A

Optimal minimalism. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question now?

B

It is in a perfect time. I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. Ferris show.

A

Well, hello boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. And welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. Good day, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you may be, my gorgeous little Maguire. My guest today is David Allen. You may know of him, the man, the legend. You may worship his systems or you may not know who he is. So I will tell you who David is. One of the world's most influential thinkers on productivity. David's 35 years experience as a management consultant and executive coach have earned him the titles of Personal Productivity Guru by Fast Company magazine and one of America's Top five Executive Coaches by Forbes magazine. The American Management association has ranked him among the top 10 business leaders, full stop. His bestselling book, Getting Things Done, subtitled the Art of Stress Free Productivity, has been published in 30 languages. And the GTD methodology, as it's known that it describes, has become a global phenomenon being taught by training companies in 60 countries, probably more at the time of this reading. David, his company and his partners are dedicated to teaching people how to stay relaxed and productive in our fast paced world. You can find him on Twitter TDGuy, GTD Guy, G Y and@gettingthingsdone.com and without further ado, please enjoy a very wide ranging, very unexpected in some aspects, conversation with David Alan. David, welcome to the show.

B

Tim, delighted to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

A

My pleasure. And it has been a very, very long time since we've had any contact. I know we were chatting before we pressed record. It was probably just a few weeks, maybe a month after the four hour workweek came out in 2007 that I found myself being interviewed by someone alongside you virtually on the phone. And I was a nervous mess. I was very intimidated because I felt like I was stepping sort of into the arena with the literal and metaphorical black belt in the productivity space. Because also at that time in 2007, GTD getting things done was ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. I mean, it was the talk of the Town and 43 folders, Merlin man, and all of these other outlets, Lifehacker seem to talk about GTD every day. It's nice to have a conversation where I feel more comfortable asking questions, catching up.

B

Well, you know, for folks like you and me, time, time is somewhat irrelevant. And that's what good Friends are for. You know, it's like you show up and go, hey, what's new? I don't. Two years, 10 years. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

A

And I was thinking back to that timeframe. 2007 was a very important inflection point for me, if I want to look at it that way. And around the same time, somewhere between I want to say, 2007, 2009, a friend of mine actually interviewed you at south by Southwest in a format that is very difficult, I think, in some cases for both sides, inside a car. His name is Chase Jarvis. He.

B

I remember that. That was such fun.

A

He's a phenomenal guy, brilliant photographer, and he was trying to do his best to squeeze out. And of course, you're very good at providing this, but some type of nugget that he could extract in, say, a minute or two minutes or however many minutes it was. And I thought we'd begin there, because the answer, as I remember it, was, your mind is made for having ideas, not for holding ideas. And I think this is so important. I would love to hear you just expand on what that means.

B

Well, your head's a crappy office, and, you know, most people are still using their head as their office. And your brain did not evolve to remember, remind, prioritize, or manage relationships with more than four things. That's new cognitive science data, by the way. So, you know, how many people are trying to keep track of more than four things and manage the relationship between them and prioritize between them? It's like, excuse me, how about 10,000? Or how God knows, however many. And, you know, I just sort of uncovered years ago, more practically and just on the street, how critical it was to empty your head. And, you know, what the. You know, in the early days of the new cognitive science field I call distributed cognition, called get it out of your head. So I discovered that and then discovered you not only just get it out of your head, but there are other things you need to do to clarify, Dr. Peter Drucker, like define what the work is that you're getting out of your head and what your kite is to it. So I spent 30, the last 35 years trying to figure out what that algorithm is and then spending thousands of hours, as you probably know, deskside, with some of the best and brightest and busiest folks on the planet, actually implementing that process and watching this transformational stuff happen. You've done a ton of coaching and advising, I'm sure, and, you know, best advice is not to tell people what to do, but ask them the right Questions.

A

Right.

B

You know, and find out what's going on in their head and help them frame that in a way that's useful. And so I just, I just figured that out. I don't know how long I'm going to be preaching this, Tim. You know, folks, your head is not, don't do that. Don't leave your stuff in your head. And it's such a huge habit. I think it's because I think it gives people a false sense of control to keep it in their head. And control is the master addiction, you know, so you've got to feel vulnerable enough to unload everything that has your attention and take a look at it. That's daunting, I guess, for most people.

A

You mentioned coaching, so I'll jump to that next. I'd love to hear you describe what you do with a, say, corporate client. Past, present, hypothetical. When you come in to meet with say, executives and they're individually very high performing people nonetheless carrying far more than four items in each of their heads. And you sit down, what are the first questions you ask or exercises you do? When you sit down with high functioning but nonetheless overwhelmed people to work with them, what are some of the first things that you do with them?

B

Well, aside from establishing rapport, right. Which is, you know, hi, and why did you bring me in here? What is your presenting issue as best you can describe it and you know, and here's a little bit about who I am, kind of what we're going to do. But ideally, and over the years I discovered the less I tell people about what we're going to do, the better. Surprise. So if I just walked in cold, you know, the tabla raza here is first thing I would do. Tim, would you would be. Let's make sure you have an entry, a physical entry, someplace to throw stuff until we can make decisions about what it means, what you're going to do about it. But we need to collect a bunch of stuff first. So that's what we're going to do first is get some sort of a material version of collection or capturing stuff that has people's attention. So we just get a big stack of printer paper, a favorite pen or pencil, sit them down and say, okay, what's on your mind? What has your attention? Oh, I need cat food. Oh, I need a life. Oh, I need to do vice president marketing. Oh, our next vacation is coming up. Oh God, my cell phone just crapped out. The printer broke. Daddy Eddie. And we literally start writing. They write each one of those items that has Their attention on a separate piece of paper and they toss that into their entry. You'd be surprised by the way, first of all, how many people don't have an entry, or if they do have one, it's petrified because it's just been sitting there with, you know, crap in it for weeks. We need to have some sort of clear space to just collect all that stuff to begin with. That process, Jim, takes usually in my experience over all these years, for the mid to senior level professional that we actually coach with this process, it takes one to six hours just to capture what has their attention. Not to organize it, not to prioritize it, not to make decisions about it, just to identify it.

A

Yeah, it's so impressive and horrifying at the same time. And I was doing prep for this conversation, I found one paragraph that struck me as important that's related to this, I think in some capacity. This is from an older piece in Wired, but it reads as the following. So at a seminar, Alan asked the audience to try to capture all their stuff by writing a list. And at the end of a few minutes tells us to look at the list and think about the way it makes us feel. He guesses that our feelings include, and feel free to fact check any of this, by the way, a mixture of grief and relief. The relief he suggests comes from the simple fact of making the list. But where does the grief come from? And this is the quote that really caught my attention. These items represent agreements you haven't kept with yourself. Alan says what happens when you break an agreement with yourself is that your self esteem plummets. Could you speak to this a bit? Because I would imagine a lot of folks would say I feel guilt perhaps about all the things I haven't done for myself or for other people. But this grief and agreements that you haven't kept with yourself struck me as as important, at least got my attention. Could you speak to that?

B

Well, I'm going to reverse engineer it a little bit and come back to the fact that you're breaking the agreement is because you're keeping track of it in your head. And where you keep track of that has no sense of past or future. So that part of you, that little subliminal part of you thinks you should be buying cat food 24 hours a day. Vice President, 24 hours a day. That's why it wakes you up at 3 o' clock in the morning. Oh, home. Because that thing has no sense of past or future. So because it doesn't, you can't do it. All you can't do more than one thing at a time. And so there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing all of that all the time. So talk about us. Ton of broken agreements. Yeah. So you don't have to finish the thing to keep your agreement. You do need to get it out of your head agreements. And this is one of the things I learned back in the old personal growth days, you know, agreements. There's an automatic price you pay when you break an agreement is you disintegrate. Trust either with other people or with yourself or both. If you don't want to have a broken agreement, you have three options. One is don't make the agreement, go. No, I'm not going to do that. Right. Move it to someday maybe or something. Keep the agreement, go buy the cat food, go hire the vp, go finish the thing. Or most importantly for most people is renegotiate the agreement. If I made an appointment, you know, today, for instance, Tim, as people may hear ambient noise out there, there's construction going on. If that was too loud, I would probably have to try to renegotiate and reschedule this, this talk with you. And then I don't have a broken agreement if I don't do it. Because she. But you can only feel good about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing. So most people just have just made so many more agreements than they're aware of. So all we do in our coaching is get people aware of what are all the agreements you've made, what are all the would, could, should need to talk to. And. And that's one of the reasons people feel good when they make a list is they look at it and go, well, gee, I can't do all this right now. No kidding. And so it comes back to externalizing stuff out of your head. That's why it's so critical to do that. And most people, I don't think, have really understood or certainly managed themselves with an understanding of that dynamic.

