On this Flashback Friday episode, Jason Hartman speaks with David Allen, the world’s leading expert on personal and organizational productivity. He is also the author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life. David shares his Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology and gives his thought on the concept of time management.

Announcer 0:00
This show is produced by the Hartman media company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts visit Hartman media.com.

Jason Hartman 0:09
Hey, this is Jason Hartman, thank you so much for joining me. Do you know what day it is? Yes, it is flashback Friday, where you hear the best of the creating wealth show and you hear some good prior episodes, some good review. Remember, we’ve got almost 500 episodes out. And you know what? iTunes doesn’t even hold them all if you’re an iTunes listener, if you are listening on Stitcher, thank you for joining us. So we want to bring you some good review stuff. Now. What’s interesting about flashback Friday, it’s a little scary for me. I got to be very, very candid with you on that. Because you the listener, you get the chance to hold my feet to the fire. Did I make any predictions? Was I right? Was I wrong? I’ve been right about a lot of things, but I’ve been wrong about a few. So you can give me a hard time about that if you wish. But it’s flashback Friday, and we will give you the uncensored Best of the creating wealth show with a prior episode. So let’s dive in. Here we go. Remember, this is not current. It’s Flashback Friday.

Announcer 1:22
Welcome to the creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You’re about to learn a new slant on investing some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world’s most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multi millionaire who’s actually been there and done it. He’s a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur whose own properties in 11 states had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to your financial independence day, you really can do it. And now, here’s your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Jason Hartman 2:12
In this show, we will talk to author David Allen, who is the author of several books, but probably his most famous book is called Getting Things Done. And it has been extremely popular in the corporate world. And it’s about organization time management, and you know, what, just generally getting things done. So it’s a great topic. And as you know, every 10th show, we do a non real estate non financial topic, but I do have to say this one probably runs pretty close closer than most of the every 10 shows to the financial side. But of course, it also applies to the rest of our lives. Because we want to be more productive, we want to get more things done execute on things, because then it leaves more time to do the other things that we want to do. So maybe leisure is on our list of things to do, if you will, and this can help you do that we are called human beings, not human doings.

So let’s talk about getting things done. So we can be rather than do more often. We just finished a fantastic masters weekend last night. And we’ll kind of debrief on that on a future show. But today we didn’t have time to we didn’t have everybody together as I’m recording this intro, but it was a fantastic masters weekend, we had a packed room here in Costa Mesa, California, and people flew in from all over the country. I want to thank the Platinum team for helping make the event a big success. And thank you to all of our clients who participated on the client panel, the tails from the edge panel and all of the other people who came who participated. It was just great to have everybody there. And we had many repeat guests that have been to other masters weekends. And it was great to see them again and just love doing that event. So we’ll debrief on that later. But let’s go right into the show with David Allen. Oh, one more thing before we do that tomorrow. That is Tuesday night, we start our six week creating wealth online course. And that is a six week intensive. Each session will run on Tuesday evening at 5pm pacific time. And if you can’t attend the live session, you can see the full audio video online as well. So you don’t need to attend live. And even if you do attend live, if you’d like a review of it, you can have the recordings as well. Again, this is a first time that we have done the course online. You guys have been asking for this. So we listened and here it is, you can register for it at Jason hartman.com. You can pop in and start anytime within the six weeks. But of course it’s always nice. If you start at the beginning, we have a whole bunch of people registered and again, Jason hartman.com, click on events and go ahead and register for the creating wealth online course you get a PDF workbook with the course and that is about 30 pages long I believe and it’s just going to be Fantastic online course you can interact with me, you can interact with the other instructors and the other speakers and panelists that will be involved over the six weeks of that course. So be sure to join us for that, especially if you have not yet attended the creating wealth course a lot of people attended masters weekend that have not been to the creating wealth course. And this is a perfect opportunity. Because those are very different. You need the foundational philosophy in the creating wealth course. So once again, without further ado, let’s go to the interview with David Allen. Here he is.

