Latest / The Action Catalyst / Getting Things Done, with David Allen (Productivity, Time Management, Organization, Author)

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Getting Things Done, with David Allen (Productivity, Time Management, Organization, Author) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:00
  Adam Outland: Hello Action Catalyst listeners! Today's
• 0:00
  guest is someone whose work personally impacted me as a
• 0:02
  young man, and whose work continues to be spun out into
• 0:04
  numerous editions and versions, printed in dozens of languages,
• 0:07
  and implemented across the globe. We're speaking with
• 0:08
  author and productivity consultant David Allen, perhaps
• 0:11
  best known for 2001's groundbreaking book and time
• 0:14
  management method, "Getting Things Done". And David, you're
• 0:15
  joining us from Amsterdam today?
• 0:16
  David Allen: I lived here nine years.
• 0:37
  Adam Outland: How did you end up in Amsterdam?
• 0:42
  David Allen: You know, we just wanted to become more global in
• 0:46
  terms of both our work and our interest in our focus. We love
• 0:50
  to California where we came from. And we saw people slightly
• 0:54
  older than us looking a little more sedentary than we wanted to
• 0:57
  be. So we said, you know, come on, let's throw a dart. Let's
• 1:00
  time for an adventure could have been anywhere as long as I was
• 1:02
  near a good airport. But we'd been here a couple of times. We
• 1:05
  love the city. I mean, it's under eyecandy. City. It's we're
• 1:08
  just in we'd love the Dutch. We'd love the culture. And we've
• 1:10
  since we've been here, we've kept falling in love with it.
• 1:14
  Adam Outland: Are you a cyclist now?
• 1:15
  David Allen: I'm not like one of those guys dressed for the for
• 1:18
  the kill, in latex. Adam, where are you now? Where were you
• 1:24
  talking from?
• 1:25
  Adam Outland: Texas.
• 1:26
  David Allen: I know it well, I grew up in Shreveport. So we
• 1:29
  traveled around Dallas and Houston doing debate
• 1:32
  tournaments. And I had an I had an uncle who was had research
• 1:35
  chemist for Texaco for many, many years. And he lived in Bel
• 1:38
  Air.
• 1:39
  Adam Outland: So you know, part of what I think brought up this
• 1:41
  connection was I was interviewing Nick Sonnenberg. He
• 1:45
  had just come up with a book kind of a his take on time
• 1:47
  management strategy. And I brought up this idea, my first
• 1:51
  exposure to time management at all was your book, getting
• 1:54
  things done, and I read it when I was 21. Because I had an
• 1:59
  interesting path in college where I was selling educational
• 2:02
  books and running a sales organization during my summers
• 2:05
  between college. That's how I paid for school. But it required
• 2:08
  a tremendous amount of organization. And that was my
• 2:11
  worst functional trait as a human and picked up your book
• 2:15
  read it. And it was very transformational.
• 2:17
  David Allen: Well, I'm always delighted right across people
• 2:19
  where some of this sticks. I never know what sticks. Good for
• 2:22
  you.
• 2:22
  Adam Outland: Yeah, thank you. And when I was combing through
• 2:25
  some notes about you, it was just so interesting to hear your
• 2:29
  initial life story. I mean, you just mentioned growing up in
• 2:32
  Shreveport, how does one go from Shreveport to hold on a
• 2:36
  magician, waiter, karate teacher, landscaper, vitamin
• 2:40
  distributor, travel agent, I can't even say them all.
• 2:43
  David Allen: I didn't know what I wanted to do. But I grew up.
• 2:45
  And you know, I didn't grow up with deep pockets. And so I had
• 2:48
  to, I always had the work to make spending money to do
• 2:51
  whatever I wanted to do. So it banged around a whole lot then
• 2:54
  got very interested in, in my school got very interested in
• 2:57
  liberal arts sort of expanding my vision. Also, I was the sort
• 3:01
  of child actor in Shreveport, I had two or three significant
• 3:04
  roles as a child in the community theaters, I had an
• 3:08
  opportunity to experience a lot of people and things that were
• 3:12
  kind of outside what you might consider the street port culture
• 3:15
  early on. My mom was quite open to having me just go experienced
• 3:19
  whatever I wanted to experience wherever. So that's what I did.
