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E132: Getting Things Done - David Allen

Episode Summary

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. In this episode David Allen teaches us how to clear our minds and optimize our workflow. David takes us through the GTD way of thinking and how this can improve your life significantly and help you to reduce anxiety and stress related to life, work and family. If you’re finding that your world is slightly overwhelmed or you’re making mistakes in your business life then this is the episode you don’t want to miss.

Episode Notes

Getting things done is a personal productivity methodology that redefines how you approach your life and work with 5 clear steps that apply order to chaos.  

After decades of in-the-field research and practice of his productivity methods, David wrote the international best-seller Getting Things Done. Published in over 28 languages, TIME magazine heralded it as “the defining self-help business book of its time.” In 2015, he released a new edition of the book, with new insights, updates, and discoveries about the GTD methodology and its many personal and professional applications.  

Today, David Allen is considered the leading authority in the fields of organizational and personal productivity. The David Allen Company, run by David and his wife Kathryn, oversees the certification academy and quality standards for Global Partners offering Getting Things Done courses and coaching around the world.

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. You don't have to transform yourself, just redirect the way you think. 

2.  Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. 

3.  Your head is just a crappy office. Data shows your mind can only hold 4 things until you have to suboptimize your cognitive process. 

4. GTD is a way of thinking. It allows us to disengage with our world but in an effective way. 

5. The steps to get control of any situation: 1. Identify the issue 2. Decide if you need an actionable plan 3. Specify the next step in the plan. 

6. Completion and Creation. Finish what you put in motion and be accountable for what you put in motion. 

 

BOOKS

Jeff Sutherland - Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time - https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X

Daniel J. Levitin - Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/46114266-successful-aging

 

LINKS

https://gettingthingsdone.com/

https://www.instagram.com/gtdtimes/

https://www.facebook.com/gettingthingsdone

https://twitter.com/GTDtimes

Episode Transcription

Title:   E132: Getting Things Done - David Allen

Duration:   00:33:09

Interviewer:   Steven Pesavento

Interviewee:         David Allen

Narrator (00:00):

It's wonderful that so many of you have stepped up and registered to partner in future multifamily opportunities together. We follow a very strict vetting process when selecting our operating partners, and all of which have a serious track record, at least five years of experience, at least 2,500 doors that they've actually managed and owned and over $250,000 of assets under management. These kinds of guidelines help make sure that we are investing together in some phenomenal deals and you can learn more by registering at theinvestormindset.com/invest. These institutional style investments bring benefits to busy professionals and real estate entrepreneurs looking to reduce their taxes and increase their returns. And you can join us by getting started at theinvestormindset.com/invest. I look forward to seeing you on the next deal. 

This is the investor mindset podcast and I'm Steven Pesavento. For as long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with understanding how we can think better, how we can be better and how we can do better. And each episode, we explore lessons on motivation and mindset for the most successful real estate investors and entrepreneurs in the nation. 

Steven (01:17):

Getting Things done; How do we accomplish more of the things we want to accomplish while living a stress free life? In today's episode, we dive in with the famous David Allen, who is the author of the book, Getting Things Done and is one of the leaders in the space of understanding how to live more productively, how to get more of the things done that we actually want to on our life and our business, and has made an impact on millions and millions of people's lives with his teachings. We're going to get into how to use this strategy the way David thinks and some of his philosophy in this episode. You’re not going to want to miss it.

We all know David because of his bestselling book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity, which has been published in 30 languages and the GTD method has impacted millions and millions of people's lives. David's 35 years of experience as a management consultant and executive coach has earned him the title of personal productivity guru by Fast Company and one of America's top five executive coaches by Forbes magazine. The American management association has raked him as a top 10 business leader. So, you can see David has made a huge impact in the world being named in Forbes, Fast Company, the American management association, you know, David and his company, his partners are dedicated to teaching people how to stay relaxed and productive in a fast paced world. And so, I am super grateful to have him here. David, are you ready to dive into things?

David (02:56):

Oh, why not, Steven? Sure.