Remember, you’re listening to flashback Friday. Our new episodes are published every Monday and Wednesday.

It’s my pleasure to welcome David Allen to the show today. He is a guru and expert on personal productivity and organization. His latest book is making it all work winning the game of work and the business of life. David, welcome.

David Allen 5:55
Delighted to be here.

Jason Hartman 5:56
Great to have you. I first discovered you a few years ago with the book getting things done. And I know that’s not the latest book, but seems to be rather foundational. And I thought maybe we talked about that one first. What do people need to do to be more productive? We’re all distracted today with overly committed lives. And we’re just all too busy. And it seems like a lot of times we’re just kind of going in circles. What’s the key to getting things done?

David Allen 6:20
Well, I think if you back it up a little bit and ask yourself, when you’ve had a really good day, when you really got things done, you probably would call that in you probably in your zone, you know, the athletes call it them as time disappears, like lunchtime, where did the morning go. So that state where you’re clear, you’re relaxed, you’re highly focused, you’re inspired, but not like giddy, and tea and hot but inspired, meaning you are engaged, you’re just on when time disappears. I think that’s the most productive state to be in, it’s the most productive state to operate from whether you’re hitting the golf ball off the tee, or in a difficult conversation or trying to rethink, you know, your life strategies, whatever. It’s like you’re clear, you’re highly focused, and you have all of your resources available to you. Well, if you could stay in that state, and that’s a lot of what my work is about is well, how do you get into that state? And when you fall off? How do you recognize you fall off? And how do you get back on? So I think what most people need to do is to understand there actually is a definable set of behaviors that allow you to get on top of your game, instead of feel like you’re behind it. And that’s what I did, I spent a lot of years just uncovering, not really making it up. It’s not like a foreign language or a technology you don’t understand. But what I did was just begin to really examine very closely what it is we do that works for us in that regard. And I just wound up defining those sets of behaviors and describing essentially a coherent methodology that if you start to apply it let you get a lot more done with a lot less effort.

Jason Hartman 7:47
So you call this kind of a new practice for a new reality. Tell us about that, if you would,

David Allen 7:52
Well then. What’s different these days is how frequently everything is different. That’s what’s new, is the fact that while we’re talking right now, stuff is piling up in there, that is potentially meaningful new input that could cause us to have to recalibrate our whole mix of of our priorities and our commitments and recast the whole game, if you will. And then repoint, and refocus, it just that’s happening many times a day, as opposed to once a month for our parents. So that’s what’s different is things are coming in much, much too fast to let them lie around without defining what they mean. And without being having a lot more rigor in terms of keeping track of what all of our commitments are at multiple different levels, and being able to step back and see that whole inventory and keep it current, so that you’re making much more objective decisions on an ongoing basis, and can reset very fast. That’s what’s really different. So the flexibility to be able to unhook and redo and refocus is really, really critical these days. And that’s not really being taught. Everybody’s kind of in it. But I think what I did was let people know there’s light at the end of that tunnel, but it’s not free. There are certain behaviors you have to do and certain things you’ve got to get good at and better at and much more on the front end about and more rigorous. I want to make it sound hard, because you know, it’s stuff that’s actually pretty easy to do. But most people don’t seem to have done it or understood it in a coherent way, like I did.

Jason Hartman 9:12
Yeah, well, things are moving so fast nowadays. And I believe it was Peter Drucker That said, the one thing constant is change. So very much to your point. What do people do? I mean, what are some sort of the fundamentals of getting things done?