• 3:23
  Adam Outland: I've got to ask to you. I mean, early in your life,
• 3:26
  I couldn't help but wonder like, was organization time management
• 3:30
  something you consider a strength back then of yours?
• 3:33
  David Allen: No, I, I've always been somewhat organized. I mean,
• 3:36
  I I always like, what I had my own room in my little house in
• 3:39
  Shreveport, my mom had someone come in and build kind of a wall
• 3:43
  to wall desk, you know that I can do my homework, and I can do
• 3:47
  other things. And I'm always was like that. I'm just a lazy guy.
• 3:51
  I don't like to have to look for things, you know. And so I've
• 3:53
  always been attracted to just clear space. I don't like to be
• 3:57
  distracted. I don't like to have to do stuff. I'm just Mr. Lazy.
• 4:01
  And don't don't make me work or think any more than I have to,
• 4:05
  you know, I didn't have that as a conscious notion. It was not a
• 4:08
  conscious process.
• 4:09
  Adam Outland: Right? You do graduate work in American
• 4:13
  history. And so I'm trying to get the transition to all these
• 4:16
  automated jobs. And then all of a sudden, boom, business
• 4:19
  productivity in the 1980s for Lockheed.
• 4:23
  David Allen: You know, I dropped out of graduate school, I was
• 4:25
  sort of, I was studying people who were enlightened and decided
• 4:28
  that one of my own, so I dropped out to try to just sort of
• 4:31
  discover who I was and come up. This is the 60s in Berkeley. And
• 4:33
  so that's, that's when sort of self exploration and whatever.
• 4:37
  So a lot of experimentation, a lot of exploration, martial
• 4:41
  arts, meditation practices, who are the gurus out there? What
• 4:44
  are they doing? What are they teaching? What can I learn about
• 4:46
  any of that? So I was kind of engaged in that. Of course, they
• 4:49
  weren't paying people to do that. So I had to pay rent. What
• 4:52
  I like to do was go in and see what people needed, if I can
• 4:56
  help them and those weren't my areas of expertise. I would just
• 4:58
  go in and say I was kind of a good And number two guy, I'd
• 5:01
  say, Well, how much easier can we do this, and then I'd wind up
• 5:04
  doing that, and then get bored. And then I go leave and go find
• 5:08
  another gig, then I discovered they pay people to do that. They
• 5:10
  call them something. So that's what I hung up my shingle in
• 5:13
  1982 and said, Okay, let me just see if I can sell myself on a
• 5:16
  project by project basis. It's, that's what I seem to do. And I
• 5:19
  didn't want to be hung up with anything. And so that just
• 5:22
  became, we didn't call it coaching back then. But that's
• 5:24
  kind of really what it was, was Yeah. And then that threw me
• 5:28
  thrust me into the corporate training world, and they were
• 5:30
  the ripest audience. So, you know, at a certain point, you
• 5:34
  know, come on, Adam, it took me 20 years to figure out what I
• 5:36
  figured out, and that nobody else had done it. And then it
• 5:39
  was bulletproof. So I had some good coaching, somebody said,
• 5:42
  Well, you should write the book, I never wrote a book, the first
• 5:45
  edition of getting things done. Published in 2001, I had no idea
• 5:49
  whether anybody was gonna buy it or interested in and I just had
• 5:52
  to get it out of my head.
• 5:53
  Adam Outland: You know, one of the things that we often talk to
• 5:56
  leadership about is the four levels of competency, the
• 6:00
  beginning of anything new that you endeavor, you're
• 6:03
  unconscious, incompetent, and hopefully, you became a
• 6:07
  conscious, incompetent, meaning you're at least aware that
• 6:09
  you're not good at this. And then you become a conscious,
• 6:13
  competent, and eventually an unconscious competence, where
• 6:16
  it's so natural that it just becomes easy for you.
• 6:19
  David Allen: Yeah, couldn't agree more. By the way, that's
• 6:21
  that's exactly how that works with people with my methodology.