A

I'd love to underscore and maybe dig into a word that you used that I'm certainly in my own life trying to pay more and more attention to, which is renegotiate. Could you share perhaps any recommendations that you give or perhaps language you use yourself for renegotiating when need be? What do you say to someone, whether via email or otherwise, when you need to remove a commitment, whether it's forever or simply for another time? Do you have any particular suggestions or

B

thoughts related to well, there's probably a. I could probably think of a dozen. But one of the most interesting ones and useful ones sometimes is to make it really politically correct. It's like, wow, you know, what you're asking me to do or what I've committed to do is going to require so much more attention than I have the bandwidth to actually give it the attention it deserves right now. Can we renegotiate that in terms of when it's due, or how are we going to make it happen, or if I even need to do it at all? So that's one way to do it, to just say, hey, you know, that's a cool thing. I don't mean this is not bad about you, not even bad about me. Life changes and sometimes we just have to renegotiate stuff in that way. You know, I think it's important to tell yourself, as I say, you can only feel good about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing. That's why in order for me to be on the call with you and be present here, Tim, not long ago, I looked at every single thing I might, could, what should be out of doing today and say, no, this is it. Maybe I made a mistake. We'll find out. But at least for now, this is the coolest thing to do. It's the best thing to do. It's the only thing to do right now. But I just looked at everything else. But it's hard to do if you haven't seen everything else because you don't know what everything else includes, and so you're not quite sure what you're not doing. And so most people then can't truly renegotiate with themselves because they're not sure what are all the things that they would, could, should, ought to do. That's why, Tim, I mean, to another point, but it ties very closely to it. When I'm not doing anything else, I'm cleaning up my backlog to zero because there's a surprise coming toward me I can't see. And when that surprise hits, and that could be good, bad or indifferent, but when that thing hits, if I've got a big backlog of unclarified, uncaptured, unorganized stuff, I'm going to be disturbed by any input, even if it's good, because I don't know what else I'm missing, that if I decide to put my attention on that new thing, what's going to be missed, what's going to fall to a crack somewhere. So that's why keeping it clean, you know, keeping the backlog as minimal as possible, it's just a fabulous way to just make sure that you're clear about what are all the agreements that you have renegotiated with yourself.

A

That makes very good sense. On the whether this will turn out to be the best use of your time. You give me perhaps another half hour to disappoint. We'll see how it turns out. You guys know I love wearables. I'm sure you do as well, and they're great. But they give you data. Typically they do not give you solutions. That's why I absolutely love the Pod by this episode's sponsor, eight Sleep. I've been using their stuff for many, many years now. It fits over your existing mattress, tracks your heart rate with 99% accuracy plus respiratory rate, HRV and sleep stages. It is wild how much it correlates accurately to the stuff that you wear on you. Then the autopilot analyzes your biometrics and automatically adjusts your bed temperature while you sleep with independent temperature control for couples. Also important for domestic peace, users report falling asleep up to 44% faster. This matches with my experience. I've experimented with all sorts of stuff, countless sleep aids, and I've yet to come across a better solution that both measures and fixes my sleep within the same system. Summers don't need to mean terrible sleep. So go to 8sleep.com that's spelled out E I G H T8sleep.com Tim and use code Tim for $350 off of the pod 5 with their 30 day trial and free returns, you can try it out risk free. So check it out. 8 sleep.com Tim not to be a salty old dog, but in the early 2000s, back in the day when I was running my own e commerce business, the tools were atrocious. They tried hard, but man was it bad. You had to cobble all sorts of stuff together. I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and now 10% of all e commerce in the US is on Shopify. Now back to the early 2000s then nobody even thought of AI. Who could have predicted even in the last 24 months the magic that is now possible with with AI? Shopify has been ahead of the curve and they are packed with helpful AI tools that will accelerate everything. Write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your product photography. Best of all, Shopify expertly handles everything from managing inventory to international Shipping to, processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com Tim one more time. Shopify.com Tim Tim in 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify on the backlog. As minimal as it may be, where does that physically live for you currently? What is the. The holding pen for that for you?

B

Primarily two and a half places. One is obviously email right now. I'm just. Because of some other stuff that's going on. I have about a screen and a half full of email, which is a little, little too much for my comfort zone. But that's okay, you know, I'll clean it up sooner than later. My physical in tray that I'm staring at right now, which happens to be empty, while I was waiting for the construction site to slow down a little bit out there, I was processing a bunch of receipts that, you know, my wife and I collected the last 24 hours, putting them into Quicken. So that's all zeroed out right now. And the other half place is my little note ticker wallet that I carry around with me that has one note in it that says chiropractor. Okay. So I'm just throwing that into my entry right now. So those are the, those are the places I capture, really. I don't capture much digitally. I do have an iPhone digital capture called Brain Toss. Great little program that two GT Deers, you know, in Amsterdam actually built. Because what it does is it doesn't put it into the black hole of my iPhone. It automatically transfers it to my email. So if I care to digitalize anything that I'm capturing, some thought, some idea what a picture I want to take or something, whatever, it automatically goes to email, which then I clean up like I clean up my email regularly. But those are the main places.

A

What are the benefits of minimizing the digitizing, so to speak? Are there benefits? Is it simply a habit that you have continued over time since that's where it started, or are there features to using physical blueprint?

B

Oh, yeah. There's two sides to the coin to the digital world. First of all, it's a great time to be alive if you know what you're doing and you've got a little discipline. If you don't, it's a black hole. And you're likely to throw stuff in that you uncover a month later, go, oh my God, I should have handled that, or whatever, whatever. And it's. You put it in Dropbox, you'd stick in Evernote. You want to put it in Outlook, you want to put it in WhatsApp. Where are you going to stick this stuff? So the plethora of options has made it almost more work. You know, come on. I don't know if you've seen all the studies that say that basically productivity hasn't gone up at all, though technology has gone through the roof and a lot of that is because the technology hasn't necessarily improved productivity. It's actually complicated people's lives a lot. I know a bunch of high tech people that are going back to paper planners, especially the ADD and ADHD type, because there are too many clicks and out of sight, out of mind. You know, I've got a thunderbolt screen, but I still don't have the real estate on there that I used to have with my Time design paper planner. You can't beat it because you can see all of that sort of a relationship to each other much easier. There are no clicks, there's no battery, no WI fi required. It has all the downside. I mean, I'm a kind of a high tech end user anyway. I like all that stuff because of connectivity and so forth. But if you really need to know what you're doing, otherwise the tech world can really be quite overwhelming.

A

And I think what I'd love to do is rewind the clock a bit to get a better understanding of how you became the current version of David Allen. Could you describe where you were in high school, what you were focused on at the time, if anything, and what you wanted to be, what you thought you would be when you grew up or what you wanted to be when you grew up?

B

Yeah, well, I have to rewind the take quite a bit. Well, first of all, I was an actor as a kid way before high school. When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I took an acting lessons and actually became sort of the child star in Shreveport, Louisiana where I, I pretty much spent most of my growing up years. So that, that was always kind of a love, was that. Then in high school I became a debater and state champion debater, regional champion debater, whatever. So I enjoyed, I love debating. That was fun standing up and trying to make it up, you know, kind of while you're on your feet. We're talking the 50s and, and early 60s and in Shreveport, Louisiana, you had any brains at all, you were either a lawyer, a doctor or a teacher. You know, if you weren't necessarily in that line of things. You either sold cars or insurance or something like that. That was pretty much it. You know, there weren't a whole lot of other option consultants. What's that? Actor? No, go get a degree, show that you can have a job. There weren't a whole lot of options. Basically, in my head, it turns out I actually had the opportunity. We had an exchange student at our high school that I was going to from Germany. And that kind of, that was of interest to me. And so I actually applied to the American field service afs. And back then there were not many Americans that foreign families or international families would actually take an American for a whole year. Usually Americans went for the summer. But I applied for a whole year. I said, what the heck? And turns out I got chosen by a family in Zurich, Switzerland. I went and lived with the Swiss family for a whole year. That was eye opening.

A

How old were you at the time?

B

17 and 18.

A

Wow.