David Allen 9:25
Well, the real fundamental is, well, all you have to do to get things done is define what done means and what doing looks like and where it happens. It’s just that those don’t show up by themselves. You know, what is done mean in terms of mom and elder care? What is done mean right now in terms of, you know, I got to rethink I need to restructure my business now that the world may be waking up a little bit more out there. So defining what our outcomes are is not is not an easy task, necessarily. And then even when you define those, okay, well, what’s the very next step? What’s the next thing I need to do? Oh, yeah, well, then making that decision. Those don’t show up already in nice little pink bows and well defined. So we have to train ourselves to how to make those, you know, somewhat common sense and obvious, you know, executive operational decisions. That’s the basic sort of thought process and behavior that’s embedded in GTD. But how do you do that with the flood of stuff that we’re engaged with, and that we have to deal with on an hour by hour basis? Now? That’s the challenge. And that’s where I came up with the five phases of how do you how do you really manage to get that under control and keep it under control? And what are the six different conversations or horizons that we need to evaluate in terms of what our commitments are? So essentially, I got it as simple as I could, but I couldn’t get it any simpler than that. So that’s sort of the detail of how do I how do I manage that thought process and make sure that it’s installed out there?

Jason Hartman 10:45
Well, take us through those steps, if you would, there are six. Six and five, you said?

David Allen 10:50
Yeah, well, there’s a five and six, I take it, like, let’s get control first. Because if your foot is slipping off the rock, you can’t really focus on which were where you want to climb, you know, you need to get control first. If the ship is sinking, you don’t really care where it’s pointed. So the first thing is, how do I get this situation under control. And that could be my email, it could be a client relationship, it could be my office, it could be my country, it could be anything. And those five stages of how you get control, very simply, I’ll give you the quick bullets are, first of all, to capture the stuff. Just capture, capture, capture what’s pulling them they capture what’s not on cruise control, I need to identify that. Number two is I then need to clarify or process what those things are. What that what does that mean? How do I relate to the fact that that email is sitting there and giving me information about x, y, and z? Is there something I’m committed to do about it or not? Do I need to throw it away? Is this something I need to review later on? And if it’s something I’m committed to move on? What’s the outcome I’m committed to? And what’s the action step I must take? So that’s essentially those are the clarifying questions about what emails mean, what what what my meeting notes mean? What do I now need to do after I get off the phone with this person? So that’s the clarify, that’s stage two. Stage three says, Okay, once you make a decision, oh, I need to call Fred Smith about this, I then need to organize some reminder about that. So stage three is to organize the results of that thinking about your stuff. stage four is to step back and make sure now that you’ve organized it that you’re reflecting and reviewing the contents that you’ve organized in some appropriate manner on some appropriate recursion or regularity. Then stage five says, Okay, now how do I allocate resources? What do I go do? How do I engage? With what what do I do next? Is this an email? Do I need to go to sleep? Do I need to have a conversation with my boss? What’s next? What’s the very next allocation of resources? So essentially, you capture you clarify, you organize, you reflect, and then you engage. So and that’s, you know, at micro levels, or macro levels, those are that’s actually what we all do. If things get out of control, and we wind up getting them back into control, we did some version of those phases in that order. So there’s a lot of detail on each one of those, I can drill into those in more detail in more detail. But then if you say, Okay, well, once I’ve done all that, I’ve got a lot more things to do than just one thing. No kidding. And that’s where you How do I make priority decisions? Or how do I then decide which of those things I need to do right now, and that’s where I, a critical component for that is the six conversations, you really need to have to really feel comfortable about, you know, what you’re doing, and I put them in altitude, and an altitude analogy, because they, it tends to work that way, you know, kind of lift up and see higher, that the very highest would be what I call a 50,000 foot level, that’s your ultimate purpose. And your core values. What are you about? Why are you on the planet? What’s really important to you? The next level down from that would be okay, what would while success of doing that look sound or feel like what are the long term picture of success for you, that’s what you could call it vision 40,000 feet, let’s drop down and make the purpose more operational here, then I have a vision of what that might look like. But then of course, you need to step that down a little further, I come down to 30,000 feet, say, Okay, what do I need to accomplish for the next three to 24 months? The goals, the objectives, the plans that I need to do? What do I need to do to start to make the vision happen? And then you need to step down to 20,000 feet and say, Okay, well, what are all the components of the engine that need to be maintained so that this enterprise is healthy and can get me there? So in your work, this would be the area four to seven things are responsible to maintain gross sales, grow staff, manage assets, and stuff like that, as well as in your life? You know, well, I need to make major maintain health and my relationships and my household and my spiritual life and my recreational life and my own personal development, etc. So those would be sort of the areas that we need to maintain sort of our personal and lifestyle and business or chart, if you will. But then out of all ads, you say, Well, okay, I think through all of those things, I probably got a lot of stuff, I need to finish things to take more than one step. So then you come down to 10,000 feet and say, Okay, what are all the projects I now have out of all that, and mostly, we’ll have 30 to 100 projects, like from get tires on the car to hire an assistant to launch a new ad campaign, etc. You still don’t have what to do yet. Those are the five sort of horizons of outcomes at different levels that you would need to think through and then you come down to Okay, what do I now need to Do out of all that and and out of all that come about oh 150 to 200. Next actions, what are the next physical things that need to do, that’s what I call the runway, that’s that’s where the rubber truly is hitting the road emails to send phone calls to make stuff to buy at the store things to go over with my spouse, the next things that need to happen to complete the projects that are going to fulfill my areas of responsibility that are going to get me to my short term objectives that are going to let me get my vision accomplished, that’s going to fulfill my purpose. Now, I couldn’t get it any simpler than those six conversations. So that’s why I don’t recommend ABC priority codes or 123, or high, medium and low because you’ve got a much more sophisticated set of variables that you have to deal with and that someone oversimplifies