Stephen (02:59):

All right. Why don't we start out by taking a look back earlier in your life, what events or influences from your childhood shaped, who you are today?

David (03:07):

Well, I think from early on, I discovered what I love to do was to make people laugh and to do things that improve people's lives and they felt better after being engaged with it and that's happened since I was a little kid, I was an actor as a kid where I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana. I then became a student teacher in college. I then got involved in you know, sort of studying people who had successful lives, I was a history major in college. Then pretty much went on a trap, for myself, to find my own enlightenment and sort of just studying people who had theirs. So, I discovered that, at least for me, academia was not a place to find that and so I dropped out of graduate school and went on a deep and an intense, personal growth journey, trying to figure out who I was.

Steven (03:57):

So going back all the way until the point that you were a kid, you actually had this obsession with studying people, is that kind of what you’re saying?

David (04:05):

Not really studying people, but in assisting people. So, you know,  I discovered that making people laugh was a nice way to improve people's lives. So, you know, as a very young kid, I didn't want to be a policeman or a fireman. I wanted to be either a comedian or a horticulturist cause I loved growing plants and flowers. And I love to, you know, watch people sort of get healed in a way I couldn't have described it that way, but I loved having people laugh around me, you know, people's pain and that pain was painful to me. So anything I could do to help relieve that, help relieve it for me.

Steven (04:45):

It's, it's incredible. When you think about it like that, David, because from what I've known about what you do out in the world, you're relieving pain every single day, when people learn how to think more productively, how to get all of this stuff out of their head, that they've got going and put it into some kind of organized system so that they can actually live and be able to focus on the things that matter most. Not only their work of course, but the things that really matter most in life, like spending time with family and friends, but being in the moment, being able to actually be present

David (05:21):

Yeah, being present. And I couldn't have described that when I was a kid, but certainly now, and looking back in retrospect over the last 30, 35 years, discovering for myself first, how valuable being present was just as a very practical thing, you know? In the martial arts, you know, I trained and got a black belt in karate back in my twenties and then the high levels of training, a lot of it has to do with sort of meditative kind of practices. There may be a spiritual component, but there's certainly a practical component. I mean if four people surprise you, jump you in a dark alley, you do not want 2000 unprocessed emails hanging your head. So, you need to be nice and clear. So the whole idea about being clear was, was attractive and important to me. Discovered techniques for myself so I could remain clear as my life got more professional, more complex turned around.

And then after my, you know, I started my own small little consulting and coaching practice back in the early 1980s. Discovered the techniques that worked for me, worked exactly for my clients the same way. So more control, more focus, more space to think about meaningful things in your head. So to your point, there was a, a kind of a cognitive mindset or a way to think about things that you didn't have to totally transform yourself. You could just redirect yourself to think in a certain way. Cause I also I'm the laziest guy you ever met Steven, so that's why I came up with getting things done as a way to make sure you get to clear spaces quickly and easily as you can. And because it's the most practical way to operate in your life, it's the best way to place from which to cook spaghetti or tuck your kids into at night or write a business plan or whatever it is that you're trying to focus on.

Steven (07:08):

It's amazing because when people hear about learning about time management or productivity, they kind of feel bored about it right off the bat because they're like, I don't need to be more productive, I just need to get my work done. But at the core, what this is really about is it's about how can you be more effective in everything that you're doing? And like when I first learned this system, I was a little bit overwhelmed. I thought, well, there's so many steps to it that it seemed confusing at first, but only when I actually took a moment to reflect and understand how to apply it in my own life, that I realized that it actually allowed me to do most of the things that I wanted. And so at the end of the day, isn't that what people want? Like to be able to cook spaghetti with a clear mind, to be able to, you know, enjoy time with family and to be able to get the work done that needs to get done and only do the work that is most important.

