My agenda is to be as much of a resource for you folks as I

can be for the time that we have. It's always the most fun

when I feel most used.

So very happy to run me through the grinder and take

advantage of what I might be able to share with you.

Let me just start out by saying you

all get things done.

I was listening to the radio this morning.

What, your stock price in the last--

I mean, excuse me.

This is about as cool as it gets in terms of getting

things done.

So why are you in here?

Maybe it's the stress of opportunity.

Do you know Wall Street was more stressed out in the '90s

than it was after the recession?

Because they were afraid the competition might be getting

there at 3:00 in the morning instead of 4:00.

So they just stayed.

In a strange way, when you're in crisis you get to relax,

because you don't have to think.

That's really, I think, what GTD, the nerve that it hit, is

what is the, as someone very actually elegantly called it,

knowledge work athletics.

What is the thinking that we need to do?

Now, we all do it.

We all sort of do it intuitively.

What I've done is bring to more conscious awareness what

the thinking process is that facilitates our ability to get

things done.

Quite simply, you need to know what done means and what doing

looks like.

But that is not in the Gmail.

Any of you ever open any one of your emails, and it

suddenly, by opening it and starting to read it, it

suddenly goes ding, ding, ding, ding?

By opening and reading and expecting this email, here is

the outcome you have now committed to about this.

And here is the very next action step you must take to

move toward closure to keep that commitment.

Any of you get emails like that?

It would be tough enough, even if that was all

clear, you got a lot.

But no, each one of those inside of all of that, we all

have to make those decisions.

That's the thinking process that has to go on

to determine meaning.

A lot of what GTD was about was, wait a minute.

What is it that we really need to clarify out there in order

to be able to surf on top of this game instead of feel

buried by it?

So if you're like me--

I'm a fellow student by the way.

Every single thing I'm going to share with you today, I

fall off the wagon regularly and fast. By the way, it's

very easy to fall off the GTD wagon for those of you are

familiar with this.

It's very easy to get back on.

It's very easy to get out of control.

Very easy to get back on as long as you

know how to do that.

So a lot of what I did which is make more conscious the

process of how we get back on in case you get off.

So if you're on, this will just be a reminder about how

you got there.

A lot of people get on, but don't know how they got there.

They go, wow, I'm on.

What happened?

Then they fall off and they go, oh damn.

What happened?

As opposed to understanding here's why I am on.

Here's what I did that created that.

It's actually a duplicatable event once

you figure that out.

So that's kind of what I did was figure that out.

And a lot of this is kind of after the fact.

I'm really a behavioralist. I didn't start with theory and

then try to make that work.

I started with what works toward making things happen

easier, faster, whatever.

And then kind of backed up and said now wait a minute, what's

the principle that lies behind that?

For instance, have any of you in here sort of felt your back

up against the wall and felt yourself sort of confused and

a bit overwhelmed, and you sat down and you made a list and

you felt a little bit better?

Anybody ever do that?

If you'd figured out why that works, you'd never keep

anything in your head the rest of your life.

It's just most people have to feel really bad before they do

things that make them feel a little bit better.

But if you actually figured out why that works, you'd

realize your brain is not for holding commitments.

It doesn't function very well that way.

And that's why writing it down, nothing changed out

here, but something changed about how you're engaged with

that by distributed cognition, as the

scientists now call that.

I had a psychologist go through one of my seminars.

She said, gee, David, you know what this is?

I said, what is it?

She said, distributed cognition.

I went, you mean write it down?

She said well, that's another way to say it.

OK.

Well, we laugh, but you've only seen the tip of the

iceberg in terms of people understanding the value of

getting things out of the psyche to be able to then

negotiate with it in a much more objective, elevated level

than to be in it.

And I think we're still at the beginning of sort of testing

out exploring and researching what those tools are that

facilitate us freeing ourselves up for what the

brain is really designed to do, which is intuitive, your

intuition, your intelligence.

No system can do that.

Now, you engineers are saying, I want to find a better way to

automate GTD.

So fabulous.