Jason Hartman 15:43
Just a reminder, you’re listening to flashback Friday, our new episodes are published every Monday and every Wednesday. There’s been certainly volumes written and many talks and conversations about the concept of time management. David, Is this about time management? Is it about organizing things and papers? Or is it more philosophical than that?

David Allen 16:10
It’s actually none of that. What it is, is really describing at the end of the day, how good do you feel about what you did versus what you didn’t do? So it’s really about action. It’s about, you know, how well did you manage your allocation of your attention and your resources. That’s really what it’s about. You can’t manage time. That’s the problem. They’ve called it time management for so many years. But if you if you miss identify a problem, you’ll never come up with a solution. The problem is not time you can’t manage time you don’t miss manage five minutes and come up with six. You know, I think one of the reasons it got called time management, because actually most executives think they need it. And it’s a little embarrassing for executives to admit they need help in managing themselves. And their decision making, you know, so let me call it time management. That makes me sound important. But the truth is, it’s really about how you manage yourself. How do you manage your allocation of your focus and your resources? It’s that it’s that simple. And that complex goals? Yeah. And there’s all the variables that go into that. And it’s actually, yes, organization, as you heard was, is a critical component of how do I get things under control. But if you just try to go get organized, and I understand that idea, people go, Hey, wait, let’s get organized and get focused. That’s two very appropriate admonitions, whether you’re trying to get a project going or you know, redo your company or rethink your career, I need to get organized, and I need to get focused, no kidding. I mean, when the recession and believe me, that’s a lot of conversations, you know, in the hallway, I got to get organized, and I got to get focused now, assuming you don’t just want to let yourself feel run over by the bus. So those are two appropriate admonitions. That’s why but I sort them into control and perspective. But oftentimes, they get controlled, you need to disorganize what you’re doing, the way you’ve been doing it. That’s the problem is a lot of people’s organization is not an appropriate structure for the kind of flexibility or it’s an old structure that they haven’t read done. They’re too embedded in their comfort zone about it. So people tend to think of me as an organization guy, but I’m really not. I’m really as much as disorganization, guys. Anything else?