David (08:12):

Well, if you know what you're doing, efficiency is your only improvement opportunity and style. I mean, you know, if I'm trying to walk out of the room, I'm always figuring out, what's the easiest way to get out of the room? I may not take that route, I might want to go boogie around and do you know, style and do some other things, but at least being aware of how can I use the least amount of energy to produce the most amount of result, which is really what productivity is about, or at least improving productivity. Everybody's already productive, Steven. Everybody's producing exactly what they're getting. When people say, I want to be more productive, what they're talking about is I want to be able to get done what I'm getting done with less effort or given the effort that I'm putting in, I'd like to produce more results. Either way, either one of those is an improvement in productivity. So, I just figured out what the heck? And I have to admit, you know, my apologies, I've never had any traditional or formal education in time management, business or psychology. All of my stuff that I wound up, you know, discovering and uncovering and formulating all came from street smarts and it all came from lots of experience with myself first and then working that model with a lot of other people.

Steven (09:27):

And that street smart is clear because. like this stuff works. It works for almost anybody who uses it once they actually learn just a couple of key principles, but I've got a quote here and it's one of my favorite quotes from you and it's “your mind is for having ideas, not holding them”. I'm curious, like, what does this mean to you?

David (09:49):

Well, I discovered in the martial arts and my own meditative and spiritual practices, you know, 35, 40 years ago, that having a clear head makes anything you're doing a whole lot richer and more effective and efficient. So, it's really about stopping using your head as your office. Most people are trying to manage a whole lot of stuff in their head. And I discovered 35 years ago again on the street, just for myself personally and then working with lots of people since then, that your head's just a really crappy office. And now in the last 10 or 15 years, you know, anybody, any of the cognitive scientists that have been studying how the brain works, basically it just validated that. The new data is that your mind can basically hold about four things and as soon as you have more than four things, you're kind of trying to keep track of or prioritize, you're going to sub-optimize your cognitive process. You're not going to be as smart as you could be, you're not going to be as quick as you could be and you’re not going to be as present as you could be.

Steven (10:53):

So you've got to get those things out of your head, and there's a clear process to this. And for those people who don't know about GTD, you know, like I keep saying, it's really a way of thinking and when you can get that way of thinking to start happening and you follow this process, things start being much simpler, you know, to organize your, to do is, and your priorities. But David, will you tell us a little bit about this way of thinking and kind of give us a little bit of an overview? 

 

David (11:19):

Yeah and Steven, I didn't make this up, I recognized it. Everybody listening or watching this at some point felt confused or overwhelmed at some point and sat down and made a list and felt better. It felt more controlled, more focused about whatever it was. So, if anybody reverse engineered all that, they never gave anything in their head again, because nothing changed in their world except, what changed was how they were engaged with their world. So, I just started to recognize what it is that we do that allows us to disengage with our world, but in an effective way. In other words, there's a lot of stuff you don't have to complete to get them off your mind, but you do have to capture them, clarify them, organize the results of that thinking, in some trusted way that gets it off your mind.

Most people listening or watching this are probably not worried about or thinking about where they need to be two weeks from Wednesday at three o'clock in the afternoon. Why? They have a system, it's called a calendar. They've got the content in there that they trust needs to be there. And they trust they have a behavior that will look at the content at the right time. Well, anybody who says you don't need to get stuff out of your head and create appropriate lists of things you need to be reminded of at the right time, you're kidding yourself. You know, intellectually dishonest. There's a five step thing in the way we get control of any kind of situation. You need to identify or capture the stuff that's got your attention in this situation. What's got my attention about my work, my life, my family, right? You know, the pandemic that's going on, whatever, what's on my mind about any of that?

