This article brings together selected writings on GTD by Francis Sopper, CEO of GTD Focus, exploring what GTD is, how it functions, and how it shows up in real life.
What Is GTD?
Since you’re reading this, you most likely know.
So how can we explain to others why GTD is so much more powerfully effective than other practices?
GTD shows up in searches using terms like productivity, organization, time management.
While those things emerge from a GTD practice, we know it’s so much more.
It’s not a system or a process: it’s a way of thinking.
It’s about understanding your contexts, experiences, and relationships.
Here’s an example. A kitchen is a context. Cooking and eating are experiences. You have relationships with the people you cook and eat with. That kitchen needs tools; places to store and retrieve them. Food preparation requires knowledge, skills, ingredients, All that takes time.
All that — every last bit of that — is GTD. It’s why I’ve been at it for 23 years — because continuous improvement is also GTD.
What This Looks Like in Practice
You have an optimum set up for Projects, Next Actions, Agendas, Waiting Fors and Someday/Maybe. It likely includes some well chosen apps. Maybe some things work better for you on paper.
You’ve recently gotten your inbox to zero.
You’ve gotten other backlog cataloged. Your calendar is for appointments; not for task management.
You’ve recently completed a comprehensive Weekly Review.
You’ve gotten your stuff systematized, in place, and managed.
You got your act together.
Getting There is Rarely Linear
In early March 2020, after I landed in Boston from International travel and within days entered lock down at my home in Vermont, I began an involuntary journey of self discovery. (Cow length social distancing.) Over the last 2 ¼ years of various forms of living behind masks, limiting direct personal contact, maintaining distance when in contact, meeting outdoors — you know what it is — I’ve learned I’m extravagantly extroverted. Yeah, I’m that guy who talks to you in the supermarket line. I strike up conversations with toll-booth keepers, and make small talk with the police standing in the rain while maintaining security lines at demonstrations. “Are you getting good overtime for this, at least?” And I talk to fellow riders on the New York subway at midnight.
I study human behavior, so I work hard not to be creepy, and I find if I maintain distance, get at least implicit permission to proceed, many people are grateful for my lowering the wall of strangerness.
When I recently shared this self-realization of my extreme extroversion to friends, I’ve been informed that I’m now officially the last person to know this.
This realization then, allows me to understand what I’m proposing won’t be of interest to all y’all, and I know it will be beyond price for some of you.
Many of you know, I came to Getting Things Done as a client in 1999. You can ask for my hitting-bottom story.
Meg Edwards arrived to give me two-days in person to introduce me to the GTD methodology. This wasn’t some step-by-step instruction in a private office with the doors closed, or in a classroom. This was Meg in my space in the heat of my day: people in and out, meetings with my boss, my peers, and my direct reports in between phones ringing, emails to be answered, deadlines looming.
There were no hypotheticals.
“How are you going to remember what that person just told you?”
‘You just made a commitment in that last phone call, how are you going to track it?”
“You just spent 6 ½ minutes searching for something in that pile on your desk. Here are file folders and a labeller, let’s start rationalizing this.”
‘Were there any next actions for you from that meeting?”
“Was that a necessary use of your time?”
For two days, Meg was the omniscient narrator of my life, my workflow, and my systems to manage all that. What’s best there was no judgment; no critique of all the things I was doing wrong; no long list of all the things I would have to do after she left. Instead, step by step, as things showed up in my real world, we started to build project lists, next-actions lists, built a calendar, created systems for reminders, made clear and actionable delegations, and — new and revelatory to me — waiting-for lists, and someday-maybe lists.
As a result, when Meg left, I had all these structures framed out and populated. That was 23 years ago. Those systems are as solid and functional as the 212-year-old house I live in. Both are powered with new technology — fiber optics straight to my home office — but the fundamentals are simple, practical, and eminently easy to maintain.
As you can see, it’s intense and highly personal. And maybe not for you. We have been providing remote coaching since the early days of web conferencing, and, at the same time, these last 30 months have led us to some powerful refinements of that. The core understanding driving our work is that no two people stand in the same place at the same time and have the same experience.
However, if my experience resonates with you, contact us. For me, it was irreplaceable and life changing. It set my course for these two decades and counting. It’s been beyond price.
What Happens When You Get Stuck
Overthinking, it’s not a thing.
What you’re doing is perseverating. Your thinking is stuck. Your mental gears are spinning and not generating. A useful framework for aligning those gears to create movement is to engage your horizons of focus. This post is the course catalogue description. David Allen’s, Making it All Work, is the textbook.
Here’s the summary.
Level 1 — the Runway
These are your next actions. Anything you do requires you to do things in the real world. I call them filmable events. Someone could point a phone at you and document the action.
Are you stuck because you haven’t identified the next thing to do?
Level 2 — Projects
A project is a series of next actions that, again, produce something in the real world: buy a car, start a theatre in the barn, start a business, build a house, have a baby. All of these things require a more or less coherent set of actions that result in a thing in the real world. (wipe that smirk off your face).
Are you stuck because you haven’t defined the outcome, haven’t identified the necessary next action, or are engaging powers beyond your control?
Level 3 — Areas of Focus and Responsibility
These are things we do because of commitments we make to ourselves or others. Again stuff in the real world. Eat more plant-based foods, spend a certain amount of hours on the job, pick up the kids from school, take all of your vacation time. Commitments aren’t static: we need to recommit or renegotiate the commitment on a regular basis.
Are you stuck because the commitment seemed right at the time, but things have changed, or I didn’t know I signed up for this?
Level 4 — Vision
This is the idea place. Ideas aren’t filmable actions. Ideas can be imagined and those imaginations spoken, sketched, acted out but they aren’t things yet. Ideas lead to real world outcomes, but are still in the realm of speculation. Rather than, let’s build a bridge here, it’s — do you think there should be a bridge here? How do you feel about starting a family?
Are you stuck because you’re feeling forces out of your control? This is the place to ask, what if we amended the Constitution? What if we could deflect a meteor heading for New York City? How can we cure cancer?
Level 5 — Purpose and Core Values
This is your life’s final exam question. Here’s why I may not be much help here. I lived in LA during the “Whoever dies with the most toys, wins” era. One day on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City I saw a sparkling white Rolls Royce Corniche convertible with the license plate reading “FILTHY.” I had a camera — 35mm at the time — the photo is in my drawer. That was someone I have to believe whose actions were completely and joyfully aligned with their core values.
By contrast, I’m trying to live a life defined by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self control. However, around that same time, my younger, then college-aged, brother in law spent a summer with his sister and me in our small apartment. He was a good companion and one evening, while he was washing the dinner dishes, he observed in a kind way, “Frank tries to be nice, but sometimes forgets.”
Still working on that. Still hoping to be ready for the final.
Warmly,
CEO of GTD Focus
Francis Sopper