Productivity
“There is usually an inverse relationship between how much something is on your mind and how much it's getting done.”
2004: Geest
There. Read ..... THAT!
A book slid across the table towards me. Getting Things Done. David Allen. Thanks........ This was a one-to-one with my manager, Jason. He’d read it and clearly thought it would help me.
Dutifully, I took the book home and read it over two or three days. It was great! It held such promise. I loved and recognised the description of the problem and his approach to organisation - it was so complete and perfect. I set about buying paper trays, notebooks and all sorts of things that I subsequently struggled to use, and just as quickly as my enthusiasm came, it went....... Some things stayed with me though - the idea of grouping actions by where they move forward. Such extreme common sense and no-one else was saying it. There was gold here, I was certain of it but ...... I just couldn’t quite make it go.1
2008: Carphone Warehouse
During a particularly busy and stressful time, I needed help and reached back to this book. I’d read it two or three times by this point and got a little more from it each time I read it but I needed more. I hit Google to see what else there was out there and found David had audio books of him training his own material. These were not cheap, but I pulled out the credit card and ordered away.
These are long audio books - 8 or more hours - but I went through them so quickly; this was the moment it all began to come together. The book ....... it’s fine. It convinced me of the problem and that there was a solution here somewhere, but implementing it successfully from the book alone is tough. David though - oh my - that is a man who can communicate, and you can just feel has lived his material inside out. Listening to him explain his work was revolutionary and allows me to say now with utter conviction - it’s simple, but it’s not easy and it truly is applied common sense.2 My world came under some degree of control. My stress levels went down and things indeed, as they say - got done. Perfect? No. It never is, but it’s so much better. And I was promoted.
2013: Rackspace
I arrived at Rackspace in 2012 and was delighted and amazed to see how seriously they took corporate education. And they had a Getting Things Done course! Not only was I determined to take it, I also researched the company in the UK delivering it - Next Action Associates - it turns out I too could certify to deliver this training! I’d tried to do an explainer at Carphone Warehouse and got some way towards it; but this was proper and after all, if you want to really KNOW something, teach it!
After a conversation with my manager it was all agreed. Rackspace would pay for me to be trained and I would deliver the core, Level 1 Foundation training course. I probably delivered it 20–25 times to around 400 people, over 5 years. During that time, I also trained as a Level 2 trainer, took the Level 3 course and on one occasion actually got to meet the man himself - David Allen!
Teaching this material several times a year gave me a structure in a busy world to keep engaged with it, which for someone with ADHD was critical. Part of the delivery was showing a real, live system - yours. Training this not just helped me internalise the material, it gave me accountability for keeping my systems in shape. During this period, I was promoted from a front-line manager to a head of department then director and VP shortly afterwards. This is not a coincidence.
Cool story, bro. TLDR?
You will be as successful as your systems let you be.
I’ll let that idea settle for a moment. Think about it like this - if you are performing at a particular level in your role and someone introduces something into your systems or workflow that makes you 5% more efficient - perhaps you’ve really nailed the Capture habit and it’s noticed - then you are rewarded. More projects, more responsibility! Amazing! You earned it.
But.
The more you progress and the more senior you become, the more complexity and ambiguity enters your world. Your new improved systems are hit by even more stuff blowing the hell out of them all over again. You need new systems, and to get even better!
So: the better you get, the better you’d better get.
Expressed another equally useful way - it’s the perverse idea that if a manager has something big and important come in, do they give it to the person in their team who might be struggling and needs chasing, even if they have the most notional bandwidth? Or, do you load it onto your potentially overloaded highest performer who is already outputting more than the rest of the team because they are the safest pair of hands? Yep. Unfair, isn’t it.
I will say it again: you will be as successful as your systems let you be. Take the time, sharpen the saw.
I will close with this. If you are in the UK and want to know more - a lot more - I can recommend without hesitation Next Action Associates - www.next-action.co.uk. They run regular seminars and workshops - this is material you really will benefit from going through at an event. They do one to one coaching which is the ultimate accelerator...... They are wonderful people..... I have first-hand experience of Todd, Ed and Robert - superbly safe hands all.
Footnotes
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In years since, I have found that very few people manage to read the book and just - go! David’s method - it does look deceptively simple but it takes most of us applied effort over 12–24 months to really get it embedded properly. Don’t let this discourage you! Little life-changing things (and this has been for me) can be picked up, applied and ticked off as done in an afternoon. An honest and concerted effort to implement his thinking will bring benefits from Day One. ↩
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Many of the neat, succinct bits of phrasing on this page are either direct, or mauled quotes from David I’ve probably not properly quoted or credited. Please do read the book. Or listen to him. ↩
