The Kairos Assessment

Most productivity systems are built for how people should work.
The Kairos Assessment reveals how you actually do.

 Take the Assessment

What is the Kairos Assessment?

The Kairos Assessment is a set of 53 straightforward questions designed to capture your reflexive responses to information, how your attention activates, what it locks onto, and what it ignores.

As part of the GTD coaching process, the Kairos Assessment is used to tailor your system from the very beginning.

The result is a detailed profile of how you process, manage, and transfer information across six key cognitive channels.

Thinker

Listener

Observer

Mover

Reader

Talker

Why This Matters

Much of the friction people experience, losing focus, feeling overwhelmed, struggling to follow through, isn’t about discipline. It’s the result of trying to work against how they operate on a cognitive basis.

We don’t have one single attention system. We have multiple processes competing for input, each activating and resting in different ways.

Always-on radar

Some attention processes act like radar, constantly scanning and are hard to switch off.

Effortful engagement

Others require more stimulus to engage and more deliberate effort to sustain.

The Kairos Assessment makes those patterns visible.

Cognition Isolated From Emotion

Unlike traditional assessments that blend personality, emotion, and performance, the Kairos Assessment isolates cognition and separates it from how you feel.

It gets underneath skill and aptitude to something more fundamental: how your mind is wired to engage with information.

Think of it like handedness. It doesn’t determine what you’re capable of, but it dramatically affects how you perform best.

53
Questions


6
Cognitive Preferences


1
Profile of your mind

Once you understand these patterns, you and your coach can begin to design a system that works with your attention, not against it, reducing friction, improving focus, and making consistency easier to maintain.

GTD Founder David Allen

David Allen - Founder of GTD

"Discovering what is really under the hood of your car can make a world of difference in how you drive and utilize its power. The Kairos Assessment does the same thing for the mind, producing awareness for creating the best strategies for our own thinking and working. It has been a brilliant resource for me personally, as well as for hundreds of our clients."

See What's Under Your Mind's Hood.

All GTD coaching clients receive the Kairos Assessment as part of their program.

 Take the Assessment