B

Actually 63, 64. I was over there when Kennedy was shot, which was quite traumatic for most of the Europeans anyway, you know, when that happened, you know, I went to the, basically the high school that the boy in the family went to. It wasn't an academic program, it was more social. Live with the family, see how they live and so forth. So I went to real gymnasium, tunic bearing, which happened to be a block up from the Kunsthaus in Zurich that had Monet water lilies, you know, all over the walls. And I was three blocks from the Odeon Cafe, which is where Dadaism started, where Jung and, you know, you know, so I was thrust into the middle of European history and culture just by being there. And that kind of opened my eyes a good bit also. I had a. I had a half sister much older than me, who had wound up marrying one of the intellectual chroniclers of the Beat Generation, a man named John Clelland Holmes. If you ever looked up John Holmes, John Cullen Holmes, you know, he wrote some very interesting books. And they lived in Connecticut. They were very, very hip. My dad died when I was really young and my mom, when I was nine, took me to visit Julian John, her husband. And so I got introduced to probably the hippest of the hip in terms of intellectual culture, New York City, Manhattan beat. Matter of fact, my brother in law, John and Kerouac coined the term beat together, you know, watching somebody kind of beat themselves, you know, walk down Central Park. Anyway, so I got introduced early on to a whole new different world of sophistication and culture really back then. So I wasn't kind of blindsided by the fact that the world was a lot bigger than my world. I was growing up in. In Louisiana. So I kind of wanted to get out of there as soon as I could. Nothing against that. I still love Louisiana, still going back and, you know, sort of seeing the culture and the food and the bayous and so forth and all that. But I certainly my world had expanded by that point. And, you know, I was interested in sort of pursuing that. So I thought law maybe to begin with. But then after being in Switzerland, being around all that culture, then the interest of the liberal arts, philosophy and so forth was more interesting to me. So when I got into college, that was my focus.

A

For those of you who aren't familiar with the career path, so to speak, what did that look like?

B

Crazy little college in Florida. They would design your own education. No grades. Independent study called New College. Got bored by the philosophers. They wound up proving their original hypothesis using their original hypothesis. And circle. That's kind of a circle thing. But what was more interesting was the philosophers themselves. And I had a great friend, he turned out to be. He was my academic advisor, turned out to be a good friend who was an intellectual historian, history of thought. So he turned me on to history of culture, History of thought. That was really cool. And we didn't even use the word paradigm back then, but that's what I got introduced to. I read Oswald Spingler, the Decline of the west, which is one of the earliest books, you know, over 100 years ago, talking about cultures having their own psyche, their own geist, and how that affected art, philosophy, math, science, medicine, you know, and everything. Because you. There was kind of a thumbprint or a signature in the various cultures that you could see through all of those things. So I was fascinated by that. So I guess that was kind of the early stages of me being interested in models. Understanding a model, if we could understand a model, that could help the world make a lot more sense. I've always been somewhat attracted to that. Always also been attracted by how the invisible affects the visible. If you look back at my career, you know, my first job was a magician at age 5 on the sidewalks of Palestine, Texas. I charged 5 cents for my magic show. So you can trace it if you kind of stretch a little bit, but you could trace it all the way back to there. I always been fascinated by how, if we could understand what's going on invisibly that's affecting everybody and get a hold of it, that could make a huge difference in how you manage your life.

A

It seems like you tried your hand at many different types of jobs, and we certainly don't have to trace through all of them. But how did you end up teaching, say corporations or productivity, whichever. And that may not be the. Yeah, how would you.

B

I'll make a very long story very short. I got into graduate school in American intellectual history. Now again, this is Berkeley, 1968. They say if you can remember being in Berkeley in 1968, you probably weren't there. So but that was heady times to be there. And at some point I realized, wait a minute, I really wanted to get my own enlightenment instead of just study people who had theirs. So I just figured that academia was not the place for it. And so I jumped ship, you know, left that said, okay. And then I got went on my own personal exploration path. You know, lots of things, you know, lots of drugs, but also martial arts, spiritual stuff, you know, come on, this is the 60s, this is Berkeley, you know, early 70s. So as I studied all of that, I was more interested in finding out who I was and finding out about God, truth and the universe than having a job. But of course, Rice bowl and Cave wasn't my style. So I said, okay, I gotta pay the rent, so how do I do that? Well, so then I had a. I had several friends who themselves kind of knew what they wanted to do and they were starting their own businesses and, you know, running small businesses. And so I wound up being a good number two guy. So just, just have a good job. I helped two guys start a New Orleans style restaurant in la. I helped a friend run a landscape company in San Fernando Valley. I sold mopeds. You know, you could read the list and Wikipedia, it's a lot of stuff that I did. But I was just, basically I would go in and see, well, how can I help them do what they're doing and how much easier can we make this because I'm just a lazy guy, you know, Then I'd help improve their. Now we call that process improvement. But I was just trying to not have to work so hard. And then I went fix it. And then I get bored. So then I go find another job. And then I discovered one day they call those people something. They pay them, they call consultants, you know. So 1981 hung out my shingle. Allen Associates couldn't spell it. Now I R1. So then I said, okay, well let me see if I can sort of just throw myself out there project by project with people and, you know, make that work. But then again, because I didn't want to have to work so hard, I Thought, well, I'm really interested in models that would work in case I can't see, obviously how to help somebody in their process. It'd be nice if I had a model in my back pocket to pull out and be able to help them that would somehow improve their condition. So I got very hungry for those models also because of my meditation, spiritual work, martial arts work. I really loved the idea of being clear in my head. You know, I had a lot of training in the martial arts about how do you clear your head, you know, so you can fight appropriately. But then my life got more complex and I said, well, that's kind of screwing up my clear head. So both my interest in keeping a clear head as well as, you know, good models to help people had me start to get attracted to and pull in piece by piece, you know, and fast forward all the stuff that became ultimately GTD and getting things done, you know, 20 years later. But there was no grand epiphany. There were just little small epiphanets along the way that I began to cobble together in a system, in a systematic approach. And, you know, I found some stuff that worked for me. You know, I had a couple of mentors teach me some of the key elements of these things. And I went, yeah, that's really cool. And then I turned around and used those techniques with my own clients and it produced the same result. More clarity, more focus, more meaningful space in their head. And I thought, well, that's cool. So that became a key part of my consulting. We didn't call it coaching back then, which is consulting. And then, you know, head of HR and a big corporation saw what I was doing and said, wow, we need that in our whole company. David, can you design a training program with this methodology so we can reach a lot of people with this stuff? So I spent a couple of months and designed a two and a half day personal productivity training and we did a pilot program for a thousand executives and managers at Lockheed. 1983 and 84 hit a nerve and I found myself thrust into the corporate training world. Could have fooled me. If you told me as an American intellectual history major in Berkeley in 1968 that I'd be in the corporate training world, I'd say, what do you smoke? But it turned out that it happened to be the audience that was most attracted to what I had found out. You know, the mid to senior level professionals were just starting to get hit with stuff like email and the tsunami of stuff that was starting to hit the corporate world. And they were also the clients that were interested in actually paying for training and coaching and so forth, you know, that would assist, you know, people in those roles. That's a very short version of a very long story.

A

I appreciate the background. I would love to hear a bit more about your mentors. Are there any particular mentors who were particularly important to the formation of gtd?

B

There were two, and I just had them on stage with me at Amsterdam because I invited them to, you know, we just did the GTD Global Summit. And I wanted people to sort of hear some of the original DNA of where GTD started. One was Dean Atchison, the other is Russell Bishop. Dean was a, had been a 25 year consultant in executive consulting in organizational change. He had uncovered the techniques that were critical to be able to loosen people up so they were able to make change instead of having a lot of old business prevent them from being able to do that. So the whole idea of a mind sweep, getting stuff out of your head, I learned from Dean, he had figured that out, that that was absolutely critical for executives, particularly because, you know, if they had all this old business spinning around in their head, for them to buy into some new goal and vision was like swimming in quicksand. So he discovered that getting that stuff out of their head and having them make next action decisions, the very specific next action. So I learned the minesweep and the next actions from Dean and those are still core elements that anybody needs, you know, to get clarity, you know, get your head clear, you know, in terms of commitments. And Russell Bishop was the co founder of Insight Seminars, which was a sort of personal growth, self development thing that I got involved in in 78. And you know, I loved that. I loved that training. And a large part of that training was about commitments. So I learned about commitments there and how powerful that was. And it was a transformative experience for me. And then I actually became a trainer for Insight Seminars working with Russell. And we were designing some sort of personal productivity workshops and we were being brought into the corporate world. Back in the 70s, late 70s, early 80s, a lot of the corporate world was starting to be interested in sort of what the personal growth had to offer. Actualizations, lifespring, insight, things like that were suddenly being brought into the corporate world. It was a little dangerous because, you know, you had to be a little vulnerable. You know, most corporate cultures were not that open for all of that kind of stuff. But it was an interesting experiment and foray into that world. And so I worked with Russell, we created the Insight Consulting Group and we started to do. So these, you know, what I had learned both from Dean and my own work, we started to do versions of this stuff in the corporate world. And that's where, you know, Russell was my partner for many years. That's where a lot of that started.

A

I'd love to dig into next action decisions. This is a really powerful concept and a really important distinction that many people do not have a whole lot of clarity on. So could you talk about next action decisions and how they perhaps differ from what a lot of people put on their to do lists?

