Dave Allen: Using "Capture Tools" to Improve Productivity

>> Speaker name : What kind of tools can I use to help myself get there?

>> Speaker name : Anything. First of all you need capture tools and what most people didn't understand was I think; you know basically there are two admonitions. You need to get organized and get focused. Any of you guys on projects and situations, you all know, wait a minute we need to get organized and get focused. Sure. But that's two admonitions not one. But the one admonition of get organized unfortunately has been oversimplified. So people say let's just get organized; yeah, but how do you do that? There are actually five stages to how you get control. And one of them the first one is just to capture the things that are pulling on your psyche. See everybody in this room has stuff that's very important strategically right now that is not on their mind because the trust the system is now place holding it. The only thing that will be on your mind are things that you have yet to make decisions about; so first of all you've got to capture that. I need to identify what's pulling on my psyche. And by the way that can be a project or a company or a country or your kids or your relationships. Let me pull stuff off my psyche you know like you're doing right now. So the whole idea of being able to capture stuff that has potential value but you don't want to force yourself to have to make decisions about it when you're writing it down. That's where people sort of mixed it up and then they compressed it. If you compress the get control feature into one thing--let's just get organized, you blow a fuse. It implodes because you're trying to both capture as well as decide, as well as organize, as well as prioritize all in one event. You can't do that. So you need to make these very discreet behaviors. So first of all you need tools for capture, you know, the job's fabulous. I've got about eight job messages this morning from my little button on my car phone called job you know. I think they've got the business model running now. You pay for it but heck it doesn't take but a few seconds to offload stuff and then get it back to me. I've got one of those--we designed those matter of fact, so you've got a capture tool. There's the sleazy sales pitch, the David Allen no take 'er wallet.

>> Speaker name : The 0.5 is paper and there's a pen and a nice little logo.

>> Speaker name : Wouldn't it be cool to have a conference; I mean I love the idea if paper didn't exist and I showed up here and I showed people paper. "Oh my God, look you can take all that digital stuff and actually put it into some readable reviewable format that you can see against other kind of things, oh my God, it's a total mess, it's paper." Anyway so, paper is very cool. And write it on your arm; write it on your butt, it doesn't matter as long as you get your stuff out of your head in some place that you're gonna then process sooner than later. The first thing you need capture tools. There are all kinds of those and even the new iPhone I guess you can take pictures of all kinds of things, and you've got this huge capture function. Yeah you can take a picture of my car, get a low CR and all kinds of stuff.

>> Speaker name : So what do you use besides jobs? So once you've captured what do you do next? I guess the tasks pile up? Well you've got to capture it first which means I've got to grab the stuff into particles then force me to make decisions about what it means because that's stage 2. This thing works sort of holographically or holistically if you will. You can't really do one without the other. If you're just capturing, without then capturing and processing what you capture, the stuff backs up on you very fast like bad plumbing. And actually then it starts to creep back up into your head. Because I know compulsive list makers out there that just...they still walk around with anxiety because they just make lists. They've got list all over God and creation out there and that doesn't help either. And by the way if you're just dumping stuff in your computer, you're just collecting stuff on that iPhone, if you're not emptying it to zero every 24 hours you're dead. You know that's the problem is people are giving all kinds of sexy capture tools but then no coaching or no really good tools to then rapidly pull that stuff back around and go, "It's Mel sir you just wrote that down. What are you gonna do with that business card you took a picture of huh?" Is that a reference, is that an action required, how meaningful is that to you? So you've got to then decide meaning. So capture first and then you've got to clarify which means what exactly does that mean. In other words you folks are all going to leave this conference and a lot of the stuff you're going to accumulate, congratulations on pushing the envelope so let's get rid of paper. But here's the problem.