So you have to identify what those things are, write them down, get them out of your head, capture them some way. And then step two, you need to make some real clear decisions about what those things mean and what you're going to do about them, if anything. You're actually going to do something about researching karate lessons for your kids, actually going to do something about hiring a VP of marketing, you actually going to do something about getting a divorce, you know, what do you, what what's, what are you going to do about those things? So that, step two, is clarify. Is it an actionable item? Yes or no. If it's not, then you reference it, you trash it, or you just park it and incubate it in someplace you'll see it later on. If it is something that's actionable, they, you need to decide what's the very next action you would need to take, you know, very specific next action. Is that an email to send, is that a website to serve, is that a conversation to have with your life partner? What's the next thing you would need to do? If you were gonna move the needle toward closure or whatever this thing is that has your attention. And if one action won't finish it, what's the project you need to keep track of it until it's done. So, determining whether it's trash, reference, material or incubate, or if it is an actionable item, what's the next action and then if one action won’t finish it, what’s  the project? That's the thinking process. That's really where the power of this model is, right? So that's, I didn't make that up, I just recognized it. But those are five very different phases of very, very different practices. Each one of which has its own tools and its own best practices,

Steven (14:15):

Well it's a natural process that we tend to go through. But a lot of times what I've noticed, with myself and with clients and other folks that I've worked with in the past, is that sometimes they'll skip a step and then things really get off, right? If we capture, but we don't clarify that I've got a list and I've got something on that list and I'm ready to go work on it. But I actually have no idea what I need to do and then I, you know, we ended up going into procrastination mode. We, you know, avoid it, whatever, and we don't actually start getting those things done. Huge problem.

David (14:50):

People fall off the wagon at any phase of those five phases. First of all, most people haven't really captured everything that has their attention. They're still walking around with a bunch of stuff banging around in their head that tends to distract them when they're trying to focus on anything. So that's the first thing that people miss is they don't capture everything they don't get around in their head. Second thing is, to your point, even if they get it out of their head, they've got a list of things that are still unclear about what to do about it. And then even if they've done that, they don't have a trusted system to park reminders of the calls they need to make, and the websites they need to serve and the stuff they need to do at their computer, and the stuff they need to talk to people about it. They haven't got that in some trusted place. They know they're going to see it at the right time, when they’re in the right context and they'll still be off the wagon again.

Steven (15:36):

Yeah. And so, for the listeners, I know you guys have all been through it where you started getting organized, you started to take action, started to follow a process like David's talking about, and then you had missed a week and your list or your end tray of all the things that you've got to do, kind of gets way out of whack. You've got to get back in there and reflect it. What's the most important thing to do? What's going to get me closer to my goals? How should I go about getting these things done? It's so important. And once you get, once you skip that review for a week or two weeks, all of a sudden, now it feels overwhelming and it's difficult to get back on track.

Speaker 3 (16:15):

And you know, what's counter-intuitive, Steven, about this model and understand it is that, in order to have to really be present with the most important stuff, you need to be really present with that less than important stuff otherwise, it'll start to take more room than it deserves. As soon the thought ‘I need cat food’ pops into your head twice it just means you're inappropriately engaged with your cat. If you got a cat, you want to keep your cat and you don't want the cat to jump on your face at three o'clock in the morning and say, God, I'm hungry, I need food. Then you need to handle that. If you don't then cat food will take up more psychic space than it deserves. So, you need to be equally accountable for anything that pops into your head so that you can be accountable to yourself, to your point, to focus on the most important stuff.

But that's why a lot of the world, and a lot of people are feeling stress. It doesn’t mean that people are overwhelmed. I mean, one of the things I've sort of re understood in the last two or three years, overwhelm is not really a big issue. The overwhelm happens when your building catches on fire, right? You're feeling overwhelmed with the stuff you've got to do to survive, to get out of the building and save the stuff you need to save, et cetera. but you handle that. The biggest problem is what I refer to now as ambient anxiety. The cat food that you haven't handled, the conversation with your life partner that you're avoiding, that, you know, you need to have.

Steven (17:41):

So in summary here, like the big step we got to sit down, we've got to capture all of the things out of our head in totality, right? I highly recommend you go out and get the book, Getting Things Done, so you can get the full system. But just from a high level, we got to write everything down, we've got to capture it on paper, anything that's related to our personal life and our business life, all of these thoughts into one place, we've got to go through those thoughts, clarify them, understand what is actionable. And then we've got to organize those into what are things that we're going to do? What are things that we're going to keep? What are the things that we've got to take action on right now? And we've got to do all of this just so that we can get in the right mind state before we do anything. So what are some of them, what else would you want to add on to that for people, so that they make sure that even if they were just going to go take action right now that they can get these things out of their head. So they can actually start making some progress from a place of, you know, calm centeredness and not having to feel all that stress and that ambient anxiety that you're talking about.