• 6:24
  Adam Outland: Yes. Well, I I'm a case study for you. But you
• 6:27
  know, one of the things that I think is the hardest to do is to
• 6:30
  reverse engineer it. And this is what I wanted to ask you.
• 6:33
  Because I imagined just hearing kind of your a lot of the stuff
• 6:36
  came naturally to you, personally. And so I see you is
• 6:39
  at the end, especially in the earlier part of your careers and
• 6:41
  unconscious competent at this stuff, right? You were doing it,
• 6:44
  what I find so challenging sometimes is to go backwards and
• 6:48
  become a conscious competent again, because that's what we're
• 6:50
  required to write the book you did, it's you almost have to
• 6:53
  like, consciously realize the steps that it took to get you to
• 6:56
  where you are.
• 6:57
  David Allen: Actually, that wasn't quite my path. I don't,
• 6:59
  because what I figured out was the methodology and started to
• 7:03
  implement it. I knew the methodology work. So I didn't
• 7:06
  have to reverse engineer that I just said, How do I describe
• 7:09
  that methodology in a way that people could get it? That's
• 7:12
  right. And it was kind of agonizing to write the book
• 7:15
  because I wanted to give people the model, or I wanted to give
• 7:19
  them how to implement the model. But I also wanted to tell them
• 7:22
  all the and the old by the ways, the subtle stuff that's going to
• 7:26
  happen when you actually do this. And I tried to lump that
• 7:29
  all together, kind of the way I did seminars, it didn't work. It
• 7:33
  took me a year to write the first draft and the first rep
• 7:35
  didn't work. It was it was the way I did a seminar, but you
• 7:37
  don't read a book the way that you go through a seminar. That
• 7:40
  was my big learning about what to do with what I'd come up
• 7:45
  with.
• 7:46
  Adam Outland: How did so how did you know the first draft didn't
• 7:48
  work?
• 7:48
  David Allen: I was getting feedback from people that was
• 7:50
  giving sort of early versions of this. And they said, Oh my god,
• 7:53
  David, you nailed me in your first paragraph. But it takes
• 7:56
  three chapters to get to how to do it. Okay, jeez. And also, you
• 8:03
  know, Adam, you know, I'm a big believer in affirmations, and
• 8:06
  visioning, and so forth. And the first thing I wrote, before I
• 8:10
  started writing the book were the reviews, I wrote the reviews
• 8:13
  my anticipated best case reviews that people would write about
• 8:17
  the book I'm about to write. And that raised the bar internally
• 8:21
  for me hugely.
• 8:23
  Adam Outland: And it's so incredibly challenging for many
• 8:25
  people to get their thoughts on paper in a concise way in a
• 8:29
  relatable way. To many people try and write a book for
• 8:33
  everyone. If you just think of one person you've coached and
• 8:36
  how you speak to that one person, you find your voice a
• 8:40
  little bit easier than trying to talk to everybody.
• 8:42
  David Allen: Yeah, well, the same is true. If you're, you
• 8:44
  know, I've done 1000s of presentations for hundreds and
• 8:47
  1000s of people out there just in terms of my work. I may be
• 8:51
  talking to 5000 people, but I need to talk to one. And then
• 8:54
  they all get that I'm talking to them, because I've stepped
• 8:58
  myself down to being personal, you know, an authentic?
• 9:01
  Adam Outland: Yeah. And so I actually did buy the revisited
• 9:05
  updated edition with, you know, the upgrade of technology. And
• 9:08
  honestly, I think the book was written down. I don't know if
• 9:11
  the right phrase is technology agnostic, just meaning that it's
• 9:13
  applicable, regardless of upgraded technologies. As long
• 9:17
  as you lean into the principles.
• 9:18
  David Allen: You're still going to read that book when you fly
• 9:20
  to Jupiter in 100 years. You still need an in basket, you'll
• 9:24
  still decide next actions, you still need to then park the
• 9:28
  reminders of those things in some sort of system that the
• 9:31
  right people will see at the right time that you then reflect
• 9:33
  on and notice the status so that you can get to Jupiter or get
• 9:36
  off Jupiter. So we made it as evergreen as possible with that.
