How to Make Smart Decisions | David Allen's Productivity Insights

I think people need to sit down and clarify what experiences are you really looking for in your life.

So a lot of people now, well, I want to have a clear head, go om, you know, or drink or something to clear your head. As opposed to, wait a minute, why is this on my mind and what do I need to do to get it off my mind?

You need to make action decisions when you're smart so that when you're dumb, you do smart things.

He's a productivity consultant best known for creating the time management system known as Getting Things Done. His company focuses on productivity, action management, and executive coaching. Time magazine called his bestselling book Getting Things Done the defining self-help business book of its time. He's David Allen, and here's my take on his top 10 rules for success. Rule number 4 is my personal favorite, and make sure to stick around all the way to the end for some special bonus clips. And as always, if David says something that really inspires you, please leave it in the comments below and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired as well. Enjoy.

I think people need to get— sit down and clarify what experiences are you really looking for in your life. And that doesn't necessarily mean— it can include lots of money, but it can also include what do you want to experience with that money? A sense of freedom, a sense of service, a sense of providing value to the world, a sense of self-confidence and self-worth.

Efficacy?

What is it that you're after? So there's, you know, in my own explorations in the whole personal growth and self-awareness game for years, I've been involved in that pretty seriously. You know, there's an exercise that says, "Well, what do you want?" "I want a red Porsche." "Great. What experience do you think that's going to give you?" "Freedom and a sense of fun." Whatever. And then the people get the red Porsche and they're worried about somebody going to dent it and they can't afford the payments on it. They didn't really get the experience they were looking for.

What happened?

They got the symbol, but they didn't get the inner experience. But if you want the experience of freedom and fun, you can have that this afternoon. It doesn't mean you shouldn't have the red Porsche, but it just means that if you start to focus on the inner experience, what would climbing the corporate ladder give you as an inner experience? Why do you want that? What's important to you about that? And it could be, "I want to provide, you know, for my family, for—" you know, for after I'm gone. So there's a sense of building wealth or building net worth or building assets, you know, for the people around you that matter to you. There's no right or wrong about any of your answers to this. But I think getting clear about whether you want to do that or whether you want to get there because you want to be able to impact a much larger segment of the world for doing good or taking it over, I don't know, for whatever you want. But I think that's the key, is being able to externalize and start to become objective about Well, what is it that you're after? And so just crafting your own ideal scene, not only of the things you want, which is fine. Don't stop that.

As a matter of fact, don't feel embarrassed that you want a red Porsche.

So there's nothing wrong with any of that material stuff that you might want, but it's also true that it's a real good idea to just sit down and say, "Lemme just flay that all out." And then use that as a map just to then guide you in terms of your intuitive decision-making. I don't think you have to work at it that hard, but I think you do need to be conscious about it and validate it in some part of yourself.

Most to-do lists are incomplete lists of still unclear things, by the way. What you see on to-do lists are things like budget, mom, dog, babysitter. You go, right, well, I understand those sort of probably indicate something, that something you got to do something about, but what exactly is the work you need to do? And that's gonna be the second thing you need to do, is to take those things that you've identified that are yanking your chain, and you need to make some really specific decisions about what does the work involve. And there's two key questions you need to ask about everything on your list. What outcome am I committed to finish? So that you can define that target out there. What's the project about the budget, about the dog, about the babysitter? And identify those. And then you need to ask yourself, what's the very next action step that I need to take to move forward on that if I were gonna move on it? Outcome and action, zeros and ones of productive behavior. What are we trying to accomplish? How do we allocate resources to make it happen? But you need to apply that very specifically if you want to be appropriately engaged with anything yanking your chain out there. The late, great Peter Drucker, you folks should know that, would tell every one of us as knowledge workers, the toughest admonition, your toughest work is defining what your work is. He put it in broad terms. This is very specifically what he's talking about. What is the work embedded in that? And getting very clear about that. And I guarantee you, if you sat down and take at least a few of the things off your list and make these decisions— what's the project? Write it down. What's the action step? Write it down. You will feel exponentially more appropriately engaged with your world. Never seen an exception to that.

Tell us, when you were just starting out—

now that you're all big and successful, but back way long time ago in the day, when you were just first starting out, what were your most successful marketing strategies?