David (18:49):

Well, people often ask, how long does it take to get the value out of this process? I say, well, how long would it take you to get these dumb little tools called pen and paper and write down the top 10 things that are on your mind right now that have your attention. I need to set up my home office, I need to make sure that I'm set up with my family and my kids right now, in terms of how we're going to do their schooling. I need to make sure of all of that. No, no, no. Just write down 10 things. The top 10, the first top 10 things on your mind, and then go through each one of those and say, what's my next step on that? What do I need to do? And actually write those down. Oh, I need to email Joe about that. I need to talk to my son about whether he wants to do XYZ. I need to order this on the web so that we have -  just make the next action decisions about all of them. Watch how that feels. How long would that take? About three minutes, right? So you're not going to take you long to experience the value and people automatically never had anybody, that's why I know this works. Nobody's ever done that and never felt more control, more focused.

Steven (19:52):

Yeah. It's so much simpler than people think. And they get overwhelmed because they just don't want to do it because they've got so many things in their head. They've always been doing it like that. But you know, just like you said, write 10 things down, see if it works. I bet you're going to feel better. And then if, if you do feel better, Hey, maybe you want to take a whole day to get everything out of your head and get your life organized. So you can really take some action in the right direction. So, we've made it to the growth, rapid fire round, where the questions are quick, but your answers definitely don't need to be. So tell me, David, how would you define success? And what is success to you?

David  (20:27):

Success means achieving or accomplishing desired outcomes. If you go to a party to boogie and you know don’t boogie, it’s an unsuccessful party, if you go on vacation to relax and you don’t relax, it's unsuccessful. To your point, you know, early on Steven, where you said productivity is actually a lot of baggage as a work, because most people think about work and sweat and harbor and Oh my God. But productivity simply means accomplishing what you're trying to. If you want to be happy tonight and you're not happy, that's an unproductive evening. No, you want to have fun at dinner and you don't have fun at dinner. Come on. You know, that's success would be gee, I want to have fun there and you'd have had fun at dinner. Yay, good job.

Steven (21:07):

That sounds like the good life to me.

David (21:09):

Well, sure. Just most and most people think about productivity then usually they think about it usually for material success in a way more money, more plants, more, you know, whatever, nothing wrong with that. That's fine too. However, success, also, is what experience are you after? Why do you want more money? I want to feel more freedom. Well, what could you do today that could make you feel freer? Oh wow. And suddenly you can do some meditation or you go for a run or you decide to sit down and spend some quality time with your kids that you've been avoiding and you suddenly feel freer. Then they go, Hey dude, success. So it doesn't have to be any big thing you do, but you do have to define what it is you're after.

Steven (21:54):

You've got to clarify, you've got to clarify what you're after.

David (21:58):

I say it doesn't happen by itself. I think there's a part of us. You know, I work on a hypothesis that we have a higher self as a part of us that knows why we're on the planet, what we're supposed to be doing. And it loves us, It takes care of us whenever. It actually becomes a good guide for you if you're willing to listen to, you know, stop the world and listen to that inner voice, that still, small voice inside. So, you know, people aren't stupid, they're a bit numb and so, as soon as you kind of wake up a little bit, you can start to pay attention to the intuitive voices or voice, that you need to pay attention to. And it's never going to hurt you.

Steven (22:40):

Wow. That's, that's amazing advice. That's really incredible.