• 9:41
  That's the cool thing about it was I uncovered something over
• 9:44
  all these years it was totally evergreen. That's universal.
• 9:47
  Adam Outland: I wanted to ask are you still doing some one on
• 9:49
  one work?
• 9:50
  David Allen: Every once a while, some pro bono I'm doing and if
• 9:53
  somebody wanted to engage me for a whole year, which I did with a
• 9:58
  Drew Carey you know, when I first you know several years
• 10:00
  ago, he hired me for a year.
• 10:02
  Adam Outland: Oh, wow. With some of the applications just
• 10:04
  for listeners, the aspects that I felt were valuable personally,
• 10:09
  were the concept of separating your task list to make it more
• 10:15
  consumable, right? Because I think everybody can relate to
• 10:18
  the pain of seeing 150 things on their to do list. And it's a
• 10:21
  combination of at home tasks, work tasks, no, no understand
• 10:26
  this concept of splitting those tasks into the relevant
• 10:29
  geography that they belong to, or the right next action folder.
• 10:33
  If you split this to do list into these different folders
• 10:36
  that are more based on when you can tackle those to do items so
• 10:40
  that you're able to just dive right in when you have time. One
• 10:43
  of the challenges that sometimes I run into personally with
• 10:46
  clients is that the job or position that someone's in or
• 10:50
  their their world may not be so cleanly separated as some of the
• 10:54
  examples that you give. So it's just curious how you guide
• 10:57
  people now as to maybe what you find to be the common and best
• 11:01
  practice next action buckets?
• 11:04
  David Allen: Well, probably the best way to start that would be
• 11:06
  to have somebody list all 120 things on one list, we'll say,
• 11:10
  does that work for you? And say, Okay, how would you split that
• 11:14
  out? It should be pretty obvious that errands should be its own
• 11:17
  list, it should be pretty obvious that stuff to talk to my
• 11:20
  life partner about should be its own list, it should be somewhat
• 11:24
  obvious here, the websites I need to serve want to have a
• 11:27
  good internet connection. For me, it was important to
• 11:29
  distinguish between stuff I could do when I had a good web
• 11:33
  connection and stuff like on a plane when I didn't. But maybe
• 11:36
  let me reverse engineer this back for you, Adam, to say how
• 11:40
  this all started. This all started back in 1983 or 84, when
• 11:45
  I started doing public seminars around us with handing people
• 11:48
  public planners that we had found when the best planners to
• 11:52
  do this, and then printing a list called next actions and a
• 11:55
  list called projects that we just, you know, sort of the
• 11:57
  basic categories. And then at some point, this weird thing
• 12:01
  showed up called a mobile phone. Until then, pretty much all the
• 12:05
  actions you could take would be done, you know, in pretty much
• 12:09
  one or two environments, Max. That's right. So soon as the
• 12:12
  mobile phone showed up, guess what was possible, you could
• 12:15
  make calls from almost anywhere. So I went, wow. So what I did
• 12:19
  was I split my own next actions list into next actions, calls
• 12:24
  and all the rest. Because that made sense. Because now while
• 12:27
  I'm at with a phone, I can't do any of the other stuff. But I
• 12:30
  could make all these calls. And then I was doing a seminar, they
• 12:33
  had a great old friend, he was semi retired, and he had a
• 12:37
  sailboat. And he took my seminar, he said, wow, David,
• 12:40
  there's a lot of stuff I need to do at my sailboat, not about my
• 12:44
  sailboat, because a lot of things I need to do about my
• 12:46
  boat, I need to go to the marine store and buy X, Y and Z
• 12:49
  assembly, there are a lot of things I only like to do with my
• 12:52
  boat. So I created an app boat list. But that's cool. So that's
• 12:57
  how all this started. And then, you know, after all these years,
• 13:00
  we just gave people in my book, The typical categories that
• 13:04
  people up until that time anyway, found it useful or
• 13:07
  practical to separate things and just the computer phone calls to
• 13:10
  make stuff to talk to people about things I'm waiting for.
• 13:13
  But I've had people show up, they like to list their things.