B

When we talk about next actions, that means as granular as where physically, visibly are you going to go? To do what? To move the needle on this thing, on this commitment. Is that at your computer to write an email? Is that at your computer to surf a website? Is that at the hardware store to buy nails? Is that at your life partner to have a conversation? What is the very, very next thing you need to do to get clarity on mom's birthday? Or increasing your bank credit line or hiring a vice president or getting a life? That was the very next action. If you had nothing else to do but that, what would you go do? People avoid that decision like the plague. They do. Could have fooled me, but, you know, when we coach people, it takes one to six hours for them to identify all the stuff they have attention on, and then the rest of a day or two to go through each one of those and say, okay, what's the next thing you need to do about cat food, about vice president, about get a life, about should you get divorced or not? You know, what's the next thing? And it takes. People actually have to think to make those decisions. It's not hard. There are actually two aspects of getting clarity that I have to tie together is what's the very next action? And if one action won't complete whatever this commitment is, what's the project? If you look at most people's to do lists, you think you see things like mom, you know, in bank. Yeah, well, sure. You had a mom, so why is it on the list? Well, her birthday's coming. What are you going to do about her birthday? I don't know. Just coming. So taking something like that and then, well, you captured the idea great. So you. That's step one. But then step two is you need to then clarify what exactly you're going to do about that and, you know, what's the final outcome. So give mom a birthday party, goes on my project list and call my sister, See, you know what she thinks we Ought to do for miles birthday as the next action. As simple as that sounds. Outcome and action are the zeros and ones of productivity. But most people have not actually identified the outcomes and the specific actions you know of the things that have their attention. Could have fooled me, but there are very few people that are exceptions to that and most people have tons of stuff. Anybody listening to this right now? Just pull out your to do list and I'll show you what I'm talking about. Most of the things on your to do list are not the very next action you need to take about those. And probably the things on your to do list are not the complete outcome that you're trying to achieve by whatever action you need to take. So it's funny that zeros ones of productivity people are avoiding. I mean getting things done, you need to know what done means. You get to mark it off as complete when what's true and what does doing look like and where does it happen? Oh, that's a phone call or that's a thing to buy at the store or that's a conversation I need to have with somebody. I know it's kind of a duh, Jim, but it's something that most people need to train a cognitive muscle to answer those questions about stuff because it requires thinking. Thinking's hard.

A

It also requires a sort of a reframe as to what an effective to do list or next action list looks like. Even the label itself. Right? Should I be using the term to refer to mom, bank, etc. As a to do list? What does that actually mean when applied to bank in all caps?

B

In our case it would just be your capture list. You've captured those.

A

Good, great.

B

Then you need to throw those in your entry and then go through this decision making process. Is it actionable? Yes or no? If no, it's either reference or trash or incubate. If yes, then it is. Okay, so what's the next action? And if one action won't complete it, what's the project? So as simple as those questions are, that's how you get your invest. Get empty. Not by finishing everything. Yeah, anything you can do at two minutes you should finish right? Then that's the two minute rule. But otherwise you just need to clarify it and then you know, step three would be organize the reminders in some appropriate place.

A

I would love to talk about and please feel free to rephrase this or take a different angle if better. But sort of top down versus bottom up systems. And specifically I looked at a number of listener questions that were posed and one was related to after doing a minesweep and sorting the results into do it, discard it, delegate it, defer it. Some people still having an extremely large list after discarding aggressively and not being sure of how to then eliminate more if there are tasks or items that they can simply discard things that are not worth doing. How you help people to if they say I don't know what is important or I'm not sure how to prioritize things. If you have any advice or thoughts for those people?

B

Sure, I got a bunch. One way to think about it is from a hierarchical standpoint of priorities. You know, one of the things that, that I uncovered over all these years is the six horizons that we actually have commitments and they're at different levels with different content. The top horizon would be what's your life purpose? And you can do this iterate on your company or any enterprise you want. But let's do, let's talk about so why are you on the planet? What are you here to do? You know, what's your purpose? Obviously that's going to set your priorities right. You don't want to be off purpose. So that's the top level. Of course, knowing your purpose is not going to help you decide which email to write first a little bit, you know, but then the next level operationally, and I say down not as less, it just means it's more operational, would be what's the vision of your purpose being fulfilled successfully five years from now? Tim, where do you want to be? What does your lifestyle look like? You know, I'm sure living in New York as opposed to Silicon Valley was some part of a vision that you had as opposed to day to day. So you had some sort of a picture about, hey, if I really want to do kind of what I want to do, here's what it would look, sound and feel like. So that's the vision level that people have in companies that'd be 3, 4, 5 year long term plan or vision in terms of where does the company want to be now? Knowing the vision that you have in terms of life and career and lifestyle, is that going to help you decide which email is most important? And a little bit more then there's a next level operationally down from that, which is goals and objectives. If you wanted that vision to actually come true, what do you need to accomplish over the next three to 24 months? That'd be usually what people talk about in terms of annual plans and so forth. Yeah, well, I need to make sure My kids get into college. I need to make sure that we set up this new division. I need to, you know, I want to publish the book, you know, whatever those things are. Those would be goals that emerge as a way to get to your vision. So purpose would be horizon 5, horizon 4 would be vision. Verizon 3 would be goals and objectives. Horizon 2, importantly, is all the things that you need to maintain that are important to you to maintain so that you get there, that you're balanced and you're moving in the right direction. So personally, this would be, how's your health, how's your finances, how's your relationships, how's your spiritual life, how's your dog? How's your fun factor? You know, whatever all those things are that you say, I need to maintain these. You don't finish that. You just need to make sure that they're up to spar in terms of getting you where you want to go. So that's Horizon, too. In your organizations, that would be your job description. What are the things you're accountable to do? Well, asset management, staff development, you know, customer service, project design, you know, yada, yada. So that'd be looking at those levels there and saying, okay, well, once you defined your job description or once you looked at your aspects of your life, that's going to help you decide a little bit more about what the most important email you need to send. Then you get more operational say, well, what are all the things you need to finish about any of those things? Of both projects? And most people have between 30 and 100. Get tires on your car, handle the next vacation, hire the person, get a dog, research whether I can give my kids karate lessons or not, yada, yada. So then that's the project level. That's Horizon one. And then the ground level, we use ground. And then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Like elevators in Europe, as opposed to the U.S. since we're still international now, so we had to change. In the first book, I called 5,000, 50,000ft and 40,000 and so forth, but they don't use feet in Europe anyway. So then the ground level is what all the things you need to do, that's the actions you need to take. And Most people have 100 to 200 of those emails to send, stuff to buy at the store, stuff to talk to people about, et cetera. So when you say, how do I set my priorities? And say, well, which one of those horizons is not clear enough to you, needs more work, or which one do you need to refer back to to then decide what's most important on your list. And that's a big conversation as you can imagine, for most people to try to figure that out. I tried to get it as simple as I could, but I can't lie to anybody. That's the truth. Those are all things that are either conscious or not. They're still at effect for everybody. And so being aware of what your content is on all those different levels is going to help a lot, help a ton. On a more simple, practical level, I just set priorities by say what's most got my attention, what's most got my attention right now. What most do I need to handle so I get to clear space again. At this point in my life I got that kind of simplified.

A

Let's talk about location for a second because this is something that I'm certainly very curious about and think about a fair amount. I'm in New York right now for writing because I have a very set writing routine here in New York and I'm also pretty isolated in rural New York. The move that I made from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas was certainly dependent on my answers and descriptions to those higher levels that you described. And I'm sure this is written somewhere, but didn't want to try to research everything before the conversation. Amsterdam. Why did you move to Amsterdam? What were the drivers or the reasons behind that?

B

Well, there's kind of a perfect storm of a lot of factors. One is we wanted to get out of the US we were a bit tired of US centricity in terms of thinking. And we thought about, we love Kyoto, we love other places, but Europe seemed to be the place to go. My wife and I don't have kids and so we're a little freer to do that. My work was becoming much more virtual and actually much more global. And Amsterdam is much more the center of my world these days than Santa Barbara was. And we'd been to the city a couple of times and fell in love with it. We loved the city. It's an eye candy city and it's just gorgeous and it's lovely. And we kind of naively thought, well, let's spend three months there and six months in Milan and six months in whatever. Because now that my work was becoming so virtual, we had the ability to be able to do that. Of course, once we found out what it takes to be legal and get legal residency in any place, you know, there's a lot of hoops to jump through and it turns out that and we just kind of threw a dart and Said Amsterdam. It was warmer and not quite as dark as Copenhagen or Stockholm. Little more foreign, you know, and adventurous than London. And everybody here speaks English, so, you know, that was easy. And you know, once we were here, the quality of life here is just so wonderful. And we just love with the city even more so and still are five years later. So we intend to stay. As a matter of fact, we want to immigrate. So we love the Dutch, we love the country now, Golly, it's just an oasis of global thinking and openness or whatever that's kind of rare in the world these days.