Well, I think if we're— what we're talking about really is building a business off of the brand or building a business off the Getting Things Done model and methodology. That actually developed many, many years after I was doing the work in consulting and coaching but didn't market myself. Marketing was called pick up the phone. You know, it was all referral, whatever. But even back then, I have to say, you know, job one called network, engage. Like, don't turn down any opportunity to talk to anybody about what you're doing. As long as they're, you know, are positively inclined, you know. So, you know, if they're trying to talk to you, beat you up, or run you down, or, you know, to prove that they're better than you, that's probably not worthwhile. But, you know, most people are often gracious about that. And, you know, so you got to ask, you know, where you got to put yourself out. So that's what I've done. I've continued to do that. As the book came out, then I had opportunities. People would, you know, I got press on that that the book publisher, you know, produced. But I took advantage of every single podcast, every single interview, every single— like this, like you, Stephanie, meeting you and say, "Hey David, you want to talk to people?" "Yeah, sure, I'll talk to people." So I'm not actually a naturally extroverted person. It actually is something I do need to focus on, and you know, it's not like I get all my juice out of that. So it is a consciously done thing, and I think out of, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of interview requests and, and would you write an article about or whatever, I think I've only turned down one that just seemed to be a bit sleazy. My wife is my chief executive assistant. She provides a little bit of a filter for me about those kind of things. But I take advantage of all of that. So that's job one.

Okay, so just saying yes to every opportunity.

Saying yes to every opportunity. And also, just in terms of my stuff, many times, much like Buckminster Fuller used to say, he never He never— he learned what he knew by talking to people, because he said he had a BS meter that would go off inside of him if he was talking to people. That's where he learned, and I'm pretty much the same way. So it's not only a one-way street, meaning you're helping other people out there, but I also matured a lot of my thinking about what I was doing and how to express it by doing that.

You're a guru of time management and getting things done, so give us the lay of the land and then we'll do a little deep dive. You ready? Yes, I'm ready for this.

Your head is for having ideas, not for holding them.

That's it. That's it?

If you get that, you now have the key to keeping creative space in your brain to be able to have a lot more room to be a lot more creative, have a lot more fun, fulfill your life a lot better. Most people are walking around, most, 99.9999% of people are still walking around with the constipated psyche with all the stuff they're trying to manage, keep track of, remember, remind themselves about or whatever. And you know, that is so suboptimal.

My mouth is open because Because I just got it in that one sentence how profound that is. And I think about— you want to say basically— say it again so that the world can hear.

Your head's for having ideas, not for holding them.

Your head is for having ideas, not for holding them. I'm guessing that's getting retweeted around the world right now.

That I need cat food should pop into your head once. If it pops in twice, you're not handling your appropriate engagement with your cat or its food. Right?

I mean, why have an idea twice?

The reason you do and the reason things pop into your head for the most part is simply because you're not yet appropriately engaged with whatever that thing is, and it's got you as opposed to you got it. So interestingly, you have to learn the skill, and what I just discovered and developed and really recognized— I didn't make it up, this is nothing new. Sure, this is humanity. Well, yeah, what I did was make explicit what we implicitly do to get things done. But the truth is that you actually have to use your mind to get stuff off your mind. So a lot of people now, well, I want to have a clear head, go, um, you know, or drink or something to clear your head, as opposed to, "Wait a minute, why is this on my mind? And what do I need to do to get it off my mind?" And that actually requires thinking. Those are two very important questions. I know that's bad news for everybody listening to this. Thinking is required so that your brain can actually think.

So let me try and apply that. The worldwide audience that's tuning in right now is largely creatives, people who are learning a new skill, want to acquire a new skill in photo, video, design, art, music, entrepreneurship, for example. I feel like if I'm gonna be the test monkey here and apply what you just said to me, that when I— like, my best moments are when my mind really is the most clear. It's the most sort of empty, and I can— I'm able to take on a thing and do it. You need your—

your paints need to be organized before you start painting, right?

Because I need to know where mustard is, and I need to know where cobalt color is.

Absolutely. I mean, if you're gonna cook, how do you want your kitchen to start?

You got friends coming over in an hour.

Is that why we clean our room before we do before we study for the test. It's why your car drives better when you get it cleaned, you know?

I coached one very senior executive in a very large company whose average backlog of email was 4,000. His biggest issue was the fact that his calendar was booked for the next 2 months. Hardly anybody could get in because of his schedule. Why was his calendar booked? Because people couldn't get his input to be able to okay or get his authority to move on the things he had tasked them to do. They had to get in his face, so they needed a meeting. After I coached him, I've never seen anybody change that significantly that fast, but then his backlog went from 4,000 to zero. What happened was, you know, he started cleaning up his backlog and keeping it clean. Then what happened was the pressure came off his calendar. Why? Because people could get a response within 24 to 48 hours by simply sending the guy an email. Huge change in his culture simply because of his responsiveness. By the way, the sensitivity of a nervous system pretty much indicates where you are on the food chain. So organizations that do not have that kind of instant responsiveness or people who don't have that responsiveness basically put you further down on the food chain.

Over the years, I've just found consistency, because the seeds— boy, especially in my business, seed planting is just amazing. And it's probably true, I mean, come on, Stephanie, it must be with your business and anybody's out there. Yeah. You know, with a restaurant or anything else, it takes a while to build there, but you just gotta stay there, and you gotta keep doing what you're doing, and keep putting one foot in front of the other. And that consistency, I think, is something also people— that resonates with people.