Jason Hartman 18:01
That’s an interesting paradigm. So,

David Allen 18:03
Come on, you know, everybody’s already organized, you wouldn’t be listening to this right now, if you weren’t, there’s some level of organization and some level of spaces that you’ve that you’ve got together, just so that you can focus on anything, what you need to do is you need to wait is this the appropriate organizational model or structure for what I’m trying to accomplish? Because too controlled is out of control. Because you lack them the flexibility, you don’t have the responsiveness, you don’t have the sensitivity, you don’t have the recalibration capability. So you have to be very careful about it. It’s kind of like, you know, you want to get as organized as you need to be, but no more, but I understand it, because for the most part, I think most professionals have over created and gone way beyond their systems to be able to keep track of what they’ve committed to. So I understand that for the, I’d say probably for the larger majority, the organization, part of this component is a big missing one simply because most people are just running around the victims of their own creativity. You know, what they put into motion way beyond what their systems and their behaviors are keeping up with? That’s why they’re feeling so burned out?

Jason Hartman 19:02
Yeah, I’ve definitely felt that way myself at times. It seems like there is so much about organization and focus and project management, it’s sometimes that becomes the end in and of itself, doesn’t it? And when you say people sometimes over organized and need to get disorganized, that becomes very inflexible, doesn’t it?

David Allen 19:24
It does. Well, you know, you always have to come back to what are we trying to accomplish? Where are we trying to go. And if you think about it in a, you know, a lot of people move into pretty high performance behavior in a crisis, simply because it forces them to focus on an outcome, it forces people to have to sacrifice certain things in order to accomplish the result called Live or get out of here or survive, or whatever that thing is. And so people will tend to naturally you know, make some pretty good choices when the heat’s really on. Actually, I say make the choice, but the problem is if you wait till crisis mode to do this, unfortunately, you lose track of your intuitive executive intelligence and your forebrain you go you’re going to fight in flight mode, which actually, you know, shuts down your ability to be able to make really good decisions. But the truth is this is longer than what you asked about the truth is, yes. If you focus too much on the process itself versus what’s the process is supposed to be accomplishing. People often say, gee, David, how organized should I get? And I say, is your head empty yet? And they go, No, I say, well, you need more. Is that project still on your mind? Yeah, then you need more project management.

Jason Hartman 20:24
Right? Right.

David Allen 20:25
The projects on cruise control don’t buy there. Look, you got enough stuff to think about don’t over-organize that.

Jason Hartman 20:30
Before we leave the getting things done. Are there sort of some specific mechanical things like for example, a certain type of time management? And I’d hate to say that word, a calendar system probably software based? Is there a certain sort of workflow or paper flow that people should adopt? Do you want to say don’t be a packrat? throw things out? Or remember, there’s an old thing,

David Allen 20:56
The practical tactical

Jason Hartman 20:57
Right. Yeah.