A

It is definitely one of my favorite cities in the world. You mentioned a lot of wonderful places, but Amsterdam really does check so many boxes. It's a marvel of a city. It really is.

B

It really is. And it works. You know, we haven't had a car in five years. It just works. Catherine and I both have two bikes a piece. We walk gorgeous parks. It's a very dog friendly city. Our favorite restaurants allow dogs. You know, that's worth moving to Amsterdam. It's just that.

A

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B

Not really that much. Come on. Santa Barbara is a gorgeous place.

A

It's not exactly right, you know.

B

Come on. Actually, we lived in Ojai.

A

The hard streets of Ojai.

B

Yeah.

A

Yeah.

B

And you know, and for 22 years. And we loved that. We thought we were going to be there permanently. It was a beautiful place, wonderful place, great people, you know, great style of a sort of a country place to live. So it kind of surprised us that all of a sudden we just felt like we were done. I didn't call it Dharma, karma, destiny, whatever it is. It's like somehow just, you know, there are times in our lives when just things just are over and so we haven't missed anything at all. It didn't really change. Quality of life here is just so nice. I mean, that's nice to do it. There are no straight people and no stray dogs here as opposed to California.

A

Was it a lingering desire over time maybe we should move? Or was there an event or a day or a conversation where you just said, this is it, we're done.

B

It kind of was a four or five year move from sort of someday maybe to. Yeah, let's kind of start to see if we can get real about it. We had built our own little sort of jewel box office building in Ojai. So we needed to kind of unhook from that. A house that we bought in 1992 was so gorgeous. It was like Gossip Laker out on the east end of Ohio. It's just beautiful little property and it had old oaks in it and it was so for it. But it was kind of a Tear down house to begin with. We just couldn't afford to tear it down and rebuild. And we discovered the termites don't move that fast. So basically we just built a huge garden around it. We had one acre and we just built outdoor fireplace. We had this stunning garden. We had a fabulous friend who's a landscape gardener. And there was just, you know, so we just had a great time. We just lived outdoors. So that was wonderful. Then the termite started to win. And we said, you know, with Catherine and my style and her inclinations, we would have rebuilt it with glass and concrete and iron in that environment. It would have been just gorgeous there. But we didn't have the money to do that. So we said, you know, let's just put a price on the house. And the market was crap at the time. We said, probably nobody is going to show up, but come on, let's just put a price on it. What the heck, It'd be an emotional buy anyway. And we figured maybe one or two years from now, who knows? And two weeks later, somebody walked on and said, I want it right for that price. I went, well, this might be a sign. So we got out from under the house and we said, but we weren't quite ready to move to Europe at the time. There was still more work I needed to do sort of there and locally with the business. So we said, well, let's kind of get trainer wheels. So we then got a townhouse in Santa Barbara that we were at for three years. We sort of got trainer wheels for a year. We got Dutch bikes, and we lived in a townhouse close to town. We could walk into town and so forth. So, you know, that was kind of our transition move there. And then a certain point we said, okay, let's throw the dart. Time to go. That's what we did.

A

Off you went. It seems to be landing on the radar of more and more of my American friends. Is a possible home base. It really is a wonderful choice.

B

It's a terrible place. You never want to come.

A

It's full. It's full. They hate dogs, stray people everywhere. There are certain decisions, at least in my life, I would imagine in your life that are real chapter changes and end up informing many, many things that come thereafter. At Love to ask you what is one of the most worthwhile or the best personal investments you've ever made? And I'll explain what I mean. That could be money, time, energy, anything else. So for instance, if I asked Tony Robbins that he would point to a Jim Rohn seminar that he paid for at the time when he was working as a janitor. If I talked to Amelia Boone, who's a four time world champion in obstacle course racing, she'd say the first time she cobbled together the fees to pay for one of the larger competitions, which then ended up showcasing how well built and designed she was for this sport. Does anything come to mind as a particularly important investment that you made that had long standing ripple effects?

B

Yeah, I mean, there are probably a dozen, but I'll tell you one that comes to mind. I don't think I've shared this with many people, but as you mentioned it, what pops to mind is I had a guy that became a very good friend of mine and a mentor of mine many, many years ago that I met in Berkeley. And he was the guy who offered to teach me karate. And he was quite an interesting guy. He was a Olympic sensor, he was a formula racer, he had a black belt in karate. He was just a fascinating guy. He was also psychic. He was studied by the University of Pennsylvania just because of experiences that he had and things that he saw and things that he knew back in the early days when universities were starting to study this psychic phenomenon and where it came from. And, you know, Michael became a very close friend of mine. And as he started to teach me karate, I found my life started to change. And I suddenly, I kind of been doing all the things that were cool to do and that sort of were expected of me to do. You know, I'd been a straight A student, I'd gone to a very hip and cool college. Obviously I got into graduate school, you know, had good grades, married a beautiful woman, got a house in Berkeley. I mean, this was, you know, as cool a life as one could have. And then one day I woke up and realized this wasn't the life I wanted. That there was an adventure that I was holding myself back from, that there were things I wanted to explore and expand and so forth that I wanted to do. And that sort of changed me. You know, one day I just decided to not go back to school. And I have no idea what kind of records the University of California Berkeley has of me, but I just didn't go back. I said, not for me. So left my marriage, left my life, left all of that, and then embarked on a inner and outer adventure that was quite adventurous. I ran into, you know, you read a lot of stuff about me out there. I ran into a lot of false starts and a lot of things that didn't work very well. But that was all in my exploration, it wasn't really escape. I was just looking, exploring an awful lot of things, and then found more and more stable ways to. And more inner ways to much more consciousness and stability than kind of random and ad hoc. So I kind of grew up from that over the years and sort of my outer life became a lot quieter, even though my inner life was still quite rich. So I suppose that that was a hallmark event was for me to make that decision to sort of leave what people would probably consider, which, you know, one of the best and coolest kind of lifestyles you would have, and, you know, go on my own trip.

A

Was that a difficult decision? I mean, and I hate to sound like a broken record, but was this a kind of one day I'm done, or was it something that developed over time? I mean, that's. A lot of people don't leave situations that they feel they should.

B

I don't remember exactly whether it was days or weeks or months, but it certainly wasn't. I don't think it was months. I think it was probably weeks that I had that thought. But, you know, I'm Mr. Approval Suck on. You know, I like people's approval. I don't like being the rebel and being out. You know, I like people to like me. And so that was tough to give all that up.

A

What was the conversation like with your wife, with your partner at the time?

B

Not fun?

A

Yeah. I mean, was it just short, like I'm leaving today, or was it more of a lead time? More lead time than that?

B

Yeah, yeah, no, it was short. You know, I just. I didn't know. I didn't understand myself well enough, you know, not comfortable enough in my own skin to know how to engage with that. So it was kind of a, you know, a radical, you know, God bless her. She endured it as well as anybody could. I suppose. I was not a class act in terms of how I did that.

A

In other words, the mentor that you mentioned earlier, my listeners will kill me if I don't return to at least one description of this mentor. The psychic abilities or extrasensory abilities that led to him being studied by, as you mentioned, the University of Pennsylvania. Were you able to observe any of this or to.

B

Oh, yeah.

A

What types of things did you observe?

B

He would see certain things. In other words, he would have a vision of something and say, by the way, I know this person did X, Y and Z. And they. Indeed, that's exactly what they did or what they were going to do. So he just had an extra sensory perception ability for that and in his own story, he's now dead. But if he told the story, he was quite depressed as a kid. He just had. Was so sensitive and didn't understand where people were doing what they were doing. And so he did all kinds of things to try to compensate for that. You know, all these sports things that he was extremely good at. And then one day he went to sleep and was taken out of his body and, you know, was shown other levels of why he'd been going through all the experiences he had and who was going to be coming toward him. He would have this job, essentially the karma of being able to share what he had learned with them because he owed them. So turned out I was one of those people, at least according to him. Wow, that's, you know, that's kind of in woo woo land. But there may be some people listening to this that know what I'm talking about.

A

Yeah, no, I appreciate you sharing the story. This is something we could talk a lot much longer about. But I will try to sort of keep the thread of the last question in the sense that many of the listeners who asked questions they would hope I would explore with you asked something along the lines of what Nick Dobos act, which is how does he deal with things like mental fatigue, motivation and mood's role in productivity. I'm going to approach that from a sideways angle and kind of relate it to my last question, which is could you describe a particularly difficult period that you face? Because it's very. You've done a lot of incredible things. You have GTD being taught, as I understand it, in 60 plus countries, probably at this point, massive success on so many objective levels. I really like to humanize guests by asking about tougher times and how they got through it or found their way through it. Would you be open to describing any particular tough or dark period that you went through and how you made your way through it?

