflow way out of my comfort zone of being in control. But what a great opportunity to creatively see how we can grow and adapt as a global company.

I challenge you this month to consider doing something that will take you out of being in control—even just a little bit. As long as you know how to regain composure and balance, and that you will get there, soon enough, you’ll be fine. There may be an unseen opportunity waiting for you to grab.
~ David Allen

The red flag is CEO detachment. Makes me think back to the first time I saw Undercover Boss (I never made it to a second episode).

If you believe in the overall philosophy of Managing with Aloha, and you decide to adopt it, this good intention of sitting down with each and every employee in your company cannot be ‘a project.’ It has to be your everyday m.o. I don’t care how big your company is.

David Allen needs the Daily Five Minutes.

I am sure Allen does have all kinds of conversations with people on his staff, and on a daily basis. However his project approach described here is a recipe for disaster at worst, and workplace mediocrity at best. Unless he is an exceptional delegator, the likes of which I’ve never seen, and able to delegate to a truly stellar network of Alaka‘i Managers, I simply cannot imagine how Allen can possibly follow-up on what he’s described as “a ton of creative ideas” — not to the extent where each person he spoke with feels valued versus filtered.

His aside is what he is consistently missing within the better context of their operational presence: “amazing what others see who are positioned in a different way in front of the fire hose!” Umm, yeah, you think?

Talking to your people, — Your. People. — cannot be an occasional project. To say this in the words that Allen himself taught me, conversations with your people are “Next Actions” for a whole slew of projects, probably every single project you can possibly think of. Conversations with staff have to be an integral part of your everyday life as a manager, for then valuing their ‘intel’ is part of your everyday life too. Following up gets less stressful, for it also becomes a smaller, more nimble bit of something daily or weekly. Like all the rest of it, delegation gets easier, and more timely. There’s less clutter: I’ll bet a lot of what Allen heard was stage play for that rare opportunity people got with the big boss.

In his newsletter, Allen goes on to feature what he’s ended with in this quote, the urging to get out of one’s auto-pilot, and “Stretch, disrupt, regroup, stabilize” your personal system. I agree with that part, but if you seek to be an Alaka‘i Manager I must insist on this: Talk to your people daily to Care for your people daily, even if your Daily Five Minutes translates to seeing each of your 800 employees once every 3-4 years. You will be setting up a great habit, and a highly visual one, where keeping your people as Job One inspires them to help you keep your common causes as their Job One.

No Archive Aloha of related reading will be listed with this post. I’ve embedded several links already in a sincere hope you will check them out, and they will encourage you. If you feel you are usually more of a project with your boss, share this link with them, and then work on being a gracious receiver the next time they approach you.

Weekend Project: Hō‘imi your Trusted System

February 20, 2010 by Rosa Say

Preface: Hō‘imi means “look for better and best” and is defined here:
The 3 Secrets of Being Positive

Dip into the Talking Story archives, and you’re likely to find several posts on productivity studies which I had done within a learner’s obsession I’d had with GTD: David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to stress-free performance.

Initially, GTD appealed to me as a great companion to my earlier learning of Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; it fortified and revitalised those lessons-learned for me with how habits can put us on auto-pilot in a good way.

Get lazy

I still refer to GTD often and with confidence, for there is a wealth of productivity “stuff” to be learned from David Allen, who amuses me in the way he will repeatedly say,

“I’m lazy and I don’t want to think about anything more than it deserves.”

How’s that for a statement perfectly in tune with weekend living? He recently repeated it as the opening line of his last newsletter. Allen goes on to explain,

“So my quest became to find the best and most efficient ways to think about things as little as possible. What I found was that by asking a few clarifying questions, and putting the answers in a trusted system, I was able to use my mind more creatively and more strategically for the kind of stuff that really did deserve my mental horsepower.”

Reflecting back on it, if I had to reduce everything I have learned from GTD into a single useful take-away statement, it would be that of which he speaks: GTD has taught me to capture my stress-free performance answers in a trusted system. My answers. My trusted system.