David Allen 20:58
Practical tactical goes like this. First of all, stage one, which is captured the stuff that has your attention, you need all the tools that get stuff out of your head. So you need to be able to just write stuff down, have pen and paper with you everywhere, write it down, have in baskets, answer machines, recording devices, keep stuff out of your head, that’s the worst thing, the worst thing to do is to file stuff in your head. So the first best practice is to make sure any commitments or any potentially meaningful input had better be captured into some sort of trusted bucket that you trust, you will then rummage through and assess, you know, sooner than later. So you need good in baskets, just physical in trays, stack baskets, so you can throw paper and meeting notes and things in it, you need a pocket note taker like I have, where I just carry it around with me like with a pen in it. So I can take notes wherever I am. And capture is very different than organized for capture just means I make sure I’ve got the meeting notes there that I have the thought of the idea that I had when I was running through the store. So capture tools, you know, the simplest ones are just paper and pen. And I’ve got those all around wherever I have a flat surface on a phone and conversations, I’ve always got legal pads and pads I can write on so that I capture stuff. And I carry stuff with me that so to do the same thing, then stage two is really how do I then I then need to empty those in baskets. So then I need to go through and there are no tools for that other than your brain. That’s what your brain is forced to pick up the note you just said it’s like, Okay, what the heck am I going to do about that? What’s the next action. Now once I decide what these things mean? That’s the that’s the thinking process, you have to apply to the stuff you’ve captured, then I need to organize the things that I can’t finish, you know, right away. So I once I decide what something means, oh, this email, nothing to do, but I do want to keep it then I better have a place to store it. That’s that’s where organize comes in. So then you need to have good categories for stuff. Now the action reminders, the things that you need to be reminded of to do, those basically just need to be in some form of a list. So somebody everybody needs a good list manager a list, they’re not going to handle everything, but they’ll handle the vast majority of things you need to be reminded of of things you need to do you need a list of all the projects you have, you need a list of all the action items you need to take about those and your calendar is a list itself. So the short answer, I know this is not very short. But you know, I have to describe when you say a planner or a time management tool, basically you’re talking about, oftentimes, a loose leaf notebook is a great tool, you can hold a calendar in it. And it can also hold lists of reminders in it as well. But it also may have reference material, which is telephone and address and might have, it might have project plans and might have a lot of stuff in that one particular tool. But what you really need are list a list capability. Now by the way, you can keep a list in a low tech or a mid tech or a high tech way, a low tech way to keep track of all the calls you need to make would be a file folder, just labeled calls to make, you can just throw pieces of paper in there. And that’s that works. Well. If you wanted a little more, a little more midtech, what I call the you probably could use a loose leaf notebook with paper, just paper pages. And where you could create a page, you could you could create a tab section called Action Lists. And one of those pages could be called calls. Another one could be called stuff to the computer, and so forth. So you could divide your actions in ways that makes sense. So yeah, when I get to a phone, show me all the calls I need to make. And you can just have a page in a loose leaf notebook. For calls, you could also have a page or two or three pages, that list just give you an index of all the projects that you need to keep track of until they’re finished. So just a way to manage list, a loose leaf notebooks an elegant way to do that. And then of course, there’s lots of software ways to manage lists. If you’re in an environment or an organization that’s using either Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook or some sort of the very popular kind of group where applications out there, you can actually configure those so that they can make lists. Oftentimes, that’s not very intuitive when you get those programs. So we’ve written a couple of white papers on for instance, how to reconfigure outlooks that matches this good list manager model or Lotus Notes. And you know, people can find that on our website, give the website if you would David co.com da ve ID co.co M, you can do that. And of course, I think there are over 200 software applications we’ve seen that have been that are purporting to support the game. Getting Things Done model, you know, based on my first book, not that we’ve designed but all kinds of, sort of geeks out there have taken this and go, wow, you know, David really came up with a great idea. But list, let’s create better ways to manage lists. So there’s all kinds of list management software out there, there’s some that’s based in the clouds on the web, there’s OmniFocus, for the or things, those are two very popular programs for Mac based people that you could just they just manage lists the apple world is that the Mac world is not quite as productivity oriented as Outlook or Lotus Notes, because that is you know, that you still have to kind of tie together various components like email and your calendar, plus, then these other lists programs. But basically, all you need are some way to manage lists. Now, this comes back to a lot of people out there are into what people have often referred to as productivity porn, which is how many different ways and wow, let me get a new piece of software that will solve my life, it won’t, unless you really know what lists you need to maintain. And then you need to keep it very simple. But if you understand what list you want, you can make pretty much any tool work. As long as you have the capability of making more than one list and can you know and categorize them based upon different ways you want to set that up.

Jason Hartman 26:11
Thank you for listening to the creating wealth show. This is Jason Hartman, your host, and we appreciate you following the show. We have many, many episodes, hundreds of episodes, and some of the older episodes have been archived and placed in our members section. And that applies to this one. So we include a sample that’s about 25 minutes long. And then for the rest of the show, you can go to our members section at Jason hartman.com. Many of the other shows are still in their full length complete version. However, some of the shows like this one are in our members section where you can hear the show in its entirety. And again, you just need to go to Jason hartman.com. And you can get the full show there in the members section plus a whole bunch of other great members benefits and resources, whether it be documents, forms, contracts, articles, other video and audio content, just a great resource, so be sure to join as a member at Jason hartman.com and thanks again for listening to the creating wealth show.

Announcer 27:23
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