Dave Allen Describes the Genesis of 'Getting Things Done'

>> You know, people would ask me this, gee David are you a naturally kind of organized guy, and I think about it and I go not really. I mean my life's a mess and falls apart regularly. But when I really thought about it, I thought yeah, I was born thinking how much easier can I make things. So you know, I thought it was just ultimate laziness, then I discovered they call it process improvement, and people you know, pay money to have you talk about that. So you know, my whole game was from the very beginning, how much easier can we make things happen. A little more practical answer to that was, after thirty five professions by the time I was thirty five, I figured well, consultant or flake are the only two options. So I took the consulting route. And in my consulting practice I needed help myself, and I just discovered a lot of the tools out there, and a lot of the models about time management, personal organization. Just, they all had good stuff, but nothing really cut it in terms of the people that I was working with, and the kind of lifestyle that I live. So a whole combination of things happened in the very early eighties. I mean I was on, in one week I bought an IBM XT and a Radio Shack model one hundred, and was on the Easy Link with AT and T in 1983. So in one fell swoop I sort of stepped into this world. And also I'm a gear freak, and anything small, black, high tech and expensive I want. You know, later on I'll figure out if it actually does anything. But my buy to use ratio was probably ten to one over time. So all those kind of factors all came together, and I just started putting things together. I thought I was the last guy in the world to figure this stuff out. Cause I really didn't have a lot of experience in the big corporate world, that only happened in the early eighties when Lockheed asked me to come in with some of the stuff I'd developed and help them design a seminar for this. But my background was with startups, and friends of mine who had businesses. And I was just kind of, I was a good number two guy to come in and kind of help them figure out their process. And I thought if I got into the bigger corporate world, and the more senior people that were certainly making a lot more money than me, they'd have already figured all this stuff out. Wrong. So it turns out that the higher up people got, the more responsibility they had, the more buried they were feeling, and the more they needed any simple little tool that would help them get rid of drag on their system so they could stay focused more. And as we all know, since the early eighties, the world was starting to happen a little faster and faster and faster for people. But anyway, long version of, the short version of a very, very, very long story. But that's where, that was the genesis of all this.

>> So how does it work? Can you describe the process in like thirty seconds or a minute?

>> Sure. Basically you externalize any commitment you've got with yourself or anybody else. You then clarify exactly what that commitment means in terms of what's the outcome you're committed to and the action steps you need to take. You park the results of that defined work in some sort of in tact system where you have very clean categories about what things mean and they're parked in their appropriate places. You build in a good review contemplative reflective process on that whole inventory. You make sure you then are having the appropriate conversations in terms of purpose, vision, goals, areas of responsibility, projects, and all the actions required on some consistent basis. So then you trust your heart or your gut, or the seat of your pants, or whatever you trust about your choices about what you actually do. That's GTD, that's what it's about. Pretty easy right?

>> So if I can paraphrase, you take everything that's in your head, you put it in a gigantic task list, and then you just follow the tasks.

>> Basically what you want to do is offload the core processor's responsibility to remember and remind. The core processor in your mind cannot multitask. You people are going multitasking. Well multitasking is what happens when you drive home and you wonder who drove, right. When some unconscious, or relatively unconscious part of you, we're all pumping blood and breathing and stuff, there's all kinds of multitasking going on right here. But for the brain to consciously, creatively concentratedly focus on more than one thing at a time is impossible, impossible. It can do one thing very well. Your brain walks into here and it can see patterns here that the computer still can't even come close to doing, not even close, right. So we have a huge, huge computer sitting inside of ourselves that has infinite power, or at least almost relative to anything we've seen so far in terms of what the computer can match. However, what the brain cannot do very well is then take one person and think very creatively, how am I gonna manage that relationship, deepen that relationship, be creative about that, and then do two people at the same time. Can't do it. Cannot do it. So what the brain can do is focus on one thing at a time very, very powerfully, but not two. The problem is if you're not tracking the agreements about something here, anywhere else your mind has to have it. It cannot let it go. I mean you can fool me, but you can't fool your own head. It absolutely knows whether or not you've got placeholders in appropriate places systemically for any of your commitments. If you don't, it has it back. And it'll wake you up at three o'clock in the morning, David you need to, you need to, and it's this monkey on your back. And basically what you did was you gave the core processor in there the job of doing something it doesn't actually do very well. It can make the decisions. Matter of fact, your system can't make the decisions for you, that's probably a lot of what we'll maybe talk about here. But once it's made the decision, then having a systemic way to put placeholders on those things, so that then it frees itself up. So essentially it's possible to be buried and have nothing on your mind. Actually you can't have nothing on your mind if you're conscious. But if the only thing that's on your mind is truly the only thing on your mind, then you're in your zone.