Strengthen your trusted system

What does this have to do with our current-to-February theme? (February’s Strengthening. We know it as Love.)

When you have a trusted system for your own personal productivity, a system which perpetuates what works best for you, and which discards everything else, you are strengthening your system of self care.

You can work on the goals which set your heart on fire (and express your spirit of Aloha), because you’ve already done your very best work on the most important project of all: You, and how you operate —your strengths, your values, and your trusted systems of well-being.

Consider what falls within ‘discarding everything else’

I devoted part of yesterday to working within my own trusted system, capturing my answers, and discarding everything else: It was a day I had calendared in my Strong Week Plan for reviewing my Project List for 2010.

I tumbled the brain-writing captured in the table below at one point of my review, as a reflection on my Mahalo, the Hawaiian value of thankfulness. (To any of you GTDers reading, think of brain-writing as a contextual mind-sweep.) I was appreciating what I have managed to do right thus far in 2010, instead of beating myself up over what I still needed to improve upon. In other words, I captured some of my answers:

A TRUSTED SYSTEM	EVERYTHING ELSE
Accomplishment	Busy-work
Chic, custom-fit design	One-size fits all (which usually doesn’t, and is never very flattering)
Useful bits	Irrelevant bits
Essentials only	Extras and clutter
Captures your needed attention	Sources of procrastination
Batches work	Scatters work, or needlessly duplicates it
Creates “flow”	Conducive to interruption
When auto-pilot = learned	When auto-pilot = consumed
Designed to work efficiently	Designed to work “pretty” or riddled with “should-ing”
A blend of low-tech and digital	Stubborn about “system purity”
Conducive to thinking	Conducive to distraction
Energy-efficient or even energy-exponential	Drains your energy or wastes it
Cheap (i.e. inexpensive)	Costly (in numerous ways)
Your “burning YES”	What you haven’t said “NO” to yet

Oooh…
and I MUST point this out as a connection to The 3 Secrets of Being Positive:

I am evangelizing batching work more and more every day. Batching is the only work-around I know of, where we can successfully apply our “multi-thinking” to our “multi-tasking.” A good way to tackle more batching is to separate the tasks within your work into low-tech, mid-tech, and high-tech (own it as your tech: Comfy with My-Tech GTD).

Messes can be pretty

‘Ike loa: Look over that list again from the viewpoint of how much you learn when your trusted system becomes one of your Wow Projects!

“We all need systems installed into our days to ensure consistency of results, order and superb outcomes.

Success doesn’t just occur: It’s a project that is worked on each day.”

—Robin Sharma, author of the book I reached for most over the last year (besides Managing with Aloha :) The Greatness Guide

One of the things I learned in my trusted system, was to embrace my messiness when looks messy actually means I can see everything better. For instance, I no longer use liquid paper in my check register or personal journal, because I want to see what I crossed out, and/or quickly recall why I changed my mind. Strikeouts have become my friend; so much so that I even use them digitally now! Used to be, I wanted everything to be pristine clean and match; now I realize how useful it is to see my dog-eared, annotated pages, doodling and all, and the ink color-coding which looks like pre-school play to the untrained eye.

I’ll bet you already have the makings of a trusted system within your personal productivity habits, and that you do know of your “good bones” in your success structures. Have you ever stopped to articulate them, and value them, so you capture your answers with the work you’ve done on a system which you continue to place your trust in?

That’s the weekend project I suggest you tackle if you haven’t other plans. You will find it a fabulous way to set a better course the rest of the year to come, and it might just become your passionate flare-up for February!

What can you share with the rest of our Ho‘ohana Community about your trusted system of personal productivity?

How is it connected to your feelings of well-being, and your ‘Imi ola, your best possible life?

How has your trusted system helped you give movement to your big ideas?