• 13:15
  Here's things that provide service to other people hear
• 13:19
  things that provide personal service to myself, hear things,
• 13:23
  and they organized it by emotional value.
• 13:26
  Adam Outland: Yeah, it's less rigid, right? It's yeah, it's
• 13:28
  really taken that consultative perspective of yourself or
• 13:32
  another person that you're helping and saying, you know,
• 13:34
  what's important to you? What is your life segmented into, and
• 13:37
  then help them batch accordingly? And I guess you've
• 13:43
  probably experienced this working in a coaching
• 13:45
  relationship with anybody for a year, you realize that it's that
• 13:49
  change is hard for people, right? And part of what makes
• 13:52
  change so can be so difficult, is that how rooted they are in
• 13:57
  habits that they've done their entire life. So I just was kind
• 14:00
  of curious, your most difficult scenarios of breaking someone's
• 14:04
  bad habits and what you found helpful in getting them attached
• 14:08
  to this new way of showing up.
• 14:10
  David Allen: I haven't done that so much myself, frankly, I am
• 14:13
  not an expert at changing habits. I'm not. We know now
• 14:17
  that obviously follow up. And so we have a lot of coaches around
• 14:20
  the world, we've certified them a lot of what they do is do
• 14:22
  follow ups or they do coaching and like eight sessions
• 14:25
  virtually with people so they can work with them and then
• 14:28
  check with them in two weeks and say how you doing whatever. So
• 14:31
  there's a lot of the Keep it going stuff that helps build
• 14:34
  those kinds of handouts. The biggest issue that most people
• 14:38
  have is their addiction to ambient anxiety. They're willing
• 14:41
  to be waked up at three o'clock in the morning about something
• 14:43
  they can't do anything about it. Yes. How do you change that? My
• 14:47
  job has been demonstrating what it's like to walk around and
• 14:50
  have nothing on your mind. No matter how busy or whatever
• 14:53
  you're doing. That's kind of how I live my life. I think we got
• 14:56
  round David, you look so relax, what's going on? What's going
• 14:59
  on? Keeping you relaxed, what do you need to do about that, that
• 15:03
  you need to do to get that off your mind. So that's not
• 15:06
  spinning around you in some inappropriate way. So you can
• 15:09
  trust, you'll see that thing in front of the door you need to
• 15:12
  take to the office tomorrow, as opposed to trying to remember
• 15:14
  you need to take that thing. Why don't you build systems that
• 15:18
  remind you of stuff when you have to do so you can become a
• 15:20
  dumb and stupid like me most of the time, because I've just
• 15:23
  already made my decisions, then I have the freedom to become a
• 15:26
  dumb and stupid and have fun, and then still do effective
• 15:29
  stuff. As simple as that sounds. That's it? Yeah, that really,
• 15:33
  that really is it, to what degree someone buys into that
• 15:38
  what to read, someone integrates any of that, if you just write a
• 15:42
  few more things down, then you wouldn't normally you're going
• 15:44
  to improve your life, if you just decide what's the next
• 15:46
  action on something a little bit sooner than when it shows up,
• 15:49
  instead of when it blows up, you're gonna improve your life,
• 15:51
  if you just implement the two minute rule, anything in your
• 15:54
  email box right now that you could actually complete and get
• 15:56
  rid of in two minutes or less should not be there that's going
• 15:59
  to improve your life, you just have to decide how much of that
• 16:01
  you think you need.
• 16:03
  Adam Outland: We'll ask people on a scale of one to 10, you
• 16:05
  know, how do you feel like you are with your time management
• 16:08
  and what kind of outline what a 10 means, and a one means to
• 16:10
  most people, and you get a lot of people answer 456. And the
• 16:15
  interesting question after that is, you know, it's really the
• 16:19
  ones that I don't worry about too much. Because if you're at
• 16:22
  rock bottom, and time management, like I was when I
• 16:24
  was 21, and bought your book, you know, there's only one
• 16:27
  direction to go from there. And life's gonna get hard real fast
• 16:30
  unless you change. But in the middle, you can live your entire
• 16:33
  life without realizing what you're capable of, and be
• 16:37
  mediocre at something. And that's how a lot of people they
• 16:40
  don't haven't lost enough to where they really want to make
• 16:42
  change.