David (22:43):

Maybe that doesn't work for everybody, that's worked for me. You know, at some point, I was agonizing about what I wanted to do with my life cause there are just so many things. And I had so many things like, Oh yeah, but is this the white spiritual thing to do in terms of my why on the planet, we want us like yada yada yada. At some point, you know, I think I was driving along a freeway, in Marin County, in California and suddenly this blinding what I call a BF, Oh, the blinding flash of the obvious sort of hit me in the face and said, gee, David, you don't have to worry about where you're going, what you need to be doing. All you need to do is to handle what's in front of you with elegance and as much completion as you can, because you created so much, not only in this life, but in many others, that the thing will automatically emerge once you finish what's in front of you and I've never looked back since then.

Steven (23:35):

Wow, so David, what are some of your Keystone habits? The things you do on a daily or weekly basis that have led to you living the good life.

David (23:41):

There's my email, it's empty. I learned that 35 years ago and never stopped. And that is I keep my backlog zeroed out on a 24 to 48 hour basis because, I discovered that if you don't do that, any new thing and surprise or new inputs are first. First of all, you're not sensitive enough to hear the new input if it's internal and secondly, you're going to be disturbed. If it's coming externally, you're going to emails. You didn't expect people to walk in and give you things you didn't expect. And so, you know, I learned years ago, but when I'm not doing anything else, I am cleaning up because there's a surprise coming toward me and an opportunity coming toward me that I can't see. And when nothing happens, I want to be having as clear and clean a deck as possible to be able to then make smart decisions about how to engage with it and what to do. So that's, I'd have to think about whether that's, I'd say the main one, that's certainly one of the main ones in my life in terms of a behavior or a habit or a practice that I do continually.

Steven (24:48):

Yeah, getting super, absolutely clear clearing off all of the stuff out of your mind. I can see that.

David (24:56):

Well, let me back it up a little bit, Steven, I mean, to me, the two most important things that we're here on the planet to experience are completion and creation. We need to finish what we put in motion. You need to be accountable for the things that you do put in motion, whether that's now or previous lifetimes or however you might want to believe in any of that. But it's being able to recognize what are the things I need to finish, completely handle and deal with that I've already put my intention and my energy into. See, I don't care about your email, you do. So you have your own ecosystem that's incorporated stuff that you need to deal with, I've got mine too. So I need to be accountable to those things and manage the things that I've allowed come into my world, right? So that's the completion aspect of it. And then once I'm clear, once I get an empty basket, what do I now do? What do I do with it? Cause I can't stop creating you, can't stop focusing. You can't stop that. As long as you're conscious, you're still focusing, whatever you're focused on. You're still focusing on that and  you're reinforcing that, whatever that is. Then I need to be accountable for where I'm now putting my creative energy, so I don't create a bunch of stuff that I don't want to have to complete.

Steven (26:11):

It's a philosophy I've never heard before, but I absolutely love it. So I really appreciate you sharing that with us. What's a book that's impacted your life the most or one you're excited about right now.

David (26:20):

Oh geez. You know, I just finished one that was quite wonderful to read. This is Jeff Sutherland's book, Scrum, you know, basically the art of doing twice the work and half the time and very much similar to how I sort of developed GTD, Jeff talks about the development of the scrum process. Basically he was a jet fighter, Vietnam pilot, and a lot of what he discovered is that the way people work just doesn't work. There's a whole lot of wasted time, there's a whole lot of wasted energy, there's a whole lot of wasted stuff and so, he talks about the scrum. I’ve heard about scrum and agile and all that for years and a lot of that awareness started at the same time GTD was published in 2001. So it's fascinating to read Jeff's book. It's a great read, especially for people who are trying to do anything with teams in any kind of an organization at all, smalL or big doesn't matter. So, I highly recommend that. Another great book that was quite inspiring, a guy who's now a friend, one of the top cognitive scientists, cognitive researchers in the world, a guy named Daniel Levitin, he's head of cognitive science research at McGill university, Successful Aging. So if you're over 50, you have to engage with somebody who's over 50 or think you're going to live over 50 this is an absolute must read.

Steven (27:42):

That's amazing, I'll definitely have to check those out. I'm a certified scrum master and product owner and use that to manage teams for quite a few years before I moved into the real estate space. And just kind of realizing that there's a system in a way of kind of dealing, with things, to get things done between a larger group of people is really valuable. I mean, it's just a system in a way of thinking for managing a team versus managing your own mindset.