Footnote: If this doesn’t appeal to you, last weekend’s suggestion might!
Weekend Reading: Let’s go Blog Rolling

Learn a 5-Step Weekly Review, and Make it your Habit

August 6, 2009 by Rosa Say

Preface:
Learn a 5-Step Weekly Review has been newly updated for Talking Story as we enthusiastically greet our 6th year. We have consistently found that the Weekly Review is a must-include within the arsenal of good habits which serve to fortify our Ho‘ohana [MWA Key 2] no matter how we might individually define it.

The original version of this article was published on Joyful Jubilant Learning in October of 2007, and that version was a revision of another originally written for Talking Story two years earlier. How’s that for a time-tested yet still-current habit?

Take it from me: Your calendar is your best friend

We have spoken of our Strong Week Planning recently, and that got me wondering: How has your Weekly Review helped you lately?

I don’t know about you, but without my calendar there is very little I would remember. Surely calendars are the single best organizational tool EVER conceived of. If there were no such thing I would have had to invent some semblance of one myself by now, or I would appear to be a complete mess. I would be a mess (and not this embraceable one).

Perhaps JJLer Robyn McMaster of Brain-Based Biz can explain this to us: With all due respect to my brain, it is a great servant but poor master. Like some turbo-charged vacuum-servant it obediently and dutifully collects all I place before it to handle for me, whether logical or completely random, but it doesn’t necessarily retrieve my stored up tidbits and gems at that precise moment I may need to recall them again, and put them to best use.

Productivity guru David Allen of GTD fame talks about this with some great examples, and I’m sure you have your own; think of the last time you got back from the grocery store and had done the shopping cart stroll without a list, only to remember what you needed at the exact moment you’d returned home and had just parked your car. Then, as you deposit your shopping bags in the kitchen, your spouse or roommate says to you, “You went to the grocery store today? I thought we were going to take a drive to that great Farmer’s Market just outside of town this coming weekend.”

Thus, I worship my calendar, and with the easy-to-program recurring features now offered, digital and electronic is the way to go. My 5-Step Weekly Review is part of my Strong Week Plan [MWA Key 7] and it goes like this:

5-Step Weekly Review

Open your Calendar, and …

1. Audit last week. Make appointments with yourself in the coming weeks for whatever you didn’t complete that is important to you. Seek to complete your pending stuff sooner versus later ”“ stay in flow, and don’t procrastinate.

2. Preview the coming week. Clean up any fast entries you had penciled in, and others you may need to update. Be sure you have allotted sufficient time to debrief and finish things so they don’t end up on your pending list with Step 1 next week!

3. Check your to-do lists and project lists (whatever system you have for keeping them), and determine what you can check off in the coming week. Program action steps into your calendar by making realistic appointments with yourself.

4. Reality-check your goals and grab time blocks to work them into your calendar too. Baby steps add up to big leaps ” you are making room for those BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals)! However don’t go overboard; leave white space on your calendar because stuff happens ” life happens.

5. Team up with others. With the planning of the week to come now steeped into your subconscious mind, think of those you can enroll in your goals, putting the power of we into play. I once heard someone say, “life is not a solo proposition” and I’ve discovered there is much wisdom in harnessing that belief. Thus my Weekly Review ends on Monday: I contact those I have thought about collaborating with, hoping to secure their agreement to work with me —and their ideas!

What to expect

The Weekly Review is a great habit that creates more great habits.

For instance, when we studied the strengths revolution within a Learn to Lead with Your Strengths learning project on Joyful Jubilant Learning, Marcus Buckingham’s Strong Week Plan became one of my ‘current projects’ included in Step 3 above. His coaching for keeping my strengths and weakness statements readily accessible for further strategic work has now become part of that step for me.

SIDEBAR:
If you are interested in this integration, I highly recommend Buckingham’s book Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance containing a self-paced coaching program that I have consistently found to be very achievable and effective for many of the managers I have since recommended it to.

People who are diligent with their Weekly Review get things done, and they help others stay on track too. You will begin to see that those people you initially sought out to work with you are now returning the favor. They introduce you to exciting new projects they have become involved with because they greatly value your partnership, and your track record with getting results in a well-planned, strategic fashion.