I'm so glad you said that because I am always beating my drum of consistency. Do your marketing consistently and you will get results. And the whole seed planting, it's just—

I love that message.

Yeah, I've had people come back, you know, boy, years later, sometimes 8, 10 years later. Go, David, I met you at X, Y, and Z, da da da da da, I'm now in this position right now, you're exactly what we need. And I Holy mackerel, you know, how long, you know, did some of these seeds take to grow? Some of them pop right away, obviously, but you just got to keep, you know, Johnny Appleseed, you just have to keep spreading the seeds out there wherever you can and in whatever way you can. You know, a good friend of mine, Jack Canfield, he wrote, you know, Chicken Soup, and, you know, Jack's got the great story. I mean, they, you know, no publisher would take it. They filled his trunk with the books and they just drove around the country, you know, just talking about it and taking every single radio spot and interview that they could. You know, at some point it reached a critical mass, you know, and sort of tipped over. But— and I think there's wisdom in that. If you believe in what you're doing and you love what you're doing, you know, just stick with it and keep course-correcting. Pay attention to feedback and, you know, stick to your guns.

In your first TED Talk, you said that the brain is not necessarily good at multitasking, but it actually is a good planner, but it doesn't always know what to be telling you at the right time. For example, 3 in the morning, you're thinking about the guy at work who you can't do anything about. But you said in the long run, your mind does plan things. It plans reproductive decisions, eating decisions, and things like that. Yeah. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

Well, the mind naturally— we naturally do a lot of that stuff. And all I did was recognize what the process is that we go through when we do that. It is kind of interesting. I don't know that I have the solid answer to this yet, why everything I talk about in the book is easy to do. It's stuff we in a sense naturally do. You will naturally, you know, plan, you know, the natural planning model is called that because that's how you got dressed, that's how you walk, that's how you talk. You know, you have an outcome, you have a reason to be doing what you're doing, you have a vision of it being complete, and that then generates all the potentially meaningful things you need to consider, and then you sort those and organize them, and then you take an action. So we're doing that all the time, and yet when people, they don't really apply that same process in much larger or more complex kinds of things in those kinds of ways. So it's really sort of like learning from the smart part of us. Right.

So you deconstruct the smart part of us and apply that to those longer, those other pieces that we don't seem to do the smart things.

Yeah, and that too, I just did a tweet because I was reminded of it. I was doing another interview. That if you— you need to make action decisions when you're smart so that when you're dumb you do smart things, right? Because see, it's the smart people who really realize you're only smart and inspired in very random moments. So when you're smart and inspired, you want to use that to capture the results of that and then park the results somewhere where then when you're kind of thick and stupid, which is the majority of the time, you actually do smart stuff that you figured out back when you were smart.

What happens if you got a whole list of all the stuff to do and you're not doing any of it? Relax. You know, enjoy. Have fun. You know, procrastination simply is not doing a bunch of stuff, and sometimes the thing that you need to do is stop doing anything. As a matter of fact, how good you are at this getting things done methodology is often indicated by how well you can do nothing. People have a hard time doing nothing. But we know now, in terms of brain science, that you need as much time to let your brain relax, and be spontaneous, and daydream, in order to refresh its decision-making cognitive power. Because you only have a limit of that. And so, if you're not napping, if you're not getting enough sleep, if you're not backing off and letting your mind just relax and wander, then you're sub-optimizing your cognitive abilities. So, you know, yeah. Most people procrastinate though, because they're afraid of stepping into something you don't feel like you can be successful at. So just the simple idea of deciding what's the very next action I need to take. Oftentimes people's lists do not have next actions. You'll see things like on somebody's list— How many of you have something that looks like a to-do list somewhere? Anybody? Yeah, 99% of every to-do list I've ever seen is an incomplete list of still unclear stuff. You'll see things on a to-do list like, "Mom." Oh, good. Well, it's good historical data. You probably had one. You know, why did you write it down? "Oh, well, her birthday's coming." Well, great.

What are you going to do about her birthday?

"I don't know what I'm going to do about her birthday." Right. And most people's to-do lists, when you look at them, still are reminding you there's decision-making and thinking that you still need to do about these commitments, and you don't have the energy to think and decide, so you say, "Stop reminding me. I'm overwhelmed." So your lists become very unattractive to you. So there's lots of reasons people may have a high barrier to entry to start engaging with the things that you're committed to.