David (28:11):

His point, very similar to GDD, is you don't need to change the person, just change the system, change the process, but you're going to do that probably by implementing processes. You don't have to change yourself that much just change the system that you're involved in.

Steven (28:24):

That's such a big idea. So we've got two left here for a wrap up. Inspiration, what impact  have mentors made on your life and how do you look at going out and finding great mentors?

David (28:36):

I found mentors just because I was, you know, usually scrambling and trying to find something to handle, something I didn't know how to handle and looking around for somebody who seems to have handled it. So, you know, probably my biggest mentor in my life was my spiritual coach, a guy named John Rodger and he's not on the planet anymore, but I ran across him at the end of 1971. And based upon the experiences that I had had. but didn't understand that it caused me to sort of derail my life. Because of my lack of understanding of it, i had to find somebody who understood it much better than me and was, you know, a little further down the road than me. So I figured I'd hang out with jJR. As we called him, John Roger, I ran to the end of whatever he could teach me, but I never found an end. So, you know, I hung out with him for 15 years, you know, learning that. A guy named Russell Bishop, I met in terms of doing personal growth training, you know, in  1978, 79, early eighties, you know, when personal growth stuff was kind of hot actualization, lifespring things. And we started insight seminars, then that was very inspiring to me to watch in just five days, how people could truly change their lives by a greater understanding of where they were and just all that good personal growth stuff. And you know, so Russell was a great mentor, to me, to show me that you could do that. So, I followed along in his footsteps there. Then when I started my own consulting practice, a guy named Dean, whom I attributed in the book, taught me about getting stuff out of your head and deciding next actions about things and deciding next action about things.  I got to hang out with Dean for a couple of years as I started my own consulting practice, he had a great model. I said, wow, that's what I was after was some really good model that I could use to train with. So, you know, I'm not looking for any mentors now, but boy, if they showed up, I'd probably take advantage of them.It's kind of like the teacher shows up and the student's ready and the student shows up when the teacher's ready, kind of works both ways.

Steven (30:41):

I love that. And finishing on this purpose, what drives you to live your best life every day?

David (30:47):

Well, our purpose, at least career wise and professional wise, is to create a world where there are no problems, only projects. So, you know, that will, if I make a dent, that's inspiring.

Steven (30:58):

Well, this has been amazing. David, thank you so much for sharing these strategies with the audience today. Where can people find out more about GTD or get in touch?

David (31:08):

Yeah, well, our website gettingthingsdone.com has got a pretty good overview of this methodology and all of our network of people around the world that are delivering these trainings and this coaching around this stuff. So, and there's a free newsletter you can sign up for their end of the books. If they're, if you're brand new to this, to your point, the book getting things done might be a little daunting. I just put everything in there, so it's really a manual of what I learned in 25 or 30 years. But we just published the GTD Workbook, which actually takes sort of one of the 10 steps that, if you really want to go implement this right away, go do that. So that would be probably a good starting point for a lot of people, if they're not familiar with this stuff already. If you've already read the book and go, Oh God, I should have been doing that, yeah, right. Well, read it again or take some time and, you know, get back on the wagon.

Steven (32:04):

No better time to start again. Then now you guys, and so I'll leave you guys as I always leave you to live a life worth inspiring others, and you can do so today by applying some of David's techniques and strategies by going out and getting the book and applying this within your life so that you can start living a life with a clearer mind and actually getting things done. So thanks so much, David the work that you've been doing is amazing. You've made an impact on my life and I know that you've made an impact on millions of others. So thank you so much.

David (32:35)

Thanks, Stephen. My pleasure.

Narrator (32:40):

Thank you for listening to the investor mindset podcast. If you like, what you heard, make sure to rate, review, subscribe, and share with a friend, head over to theinvestormindset.com to join the insider club, where we share tools and strategies from the top investors and entrepreneurs and how to take it to the next level.