Something to think about:

Where does your planning impact the action steps of others?

GTD author David Allen says Friday afternoon is the best time for many of the executives he coaches to complete their Weekly Review, because they will then help everyone else they impact: As they delegate, they create a chain reaction for the Weekly Review of everyone else in their company.

As an executive coach I will encourage a big-picture view as well, and I will model it, understanding that my own Weekly Review conversations each Monday can proactively impact my clients before the following Friday if my coaching is to be best for them.

Connections:

Two days ago, I brought Paul Graham’s “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” into our Leadership Tuesday focus as a very important consideration with the teaming-up you do with others: My encouragement to you was titled “Leading encourages Making. Embrace the Mess” and the question it posed was about the alignment between work schedule, and work flow. Please set aside some time to read of those connections if you have not done so already.

These days my calendar is getting the super deluxe project treatment within the Weekly Review I do, for I’ve become a Google Calendar web-based convert and I am experimenting with some of their new Lab features. At other times I will take the time to a Monthly Review which includes time audit habits I have picked up from HCer Dwayne Melancon. If I have highlighters in hand you can bet I have the 30-70 Leading-Managing Rule in mind (yep, I do it too!)

2010 Update on the 30-70 L/M Rule:
Reduce your Leadership to a Part-time Gig in 2010

Bonus Tip!

My Most Important Tip for you is probably this one: Set a time frame for your Weekly Review, and stick to it.

If you turn this into an epic production each week, you aren’t going to do it ”“ especially if you are carving out some time on the weekend. I do my Weekly Review on Saturday mornings while my family is asleep, and within two hours max with my coffee: I’m the only one who is a morning person and early riser, and so it is quiet time I am not taking away from them though I prefer doing this at home.

So let’s go back to the question I started with:

How has your Weekly Review helped you lately?

Guess what popped up on mine? A calendar trace I had noted about wanting to revise this article, for it is that important.

You’ve got to honor your calendar, and you’ve got to love the magic of your Weekly Review. I sure do.

Bonus Tip 2: For more thoughts on GTD, Dwayne Melancon of our JJL Advisory Board has a good index of his writing about it on his blog Genuine Curiosity. As I mentioned above, Dwayne also has great audit habits.

Bonus Tip 3: In updating this posting for Talking Story I could not bring over some of the terrific comments it stirred up over on Joyful Jubilant Learning, and if you have a bit more time you might want to click over there to read them. Robyn McMaster had this to say in responding to my not-so-subtle shout out for her expertise:

“Hi Rosa, yes, indeed a calendar is a great way to outsource your brain, so to speak. You have a central place to keep life organized. It’s how leaders create success. A recent Yale research study over a 10 year period shows that people who keep targets daily make ten times more money than other do. Now that’s really something to buzz in your brain!”

Photo Credits: These fabulous 2009 calendar images were done by Jan Muder and published on Flickr. You can see his entire photo set here. Admittedly you will need a much more functional calendar for what I suggest with the Weekly Review, but I could not resist sharing these beauties with you.

Comfy with My-Tech GTD

October 30, 2006 by Rosa Say

Preface: If you are just joining us, this article is part three and the final installment I have planned for my October 2006 ho‘ohana of “Nalu it!” a la GTD, Getting Things Done by David Allen. (February 2010: Link updating in process.)

To catch up and for best context, you’ll get the whole series this way:

Our Ho‘ohana for October, 2006: Nalu it!
GTD? Nalu it!
GTD and a Story of Sequential Learning
You’re in the right place! Keep reading :-)

When I think about the way my work habits have changed over the years, the last few of them are startlingly dramatic; any of my recollections about how I worked a scant three years ago often seem like ancient history. My personal journey with better productivity has been all about embracing change, our ever-flatter world, and new technology.

However, I believe in a balance of forward-thinking change and great-value constants. Through-out it all, my constancy has been Managing with Aloha; the MWA movement has given me a real-life, mission-critical focus of the good stuff I’ve wanted to consistently apply my productivity practices to.