• 16:43
  David Allen: Well, you're gonna change out of pain, more than
• 16:46
  inspiration, you'll change out of both, but the pain wins by
• 16:51
  far.
• 16:51
  Adam Outland: You know, we hear people who've had so much
• 16:53
  success in life, and it's really easy to go well, if they always
• 16:56
  had it, they always did it. Life was like a Disney movie. And
• 16:58
  there were no bumps in the road. Right? And that's rarely ever
• 17:02
  true. And so I guess my question to you is, what were some of
• 17:05
  those bumps in your your Disney movie have a story?
• 17:08
  David Allen: Well, we had to make a decision at some point
• 17:10
  when the book was successful about whether we should try to
• 17:13
  scale the GTD methodology education any further than say,
• 17:18
  I could have just stopped everything. And just with the
• 17:21
  success of the book just had a career of speaking. But I had,
• 17:25
  by that time, 30 or 40 people on staff, and they were we were
• 17:28
  doing work in doing coaching and training around the US are quite
• 17:31
  a good bit. And I said, Come on, guys, should we do this? And
• 17:36
  they said, Yeah, we should do that. Okay, how do we scale this
• 17:39
  kind of business? Because to a large degree, it was based upon
• 17:43
  me and my really well trained facilitators that could inspire
• 17:47
  people to do this one on one. But how do you scale something
• 17:51
  like this, and so trying to figure that out, and we're still
• 17:54
  working that out. So that was the big decision to make that
• 17:57
  decision to begin with wasn't painful, but it was challenging.
• 18:00
  Couple of big mistakes that I've made in the process were because
• 18:04
  I've made some decisions before I should have without doing due
• 18:08
  diligence, about whether that was the right decision. So
• 18:11
  hiring a senior person that didn't work out, it was
• 18:14
  expensive and painful. Making a deal with someone to partner
• 18:18
  with me in in one of my book deals that I shouldn't have done
• 18:21
  then that they're getting a lot more value out of this than I
• 18:25
  could have had some other people who are closer to me that could
• 18:27
  have made, you know, a lot more money that would have been more
• 18:30
  fun if they'd been involved with that. So a lot of these were
• 18:33
  decisions that were made, because people were pressuring
• 18:35
  me, okay, what do we need to do? Or I was pressuring myself that
• 18:39
  oh, yeah, I need to make that decision about that. But, you
• 18:43
  know, live and learn, it's hard to denigrate shown rungs of your
• 18:46
  ladder. I mean, I got a great life and lifestyle, you know, so
• 18:50
  hard to say that all those were learning experiences and things
• 18:54
  that I had that I went through, and then I learned stuff about,
• 18:58
  you know, obviously, it's pretty big challenges before, back in
• 19:03
  my, in my 20s. But that was a lot about, you know, a lot of
• 19:07
  experience I had but drugs that was not, that was exploration, I
• 19:11
  wasn't escaping, I was exploring, I was back in the 60s
• 19:14
  with like, wow, what's out there, what's up there, what's
• 19:17
  whatever. And so, but that didn't help a lot in terms of my
• 19:22
  nervous system and my physiology or whatever. And then I ran it,
• 19:25
  and then I got kind of ran off the rails for a little while.
• 19:28
  And so kind of understanding how that happened and what I needed
• 19:32
  to do about that, and then how to I could come back to a level
• 19:35
  of cooperation with my world, you know, that work. So that was
• 19:38
  pretty big. That was a big change.
• 19:40
  Adam Outland: That's right, with methamphetamine or something?
• 19:43
  David Allen: Oh, I did everything, I snorted heroin for
• 19:46
  a year and there were hardly any drugs that I didn't experiment
• 19:49
  with. But it didn't help my nervous system. Kind of fried
• 19:52
  it. I haven't done any recreational stuff since 1971.
• 19:57
  Adam Outland: And you live in Amsterdam. That's amazing.
• 20:00
  David Allen: Well, come on, the Dutch don't do that. It's only
• 20:02
  the tourists that show up and do all that stuff.