I don't care how much of an AI expert you are, how much of a

macro freak in your software you are, you're not going to

write a program that when you run it, it says, call Fred.

You might, but you're going to go no, I'd rather have a beer.

So systems can't tell you anything to do.

They can, but you're not going to be able to trust it to tell

you what to do.

What a system can do is move you from hope to trust in

those choices.

And that's really what GTD was.

That was the promise of what this was all about.

Basically, as Renee--

and thanks, Renee, for the introduction--

Renee said David, what do you want to talk about?

I said, well, here's kind of my topic du jour.

First of all, I'd like to frame GTD as the martial art

it really is.

It's the martial art of work and life, essentially, and the

logic of that.

So I'm going to walk you through the logic about why

this stuff works when you work it.

And then, ultimately, why it solves the two aspects or it

facilitates your ability to enhance the two aspects of

essentially managing yourself.

Control and perspective, by the way, those are the two.

We'll talk about those.

In the matrix, when you overlay those against each

other, you'll see that--

and they need very different things to do.

There are different things to do that get you in control and

different things to do that give you perspective.

They're not the same animal.

Talk about why the models that I sort of synthesized and

pulled together facilitate control and perspective.

And as you're going to see folks, and some of you who

have intersected-- how many of you have intersected with GTD

to some degree?

You've either read the book or been to a seminar or

something like that.

OK.

By the way, if you haven't, that's not a prerequisite.

If you have, this will be a reminder of what you probably

saw, but didn't quite see yet.

I need reminders of this regularly.

Seems to be this onion I can keep

peeling deeper and deeper.

And we'll see more aspects of it.

But I'll share with you two very simple models that we

facilitate.

Now, each one of those, you can drill into it in quite a

bit of sophistication in detail.

So happy to range further into that detail, if we have the

time to do that.

I don't want to spend too much time just sort

of talking at you.

I do want to open it up and dialogue with you.

Because trust me, there are as many different applications

and implications of this material as there are people

sitting in this room.

GTD, a lot of people have called this life changing in

terms of truly how they changed how they just dealt

with getting up in the morning and dealing

with work and life.

And a lot of people just like the tips and tricks.

Usually the younger you are, the more you're interested in

the tips or tricks.

I'm changing my life, fine.

Come on, I'm too busy to be worried about

improving my life.

But as you kind of say, yeah, but now as you start to get up

and start to have kids and want play golf and want to do

some other things, oftentimes, wait a minute.

There's a whole different approach here that can

facilitate my ability to keep a lot more plates spinning at

a lot more sophisticated level without

upping the stress level.

And when that starts to be of importance to you, that's

where you start to see the value of these models.

For instance, I doubt if many of you need to understand

gravity or automobiles any better than you currently do.

You probably make it through the rest of your life real

cool without understanding those gravity or cars any

better than you do.

Unless you're hired as a formula racer.

Then you damn well better understand cars and gravity

better than the average bear.

So the same is true with work.

You don't need to understand the martial art of work if the

heat ain't on.

But if you jump yourself into or throw yourself into places

and opportunities that will challenge you to the edge,

that's when the elegance of the martial art and the moves

and understanding that and seeing how they work in making

more conscious can make a big difference.

And that's what we've seen with these models.

And I'll talk a little bit about the GTD phenomenon.

I'm as much bemused by it as many other people are.

I just said, at some point, it took me 25 years to figure out

what I figured out.

Because I thought everybody had figured

this out before me.

I was trying to catch up with the rest of the world that I

thought had already done this.

Then one day, I looked around and went, nobody

else has done this.

What happened?

So my game was just to sort of write the book, create a

website, throw this out there, put my spin on this, and see

who saluted.

And I was willing to take this as small as it wanted to be or

as big as the world wanted it.

Well, the world keeps saying, gee, this is

cool, we want more.

So now I figure I was going to take the next 25 years to

figure out how to educate the world or at least give them

tools to facilitate the implementation of this.

And I don't consider myself really an expert

at that yet at all.

So you can help us, and you are, by the way.