Another undeniable factor in this short stretch between my now and ancient history, has been that I made a gargantuan leap from corporate life to that of entrepreneurship and self-employment in 2003. Ah! Sweet, sweet freedom. A seemingly never-ending supply of Christmas presents under a glowing tree of proactive personal choice. Some self-employment struggles? Sure. But relatively short-lived, and oh so gloriously worth it.

That’s my Context for this article.

For those of you still interested, this is my here and now of GTD application. I write this for those who know of and are practicing GTD in some form; from this point on, this posting is one filled with GTD jargon. If you never heard of it, you probably won’t want to keep reading ” take a look at the blog sidebar for other suggestions.

You still with me, and still have a need to know? Okay, two things:

a) These are the bones of my Trusted System (New update for 2010: Weekend Project: Hō‘imi your Trusted System). I say “the bones” because I’m still tweaking, still seeking to pare it down to the barest essentials, and there’s no sense in writing about the stuff I’m working to eliminate, right?

b) There are parts of this which could quite easily be spun off into a series of their own ”“ such as with email, that “big elephant you have to eat at one bite at a time.” We shall keep this as much to the highlights as possible, otherwise I may as well write another book ” this series has been long enough as it is!

Okay, here goes.

Low-Tech

I so agree that psychic RAM is a terrible office, and low-tech collect and capture is the way to keep in mind like water state so you are more perceptive to the great opportunities which present themselves to you. You want to be an interesting human being to others, and live in the moment; you don’t want to be a productivity-obsessed robot.

Job One: over note-take, and write everything down. Use the gear you love to use for their tactile goodness. I am a journaler, for writing things out is part of my feels-good thinking process. Journal entries become blog posts, become submitted articles, become potential white papers and books in the making.

My UCT (ubiquitous capture tool) is a 5×7 blank book kept with me at all times, and I don’t bother with tabs (tried that, organizational fanaticism set in); I just write front to back. When my journal is full, I inhale the heady scent of my writing pleasure so captured and reward myself by buying another blank book. Tucked inside are a few index cards ”“ whatever size is on sale when I need to restock. What I write on the cards is any info that I’ll later toss into my One Physical Inbox to then Process/Organize into the mid-tech or high-tech parts of my trusted system.

I love paper tools for their tactile pleasure, but I hate filing, and to that end (Begin with the End in Mind!) I seek to be as paperless in my business as possible. The best thing you can put in my Christmas stocking is another mega-memory flash drive.

Also in this Low-Tech category:

Tickler files via expanding pendaflex. Love ‘em, use all three types: A-Z, January-December, and 1-31. They keep reminders/reference I need not double-entry into my Outlook Calendar or any other Mid or High Tech Processing.

3-Ring binders are a mainstay in the kind of work I do with my clients, they work way better for me than manila folders, and they include plastic, removable/portable and recyclable 3-punched portfolios (one thing I still use the Brother labeler for) and slant pockets.

Corporate life taught me the discipline of using trace dates, and plastic slant pockets are great movable Next Action holders from binder to tickler file, to nose-to-the-grindstone Project Work and every back-and-forth movement within the Project cycle. They slip out of my carry-on easily in all the traveling I do.

Mid-Tech

I’m a graduate of the Franklin-Covey calendar/paper planner system, and today, my mid-tech is Microsoft Office and my printer: Outlook Calendar, Contacts and for Email. I no longer use the rest of Outlook, but I do learn all the bells and whistles that come with those three applications so that I am quick as I can possibly get in using them.

Core to my mid-tech thinking: I am an incessant planner, and I cannot imagine life without a calendar —absolutely impossible! My Outlook Calendar is easily printable when I need it on paper and helps with my low-tech capture within time-specific windows: When the time it covers is over, and any notes added to it are processed, the paper version is shredded. If I process it correctly I don’t need to archive it.