• 20:08
  Adam Outland: So, you know, I think in retrospect, knowing and
• 20:11
  having gone through this journey that you've gone through, how
• 20:14
  would David Allen today, what kind of advice would you provide
• 20:18
  that 20 or 21 year old self, having been through your life
• 20:22
  already, right? Like, if you could go back as a mentor.
• 20:25
  David Allen: I would say you have an intuitive voice that's
• 20:28
  in there right now. It's always been there, it will always be
• 20:31
  there. Learn to quiet yourself, and ask the right questions. And
• 20:37
  listen to the intuitive voice that loves you cares about you,
• 20:42
  doesn't judge you, but will give you really, really good advice.
• 20:47
  I didn't learn that for another 20 years in my life, probably at
• 20:51
  that point, I would say that and relax.
• 20:55
  Adam Outland: It's a great piece of advice. And just as a kind of
• 20:58
  a last maybe a couple of quickfire questions, what are
• 21:01
  the books that you're reading, called in the last five or seven
• 21:04
  years that have been influential to you?
• 21:06
  David Allen: I'm gonna give you two big ones. One is a book
• 21:08
  called humankind. Rutger Bregman is a Dutch writer, but it's a
• 21:13
  fabulous book, even in English, it's a lot about how actually
• 21:17
  good human nature really is. And it's a big rant about the
• 21:21
  sensational media that's made it out as if there's so much bad
• 21:25
  going on in the world. He's going, No, there's not. And he's
• 21:28
  got a lot of good data and a lot of statistics and stuff in there
• 21:32
  to prove the people in sharp when push comes to shove, they
• 21:36
  help each other out. They're good people, there's a goodness
• 21:39
  to the human consciousness. And thankfully, I read something
• 21:43
  this morning or yesterday, and they've done a study that short
• 21:47
  little pieces of kindness is a universal trait across the
• 21:52
  world, that people actually are very, for the majority of what
• 21:56
  they do, how they interact with people is helping people and
• 22:00
  being kind and being useful to them in some way. So this is not
• 22:05
  something you get when you read, read the media, and here's
• 22:08
  another one.
• 22:09
  Adam Outland: The 1619 project.
• 22:11
  David Allen: So this is a compilation of some of the most
• 22:14
  elegant essay you can imagine about how slavery as an
• 22:19
  institution has impacted on the US culture, history, culture,
• 22:24
  politics, everything else. I was an American History major Adam,
• 22:29
  and I read this away, oh, my god, had no idea how much
• 22:34
  American history taught in schools ignores some of the key
• 22:39
  elements of how much of our culture was created by that
• 22:44
  institution. Yeah, it's a page turner.
• 22:47
  Adam Outland: Thanks for sharing all about changing perspective.
• 22:50
  And for people to be able to find you and some of the
• 22:52
  resources and tools obviously the book Getting Things Done.
• 22:55
  You've published two other books as well, correct?
• 22:58
  David Allen: Yeah, ready for anything, making it all work.
• 23:01
  And then GTD workbook, and, and GTD for teams. So I've done a
• 23:07
  few of those. And we again, have a new book coming out for teams,
• 23:11
  and that's going to be out first of the year. Ah, you know, all
• 23:14
  these years, people have run across my stuff implemented, oh
• 23:18
  my god, if I could get people around me to do this, it'd be so
• 23:21
  much cooler, it's so much easier. And I've never had the
• 23:24
  bandwidth to really produce that manual. Now we have, I've got a
• 23:29
  fabulous co author Ed Lamont from from our partner in UK.
• 23:33
  It's dynamite. And by the way, if anybody wants to just more of
• 23:36
  my stick, getting things done.com as website, you'll see
• 23:40
  a lot of resources there, sign up for our newsletter if you
• 23:42
  want, but getting things done.com/youtube You can see my
• 23:46
  three TEDx talks I've done you can see tons of short little
• 23:50
  snippets of videos of tips and tricks or whatever, if you're
• 23:54
  interested in a little more snacking.
• 23:56
  Adam Outland: Yeah, love it. Again, appreciate your time and
• 23:59
  being on here and thanks for the impact.
• 24:01
  David Allen: You got it, guy. Delighted.