B

Back in my early Berkeley days, I had that really interesting time where I was having my own kind of sort of psychic or spiritual experiences and didn't understand where they came from and didn't understand why other people didn't understand them. And so though I'd been sort of Mr. Nice Guy, suddenly I found myself outcast. And that was quite painful. So I wound up involved in sort of aberrated behavior out of my frustration of all that. And they put me away in a middle institution, which I thought was kind of interesting because at the time I could see as much about what was going on with the people who put me there as anybody in there. And I thought, well, that's kind of fascinating just to be able to see all that. And I'd read much of the literature about is crazy really crazy, or are you tapped into something very different? So I knew I was tapped into something very different, but couldn't get anybody to understand that. So. And then it became quite painful. And at a certain point I said, well, you know, this is too painful. I think I'm going to decide to cooperate instead of rail against these people that can't see what's going on. So, as I say, I never really got cured. You're just looking at a high state of cooperation, and it wasn't very long.

A

How long were you in?

B

Oh, a couple of weeks.

A

A couple of weeks. What were the behaviors that led you to end up there, and how did you end up there? I mean, was it family, friends?

B

You know, I got really pissed off at my mentor friend, and he knew that I was kind of had gone off the rails, and I threw a brick through his window, and so he called the cops, and the cops put me away. Anyway, it's a much longer, more intricate story than that, but that's the simple version.

A

So you decided to cooperate, and you get released. What did your life look like for the weeks following that experience?

B

Well, I got a job and sort of straightened myself up and started to cooperate with the world. That's when I discovered a whole lot of. I wasn't sure what had happened to me, but I was walking down the street in Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and walked into a store called Shambhala Bookstore. And I walked in. I don't know why, just intuitively. And I looked around and I looked down on the shelf and I saw this book that said, the Gateways to Spiritual Science by Rudolf Steiner. I said, oh, I wonder if there are people who actually know what all this stuff is really about. And so I spent the next, oh, three or four or five months exploring huge amounts of the esoteric literature of the occult and the white brotherhood and all kinds of stuff that I didn't know anything about. But there's a whole body of literature, the theosophist to begin with in the late 1800s, early 1900s in Europe that were sort of studying the science of spirituality, essentially, and dug into that like crazy. I said, oh, my God, you know, I'm not so crazy. You know, I tapped into something that there was something to tap into. So then started to go on an exploration to see if I could find somebody who knew a lot more about that than I did. And that's when I discovered a guy named John Roger, who then wound up being my spiritual coach. So I hung out with him and said, well, I'll see how much I can learn from him. And that was 45 years. And he was just further down the path than I was, but had a lot of that information. So that's when my life, sort of my outer, outer life got much simpler and much more calm and traditional. My inner life, you know, got quite rich.

A

So what does the word spiritual mean to you in this context?

B

Yeah, stuff you can't see, you know, that's affecting us. And, you know, we all exist on many different levels. Like you can't see your mental, you can't see your thoughts, you can't see your emotions. I mean, yeah, there are people who can sort of see your energy field around that, but there's a lot of stuff you can't see that's affecting us. Then I use spiritual with a small S we'll just call Yay. There's a lot of worlds out there, and it's possible to experience those worlds if you meditate, if you practice certain practices, you can quiet yourself enough to be able to tap into a lot of the other levels that we actually exist on. So this level is just a school room, but we are much bigger than all of that. So you can call it whatever you want. Your soul, your spirit, your intuition, your gut, whatever you want to call it is still a small voice essentially inside of all of us that's tapped into all of this, and it is part of it. So that's a huge universe.

A

What does your meditation practice look like these days? Or for people who want to develop a meditation practice but don't have one, what do you recommend? Maybe those are two different things.

B

Well, it's a good. You know, I don't know that I have a recommendation other than follow your intuition. I think there's perfect timing for all that for everybody. Everybody's on a spiritual path, whether they know it or not. Everybody's doing what they're doing as a way to fulfill, you know, something that they're trying to complete here on the planet. And it's all around. It's in everything. So whatever is going to allow you to be quieter and listen to. As I say, the universe is always on. So meditation is not like stopping the universe or stopping anything. It's just quieting this sort of material, loud world out here so you can pay attention to the more subtle voices.

A

What have you taken from that? If Anything from that initial experience that landed you in hospital, as you said, you weren't cured, but you became more cooperative as a strategy that has informed what you've done later or even what you do today. I mean, were there particular insights or realizations that have translated?

B

Not really. More just the strength get through all that and to come out the other side and make life work in the way that it works for me. So I don't know that there was any other particular aha. That happened other than, well, I think I will change my attitude and. And shift my approach so that it's much more effective. That helped. I mean, having gone through that, there's not a whole lot that scares me out here.

A

That makes a lot of sense.

B

Yeah, yeah.

A

That's particularly true, I find, with people who have been taken to task in the sense of dealing with all that is in here in addition to all that is out there, if that makes any sense.

B

Oh, sure.

A

Do you ever feel overwhelmed or unfocused, and if so, what do you do when you feel either of those things? And I'd always, okay, okay, kidding. I just follow up. Don't want to make assumptions regularly. Yeah, okay.

B

Come on. It's not always, you know, every vision you have, every creative thought you have, everything you decide to do is going to throw you out of your comfort zone. You're going to have to undo what you were doing before and reconfigure everything for the new game. It's not like I'm totally feeling overwhelmed. I just don't let myself go very long before I fix it. But as soon as I. This huge project I'd had, the GTD summit, was quite, you know, there were many times that I felt somewhat overwhelmed because I wasn't quite sure what was going to happen over a lot of unknowns and so forth that I didn't feel like I could control that well. And so, you know, I eat my own dog food, as we say. So I sit down, write it down, make next action decisions, say, what can I handle? What can I not handle? It's like surfers, you're always going to fall off. You just want an ankle tether on so you can get back on real quick and allows you to surf bigger waves.

A

Are there any new beliefs or behaviors or habits that have materially improved your life in the last handful of years? Any that come to mind?

B

Nothing comes to mind except just our wonderful dog that we had to put down a few months ago that we're gonna need to get another, you know, walking your Dog and just being quiet, you know. Very cool. I'm actually, I'm reading a brand new book right now. I was getting shiatsu at a spa and my shiatsu master who was working on me said, by the way, because I went to sleep, by the way, you have a little bit of sleep apnea. He said, you must read this book. So I am halfway through this book called the Oxygen Advantage. The Oxygen Advantage had no idea how critical it is to do nasal breathing instead of mouth breathing. It is amazing stuff. Anyway, there's a new habit the oxygen sleeping with. Actually he suggests going and getting adhesive cloth, a 4 inch piece and putting it over your mouth when you go to sleep so that you train yourself and you know, you build the practice of actually sleeping with nasal breathing. Fascinating stuff.

A

The Oxygen Advantage.

B

Yep, you mentioned it. That's a brand new, brand new habit I just started 48 hours ago.

A

Are there any particular books outside of your own that you have gifted or recommended often to other people?

B

Oh, yes. One of the latest ones called the Antidote. Oliver Berkman. Fabulous book. Totally fun. It's happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking. Oh, you'd love it. I love it, Tim. It's great. The content is. Is a bit more serious than what the title sounds like. He's really into poo pooing. The people that just say, oh, don't have any negative thoughts, just go think positive thoughts, just. And not, not accepting reality. And so he goes into quite a bit of exploration of stoicism. I couldn't agree more with actually his hypothesis and his thinking. Anyway, it's a fun book. My wife just broke out laughing regularly. She was reading the book. It's very well written. So that's one of my latest recommendations for sure.

A

The Antidote.

B

Yep.

A

All right, note taken. Do you have a consistent, say, morning routine of the first hour or two of your day when you are outside of a gigantic event like the summit that you just completed, but when you're in the sort of in between spaces around those larger commitments?

B

Tim, what I do regularly is the night before I look at my calendar for the next day or two and see what my hard landscape is. Meaning, what are the things I gotta do? No choice in terms of commitments that I've got. So I know how long to sleep. I'm a huge fan of sleep. I used to think I was just lazy, but now, given the new cognitive science, I'm just smart. We all need eight to nine hours of sleep a night, unless you're really an Exceptional person. So I love sleep. So that's my first thing is the night before just to see how long I can sleep. And when I get up in the morning, first thing I do is a glass of lemon water. Cleanse the system. French press coffee. Sooner or later, protein drink. We have a dog, the dog goes out. I read the New York Times on my iPad, European version. And I'll probably play a game or two of works with friends because I like to get my brain sort of going by just doing scramble with people around the world and then whatever I feel like doing next.

A

Take a long bicycle ride by those canals in Amsterdam.

B

Usually I go out. Catherine and I usually go for. We have a beautiful park about an eight minute walk from where we are that we love to just walk around, you know, just. It's a nice way to clear your head. Even when we don't have a dog we get outside and it's such a beautiful place here that helps too.

