Productivity as an art form

RELATIVELY BETTER known in the US and Western Europe than he is in this part of the world, personal productivity guru David Allen recently made his first appearance in Bangkok where he gave a talk on “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity”. Organised by Productivity Plus in partnership with M Academy and Asia Books, the sold-out event saw Allen extolling the virtues of GTD (getting things done).

GTD is centred on the premise that you will be more productive and efficient if you are able to get all the work-related worries off your mind. That can be achieved by identifying, prioritising and executing long overdue tasks. Once that’s done, you have more “clear space” in your mind to enable you to focus better on the individual tasks at hand. 

This may sound like a common-sense approach to tackling a mountain of work, but it’s not something many of us achieve on a daily basis given the rigours of life in the information age. 

“What you want to get done but is not done essentially work to do. If that’s true and you really have the interest to do it, then find what the next action is and start moving on to it,” he says in a 30-minute interview with The Nation fresh from his all-day workshop.

In Asia for the first time, Allen is quick to point out that he’s no expert on how people manage their lives and work in this part of the world. But after just a short time on the continent, he’s already noticed something critical. Southeast Asia, he says, has a hunger to move into the middle class, and that middle class is becoming more competitive. In India, people want to have more room and space to pray more. In China, however, people want more room and space to make more money.

“Different cultures have different reasons for wanting to utilise keys for productivity,” he says with a grin.

GTD can be applied for use anywhere in the world, however. 

According to Allen, GTD is a powerful method to manage commitments, information and communication, as demonstrated by the results of his 30 years of consulting services, private coaching, and training and organisational programmes. The concept is a way to increase personal and organisational productivity that’s applicable from the boardroom to the living room. 

“Whether you’re trying to launch an ad campaign, throw a birthday party, get kids into school next year, or what you want to do next in your career, GTD is about managing the inventory of your commitments with yourself and other people so that you can maintain a clear head, room to become creative and focused on meaningful things,” he says, before asking if there are any tasks this reporter is planning to achieve.

“Work-life balance!” I quip.

Allen immediately launches into a series of questions about how I would go about executing these tasks until I run out of ideas.

“If you want something, but you’re not willing to do it then it’s not valuable enough so leave it and don’t kid yourself. If you want to get things done, you need to move on to it. And when you move on you need to find what ‘done’ means. What you need to do is to start working on that to make it happen,” he says.

 Many people find it hard to get things done because they have less time, are too busy, have too much on their plates, or are trying to do too many things at the same time. Allen has drawn up guidelines on how to master the workflow and these are included in his best-selling book “Getting Things Done”.

The five keys to gaining control of your life are: collect, process, organise, review and do. 

“Collect” means writing down everything you need to do, every piece of information you must study or review and put it in an inbox, either physical or electronic. This is very first step to ensure that every plan, task or idea in your head gets recorded. 

“Process” refers to processing your inbox by deciding if the things in it can be done immediately (in less than two minutes). If so, go ahead. If not, either put the item in a pile of specific, clear tasks that you need to get done, give the item to someone else to deal with, or put it aside to deal with later. 

“Organise” is about dealing with the stuff that you’ve put aside. If it’s not something that requires action from you, pass it on. Otherwise, it’s either something you need to do in the future (put it in your calendar) or something highly complicated (a project). For each project, spend a moment determining the next specific action item that needs to be done and add that item to your pile of specific tasks to do, then put the project away in a place where you can regularly review it. 

“Review” means that you should go through your projects and your idea folder and determine on a regular basis what specific items you need to do, then toss them onto your pile of specific tasks.

The last step, “Do”, is about taking action to get things moving.

These steps may sound easy, but if they were a cinch, Allen jokes that he would have long been out of a job. “Stress, distraction, procrastination and laziness get in the way,” he says, adding that being able to get things done, not keeping your agreements with yourself and not being clear about what you’re supposed to do can create a lot of stress.

“When you think you should be doing them all at the same time, you are stressed,” he notes.

And distraction can be very stressful. Distraction, he says, is created by mismanaged commitments. Concentration is power, he says, adding one’s ability to generate power is directly proportional to his ability to concentrate, and one’s ability to concentrate is proportional to his ability to eliminate distraction. 

Then there’s the weak mind. Allen asserts that our brain is designed to make intuitive choices, not to remember and remind. 

“People try to use their brain to manage their lives, to remember things. Your mind is limited in its ability to manage commitments, because it is handicapped in its ability to remember and remind. In terms of being able to have conscious recall of something, your brain doesn't do that very well. You have a long-term memory. That’s why you forget where you left your key. There is usually an inverse proportion between the amount something is on your mind and the amount it is getting done. You need your intelligence to manage your life,” he says.

Having taught the benefits of GTD for 36 years, Allen finds that one thing has never changed: people want simple solutions. 

“People [in my workshops] want simple answer to questions like, ‘How do I set priorities? That’s hard to answer. But I say, ‘Well, decide what’s most important to you and you do that. You don’t set priorities. You have priorities.’ You know, there are questions that everybody, especially the press, want answered in sound bites. 

“But a lot of answers don’t fit in sound bites. The whole point is about being comfortable about what you're doing. That’s hard to do unless you're comfortable about what you’re not doing,” he says.

 

On the Web:

gettingthingsdone.com