I have several email addresses for different reasons, and they all get channeled into my one Outlook Inbox. The two-minute rule gets applied to my email inbox, and I get it to zero by the end of the day when possible, and in my next Weekly Review without fail (including ruthless purge and delete.)

Outlook email folders work exceptionally well for my customer, community, and relationship correspondence because I use email so much. When people leave me voicemails, I’ll often transcribe their message as part of an email string we had already started.

My Sent box in Outlook is my GTD @Waitingfor; Sent is like “Tag, you’re it!” for me. If my sent message is the end of something I delete it right away; any needing a response stay there until I get one or send a reminder, and I check it regularly, seeking to get to zero, same as my Inbox.

High-Tech

It may be different for you, but I think of high-tech as

my cell phone
my laptop
my blogs and web-presence
Microsoft Word for long documents (and most of my writing)
Excel for spreadsheets AND for Lists of all kinds
and any web-based tools I use. Examples of these are Constant Contact as my e-letter editor, Basecamp for my clients’ project management, Skype just recently, and Gmail/Google Groups functionality for the Ho‘ohana Community. Love Del.icio.us tagging as my online reference manager.

I optimize my use of my cell phone and laptop in all they offer ”“ and only those two pieces of equipment-type tools. As I’ve said before, no PDA for me. (2010: Things do change! I am now a mac-user, and loving my iPhone apps :)

I have been an Excel user for a long time, and as far as I’m concerned it remains the best List Manager ever. No Excel macro knowledge is needed; macros are complexity gravy. I have an Excel File simply named “Task” that is a constant open window and/or printable file for me. I make good use of the Auto Filter (which also Sorts by alpha). Collect/Process/Organize all within the two minute rule is an easy given for me using Excel.

As an example, these are the columns I filter in this Excel Task file:

Column A: Tag A Context (Think Category)

Column B: Tag B Context (I use Columns A and B like del.icio.us tagging of the Column G entries.)

Column C: Start Date (A long-lasting first-in/first out discipline, another procrastination killer)

Column D: Last Worked Date (Clues me into notes kept in my Outlook Appointment notes section.)

Column E: Due Date (Invoke the Discipline of Deadlines!)

Column F: Event Date (Will correspond to my Outlook Calendar Appointments)

Column G: The Task/Project

Column H: The Next Action

Column I: Other Notes

You can do the same thing for other Lists.

These are the other GTDisms and ROSAisms which have shaped my Trusted System; they are concepts I remind myself of all the time because they’ve “come true” for me.

Mind like water opens the door to captured opportunity.

Form should follow Function, and function is about Focus. I like light (I’m small), and virtual with as few gadgets as possible.

Focus with Allen’s 2 Basic Questions: What’s the successful outcome, and What’s the Next Action?

Neat and organized is not the same thing. More purge and delete = less need to clean or organize.

Productivity enables good living, it does not rule over it! The 5 Stages of Mastering Workflow must take as little time and effort as possible, and they must evolve into intuitive, best-life habit magic.

Took me a while to wean myself from my mouse, but I’ve learned to use my speed keys. Seems like sa small thing, but it does make an amazing difference.

How do I Nalu it, and re-group when I am surprised, get thrown a curve ball, or hunger for a new opportunity? The answer has to be supported by my trusted system.

Honoring the hard landscape of your calendar is critical.

The Weekly Review is critical.

Learn to Say No, and Learn to Let Go. Do not take on more Responsibility than you can handle WELL.

Develop a sense of urgency with taking Next Actions. Make more room in your life with Do it already! Purge and Delete. ‘ÅŒpala ‘ole: do without the clutter which weighs you down.

Have fun. Chores are least likely to get done.

Whew! I think this is quite enough talking about Getting Things Done. Let’s get back to doing it, shall we?

GTD is a great philosophy, and I think David Allen is pretty brilliant; I am very grateful for what he has taught me. There is much, much more we can talk about, but I think it becomes too much writing and not enough doing for me today. Time to turn to my own Next Action; probably for you too.

Thank you for the time you took to read this far.