A

What do you wish? GTD Adherence or people who were say have read your books once through each would pay more attention to. Are there any particular aspects or concepts or details that you wish more people would pay attention to?

B

Well, I'm not into having anybody change any of the behavior they don't want to change. My job was just to give people information whether they want it or not. I'm not going to beat anybody up about it or I'm not even going to proselytize about it very much much. I say look, you want a clear hit, here's how you get it and you can do it or not, I don't care. Well, I care. Otherwise I wouldn't share this information because it's potentially transformational and life changing for people when they actually get this methodology and capture, clarify, organize, reflect and engage with their stuff. But people can fall off on any one of those. A lot of people just don't write everything down so they don't trust their head or their lists. A lot of people don't decide next actions and outcomes for stuff. And so their lister when they look at them creating as much stress as they relieve. And a lot of people don't have a trusted organization system that they trust that their head can absolutely let it go knowing that they're going to see the right thing at the right time, be reminded of the right stuff. Awful lot of people don't step back and reflect. You know what we call the weekly review or any kind of a regular reflection review where you step back and take an hour or two at least once A week and bring up the rear guard and get current, you know, get clean again. Because life's like that. And those are all the steps that people don't take. Say, hey guys, read the book again. I'm going to read the book 20 times. He said it was a different book every time he read it because you're ready for a different cut on the stuff when you read it again. It sounds like it's pretty simple, but it's quite a habit for most people to change.

A

The weekly review. I'd love to spend just a few minutes on that. Could you describe what the weekly review might look like for someone? What are the stats of the weekly review?

B

First of all, let's step back a second and say if you haven't captured, clarified, organized, and reviewed most of the stuff of your life, you don't have the whole thing to review yet. The ideal weekly review means that your system is relatively current, at least it's only a week old in terms of maybe stuff that you haven't brought current yet. Then again, even if you haven't set up a system just to take an hour a week, step back and look at your life, you know, and say, hey, what's happened in the last week? What do I need to do about that? You know, just any kind of a thinking, you know, in a more reflective process is going to help anybody, you know, at any time. And not just go zone out, drink, or even just meditate, but to really focus on your. The work of your life, you know, it's a different focus where you're thinking about, well, what do I commit to? What's new? What do I need to be aware of? If nothing else, just look at your calendar for coming up, the next two or three weeks. Everybody's going to go, oh, God, that reminds me. Yeah, no kidding, you know, so any of that kind of stuff. And again, the more that you have externalized your life and your work, the more valuable this review is going to be.

A

When do you tend to do your weekly reviews? You don't have a standard time?

B

No, I don't really. Just when sort of ambient anxiety sort of creeps up on me. But it's usually about every seven days. You know, years ago, I actually read somewhere, Tim, that the. Because we've always said, we always knew, just practically anyway, that a weekly review was really kind of critical to keep your system current, alive and well. And then it grows. If you don't do that, it gets out of date. You'll fall off the wagon pretty fast and pretty Coherently. But then I read somewhere that your brain actually, if you try to recall something that happened within the last seven days, you could pretty well recreate the context in your mind after about seven or eight days. It's kind of like there's a part of your brain that does a control, alt, delete. And it's like just you're trying to recreate something that happened two weeks ago. It's like can't find it, what, where. So there seems to be some sort of a natural cycle of a seven day cycle in that kind of thinking. So it's probably one of the most challenging habits to set up, but certainly the most rewarding if you do.

A

Do you have any rules or commandments for yourself for types of things that you categorically say no to? The reason I ask this is that I, at least in my own life, really tried and found quite valuable figuring out, trying to figure out the single decisions that remove many, many, many decisions. So, for instance, no to all speaking engagements outside of Austin for X period of time, whether it's six months or 12 months, whatever it might be. Are there certain categories of things that you simply say no to as a default?

B

Not really. Except unpleasant people. That's about it. I suppose this will change. But still, at 73, I still take advantage. I think there's probably two or three or maybe five interviews or podcasts that we've refused because the sleaze factor was just too high. But I've done 2000 since Getting Things Done. It was published in 2001. I say, hey, anybody is interested in this, sure, I'm here to share it with the world. Here we go. And I don't have really that deep a pocket. I haven't been that entrepreneurial or aspirational to go build this huge fortune. So I still take advantage of work that shows up. And if it seems interesting, it seems like something that people are interested in me doing, I go, yeah, you know, my price has gone up, so I'm not doing as much. But that's okay.

A

Let's return to the unpleasant people for a second. What if there is feeling gives you an indicator that someone is a person you want to avoid? Or is it more looking at them online, doing a little due diligence and deciding this is not the tone of person I want to interact with? How do you vet and filter those people out?

B

You know, I don't have to do much at that these days, Tim. I mean, I guess given where I am in my life, people usually don't contact me Unless they're nice, you know, or at least fun to, you know. And I have a little bit of the. What's his name? I never met a guy that I didn't like, Will Rogers. I have a little bit of that in me and I think most people are good people to begin with and most people just don't come to me with negative stuff. I guess maybe in the old days a little bit. But I kind of just made a joke. It's kind of like I don't like unpleasant people, but I have a blessed life and I have nothing but pretty much pleasant people around me.

A

I'd like to read a short quote and ask you to elaborate if you're able because it seems to allude to something very important. This is from a Fast Company piece some time ago. This is a quote of yours that they may have gone wrong so you can correct it if need be. People assume that I am a hardworking, left brain, results oriented, ocd, anal retentive kind of guy. He says with a laugh. In fact, the reason that I was attracted to this work was that it allowed me to be more creative, more spontaneous, freer. I'm a freedom guy. Could you explain what you mean by that?

B

Self explanatory. I'm not sure what else I can say.

A

Well, in the sense that why does. At face value someone might say that there are a lot of rules and this is what some people ask. Well, it seems like GTD is very rigid and has a lot of process. I want to be able to use my intuition and creativity. So it may be self explanatory, but I'd like you to explain it anyway because it doesn't seem totally obvious to everybody.

B

I think it was full of bear that said be steady and well ordered in your life so you can be crazy and spontaneous in your work. That was 120 years ago that he said that. It's funny, people say I don't want to be so structured. I said, what do you think about the middle line on the road out there? It's a constraint, It's a limitation. No center line is great. Why? It lets me think about other things while I'm driving as opposed to someone who's going to hit me. So just enough structure to give you the freedom. So I don't. I don't structure anything more than I need. But you do need a certain rigorous structure. Well, throw away your calendar if you don't like lists.

A

Okay?

B

Come on. It's just the price of missing the appointment is so emotionally pretty high. That's why people, you know, maintain that structure pretty well. You just need as much structure as you need. Ask anybody out there. Was it Picasso that said inspirations for amateurs?

A

It could have been. It sounds like Picasso.

B

Sounds like him. Yeah, I think. I think that was him. It's like as opposed. No butt in chair, paintbrush, paint to canvas. Stare at it. Discipline yourself. All right, so I think there is a degree to which. Well, I don't know that. It just seems so self evident. Most of the people that I know, some of the most creative people I know, one of the most creative guys I know, and he just spoke at the summit, by the way, he's in a video. So I know since he was public about it, I can make it public. One of the most successful entrepreneurs. He just won actually the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year for 2019. Brad Keywell and breads. He's on five boards. He teaches entrepreneurialism, the University of Chicago. He built Groupon and sold it. That's why he has his own jet. His new startup now it's like, now it's four years old, but even two years in had a $2 billion market cap. This guy is so smart, so creative. You know, he collects modern art. He runs Chicago Ideas Week. He started it. So Disk is probably one of the most creative people you would ever meet, certainly one of the most productive people you'd ever meet. And I spent a year with him. People say, well, why would he do gtd? I said, well, his presenting issue with David, I'm just up to here. He was 27. He said, I'm just getting my traction, but I wake up with million dollar ideas, but I don't know what to do with them or where to put them or who to get them to. So he just needed more room. What GTD does is it provides space. Invariably if you capture, clarify, organize and reflect on all the things that have your attention, it will give you more room. What you do with that room is unique to you. Some people use it to be more creative. Some people use it to be more strategic, Some people to be more innovative, some people to be just present with whatever they're doing. One of my biggest champions, a guy named Howard Stern, can't find a more creative guy than Howard. He'd tell you to change his life. Gave them the time to learn to paint, which you always wanted to do, as well as keep serious radio going. Are people like Will Smith or Robert Downey Jr. The big champions of my stuff? I can't say their names because they were public about that. So if people think that creative people can't use gtd, there are a few people you ought to meet.

A

A nitty gritty question about the weekly review, as a few people ask this, and I'm curious as well, is the weekly review inherently a solo process or do you ever involve your staff in weekly reviews?

B

I know people that would do weekly reviews with their families. Very cool to do. I think you need to do your own private one at any case, no matter what. But if you have groups of people to say, what are the things that we are all interested in as a group that we can share and update each other with. So absolutely, it's a great time to do that. Probably wouldn't necessarily frame it so much as a weekly review, so much as let's review all the things that have our attention as a team, as a group, as a family, as a couple.

A

Do you manage your email in a task manager or is it its own system? Is it simply the email client that you happen to be using? Could you describe how the tools you use for processing email?

B

Well, I still use IBM Notes, the old Lotus Notes, but we still use that in our company. And I actually had my CTO for 15 years. Eric Mack built an app that sits on top of or within Notes that lets me use email as my task manager. But you'd have to be using Notes to use it. That's publicly available. If you wanted to set up Lotus Notes or IBM Notes and then get eproductivity, stick on it. But that's basically as I look at my screen. For instance, I have Navigator bars on the left hand side and they have my action list. There's one of them says Projects, one of them says Agendas, one of them says Calls, one of them says Computer, one of them says Creative Writing, one of them says Errands, one of them says Home, one of them says Online, one of them says someday maybe, and then waiting for. And so I can actually drag an email into any one of those and it becomes that. Or I can just open that folder and then add anything to that folder that I want. So it's both an email manager as well as a task manager at the same time.

A

Do you use any particular app or program for pulling material like articles or references off of web browsing into a system of any type?

B

No, not really. I use Evernote and I've used the Evernote little function.

A

The Web. Yeah, the Web Clipper.

B

The Web Clipper, but I still don't use it that much. I don't have that much stuff that I want to do about that. You know the problem with things like Evernote, somebody described it this as write only. They spend all their time adding stuff in there and don't even go in and look at what they've got.

A

Yeah, it's a risk with a lot of digital technology.

B

Right. Only.

A

Yeah, addition and not sufficiently. Well, at least subtraction from an intentional perspective.

B

Any of those things will work. You know, all you need are lists, basically, and you just need something to be able to cut and paste reference material in. I've got reference material all over Lotus Notes. I've got reference material all over Evernote, have reference material and just in word files all over. I don't have any particular template or any particular suggestion other than probably not a bad idea to every once in a while, maybe yearly curate all of that stuff. So you don't have a lot of old dead wood in there.

A

You've mentioned quite a few quotes. You seem to have a good memory for quotes of various types in this conversation so far. Are there any quotes that you would consider you try to live your life by or think of often as a mantra slash reminder of sorts. Are there any quotes that come to mind as being particularly important to you?

B

Well, my screensaver just says let go.

A

Let go.

B

Yeah. Control is the master addiction. So it's always a good idea to say how you drop it. Let life just, you know, be what it is.

A

I often ask people if you could have one gigantic billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a message out to billions of people. Or it could be a question, could be a quote, could be a word. Would that be let go or would it possibly be something else for you?

B

You'd have to give me that, the Lord, that opportunity. Let me see what shows up, because I need to let go to be able to see what showed up as opposed to try to preconceive that. I mean your heads for having ideas, not for holding them is not a bad one. Even just a practical GTD esque quote.

A

I was reading piece in the Atlantic which I found some of it very fascinating. And this was before you had applied the new labels to the various vantage points. So this was back when you were using the 30,000 foot view and so on. But you mentioned at one point in this, and again, feel free to fact check.

B

But is this Jim Fallows as a part?

A

I think it is. He met you. He talks about meeting you for dinner after a seminar in Washington. And there's a portion here that says back in the Old days. This is quoting you. I had this naive idea that people would see this cool tool or offering and say, okay, what else? We'd have this great big Trojan horse that would march into state corporate world and let us find people who are interested in how life is really lived. And they'd say, hey, let's go discover X, Y and Z truth, reality that sits behind all this stuff. But of course, that never happened. Do you still have that hope that people will do something with the space that is created? Related to bigger questions?

B

No, it's not really a hope. After all these years. I'm not a proselytizer. I'm really not. I just think I've had the good fortune to uncover something that allows people to create more space. And again, what they do with that space is up to them whether they want to use it to be able to do their spiritual practices. People often say, is this a spiritual thing? I guess everything is. But if you're into practicing spiritual practices, this gives you a lot more space to be able to do that in a quieter way. But again, it's. People will do whatever they do. The people are already spiritual. They just may not be that aware of it. But, you know, I don't have any. I'm not out trying to get people to be something that they're not or to uncover something that they're not. And, you know, I've been doing this for 35 years, you know, so at a certain point you go, you know, people just do what they do. Let me just do the best work I can do. And, you know, just with what's in front of me, pleaded with as much elegance and excellence as I can, and then the next thing is going to show up. You know, that was a big freeway. Aha. Moment I had years ago when I was agonizing about what I should do with my life, and this little still small voice inside of me said, david, you don't worry. You have created so much in this life and probably many others. You don't have to worry about that. Just complete whatever's right in front of you with as much excellence as you can, and the next thing will automatically show up. And I haven't turned back from that. That's constantly been what's happened.

A

Well, David, I appreciate you making space for this conversation. We're many, many time zones apart, and I don't want to consume too much of your finite time, but I very much appreciate you making space for having this conversation.

B

Oh, this was fun. Nice to chat with you, Tim. And Connect again. After all these. All this time.

A

After all this time. It's been a while.

B

Let's not wait so long for the next one.

A

No, I'll let you know when I'm headed to Amsterdam because I do absolutely love that city. And people can find you, of course, on twitter@Gtd GuyettingThingsDone.com Is there anything else that you would like to say or share or mentioned to people as we wrap up?

B

The new edition of the book that came out, you know, two or three years ago is if you haven't got the new edition, it's really worth reading, I think, you know, I've updated a bunch of stuff and, you know, sort of tweaked the languaging a good bit. A lot of people really appreciated that. And read it a second time. If you haven't read it but once, believe me, it'll be a whole different book. And we're coming out with a GTD workbook in September. Penguins doing that. It's kind of the 10 moves to stress Free productivity because, you know, the getting things done can be quite daunting for people. They pick up the book and look at it. Oh my God. Too much to do. So kind of in the. In the genre of the workbook for the seven habits that was written in the workbook for some of the other business guru books. I don't know if. Tim, have you written workbooks for the four hour work?

A

I haven't, but workbooks are really, really helpful. So I think that will really aid a lot of people. And I've certainly found the morning pages workbook and other things like that to be personally very helpful. So I will definitely check out the GTD workbook. And you said that's coming out in September?

B

Yep.

A

Perfect. Any other closing comments or recommendations for people, David, or.

B

No, I'm just saying, you know, you know, if there's one thing most people could probably do more of, it's relax, relax, enjoy life.

A

Very little downside to at least physically relaxing. Let it go. Is it let go or let it go? That's on your screensaver. Let go, let go. Good advice. Everybody listening. I will have links to everything that we've spoken about in the show notes, as per usual at Tim Blog Podcast. So to everybody out there, thank you for listening and David, once again, really appreciate the time. This has been a real pleasure and I have a whole extra set of notes here to follow up on myself and really appreciate it.

B

Thanks, Tim. My pleasure.

A

All right, until next time. Thanks. Hey, guys. This is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off and that is five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1 and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to shirt the coolest things I found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim Blog Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim Blog Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Not to be a salty old dog, but in the early 2000s, back in the day when I was running my own e commerce business business, the tools were atrocious, they tried hard, but man was it bad. You had to cobble all sorts of stuff together. I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and now 10% of all e commerce in the US is on Shopify. Now back to the early 2000s, then nobody even thought of AI. Who could have predicted, even in the last last 24 months the magic that is now possible with AI? Shopify has been ahead of the curve and they are packed with helpful AI tools that will accelerate everything. Write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your product photography. Best of all, Shopify expertly handles everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com Tim One more time. Shopify.com Tim In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. You guys know I love wearables. I'm sure you do as well. And they're great, but they give you data. Typically they do not give you solutions. That's why I absolutely love the Pop Pod. By this episode's sponsor eight sleep. I've been using their stuff for many many years now. It fits over your existing mattress, tracks your heart rate with 99% accuracy plus respiratory rate, HRV and sleep stages. It is wild how much it correlates accurately to the stuff that you wear on you. Then the pods autopilot analyzes your biometrics and automatically adjusts your bed temperature while you sleep. Sleep with independent temperature control for couples. Also important for a domestic peace. Users report falling asleep up to 44% faster. This matches with my experience. I've experimented with all sorts of stuff countless sleep aids and I've yet to come across a better solution that both measures and fixes my sleep within the same system. Summers don't need to mean terrible sleep so go to 8sleep.com that's spelled out e I g h t8sleep.com tim and use code tim for $350 off of the pod 5 with their 30 day trial and free returns you can try it out risk free so check it out. 8sleep.com Tim.