Actually, mess is cool. Actually, the most productive times I am is when I have the freedom to make a creative mess. You too. You need— I need— I need room to be crazy, to make some mistakes, to brainstorm, to be chaotic, go a little off the edge. That is going to be your most productive time. Is when you have that kind of freedom to do that. However, folks, if you're already in a mess, you ain't got room to make one. If your kitchen's a mess, you don't have time or the energy to have a creative dinner for your friends. If your desk and your office are a mess, you don't have room and space to be, you know, crazy about some new project and spread out and have brainstorm with ideas. If your email is backed up on you with 1,000 unprocessed emails and you got 3,000 other things going on in your head, you have no space to take advantage of discretionary time that may show up in terms of being creative, in terms of your energy. The results of that, if you're trying to use your psyche to manage that mess and you never get out of it, is you get the results of two things that are the critical elements of self and organizational productivity. You'll lose perspective, that is, you lose the ability to put your focus where you need it, on exactly the thing you need it, at the horizon you need it. And/or you may be experiencing the results of what happens when you lose control. That is, I now don't have stability, and I don't have the freedom in my head to be able to put the appropriate attention and execute on it when I do. So those are the two key elements. Folks, you can't manage time. You don't mismanage 5 minutes and come up with 6. The only time that you think you need time management is when one or both of these two dynamics is suboptimal. Either things need to be more under control or more appropriately focused. If you map those two things together, what do you get? If you— on the bottom left here, where you got no control and no focus. Ever been there? That's your basic victim experience. You know, driven by latest and loudest. For the most part, most of us are thrown there by our own overcommitments and creativity. We're just trying to come up for air. Now, if that part of you shows up that has high focus and perspective, but no control, now you're the mad scientist. Now you're the desperate artiste. Now you're the crazy maker with all kinds of crazy ideas and no constraints of what you're doing. Nothing very well organized. Middle of the morning, you decide to go buy the new iPhone, but your IT department won't support it. On the other hand, you could get down in the weeds and say, "Oh wait, I need to get 10,000 things organized. I need to get all this cleaned up." And now you get into micromanagement. If you don't have appropriate focus, you can get down on those weeds and hung up in them like crazy. And you'll spend a lot of time, you know, doing a lot of trying to get organized about things that may not be that important. Right? In the morning, you were crazy maker, said get a new iPhone. The afternoon, you spend 2 hours of what could be a strategic afternoon trying to set up the right ringtones. Here's what's true about all 3 of those, folks. You ain't ready for what's coming towards you. You will be suboptimal in terms of your ability to handle the surprises. And they're coming. Good, bad, or indifferent, they're coming. Trust me. And you want to be optimally available for those things when they come to you.

It's great to complete things. So it's, you know, that's a lot of, you know, we know when we finish anything, there's a part of us that sort of reaps energy out of that. That feels good. Those are your best days when you got, you handled that, you turned that in, you bought that thing, you got, you fixed that, you got the light bulb screwed screwed it in and it worked and wow. So those are your good days when you actually finish a lot of stuff. There's a lot of value to completing an open loop. How— and at the same time you don't want to feel bad if that loop is not closed. And that's a lot of what the GTD methodology does is like, look, you don't have to finish all this stuff in order to get it off your mind. But you do have to identify what it is and trust that you'll see it at the right time wherever you are with it at whatever its status is. So, yeah, you don't want to— you know, there's a whole new idea that goal setting is really not the best thing to do, especially if you set a goal and feel bad until you get the goal, right? Because then you're not appreciating the process of moving toward it. And so you don't want to be able to create frustration or guilt or, you know, undermine your energy by having some only future ideal win.

Is goal setting just as a pure exercise bad?

No, no, you're setting goals all the time. That's how you got dressed, that's how you talk, that's how you walk. You're always— you're seeing yourself out the door and then you will fulfill the picture. So we're setting— you can't stop actually because you're a teleological being. You're always moving towards something. There's a part of us that's always attempting to expand, express, fulfill, complete something. I mean, Just look, just look around. I mean, just anecdotally anyway, that everybody's doing something. Even when you're not doing something, you're doing that. So there's an intentionality still there.

But like a goal of, I'm gonna be a billionaire in 3 years, da da da da da, might not always be the most productive thing.

It depends on what you're doing with it. It depends on whether it's running you or you're managing that call. Hey, here's a picture, here's an image. Let me just stick that in there, why not? It's better to have nice positive pictures and images in your head than, you know, a bunch of negative ones. And as long as it creates expansion instead of contraction, I think that's the big key. That's something that I learned years ago as a marker for me about whether things are in alignment, you know, at whatever level you want to interpret that. Is engaging in this creating expansion or contraction? You know, love or fear, so you can look at it that way. Same thing. Right? In loving, everything works, you know? In fear, nothing works. So it's, in a way, it's just that aspect of making sure. So don't beat the medium. And don't, there's no reason, there's no bad or good about any of these kinds of things, whether it's goal setting or not, other than is that the most optimal thing, way to be engaging with it? Okay.

And love or fear, expansion, contraction, that's kind of a way. And you have a gut feeling whether you're opening yourself up doing that or whether you're protecting and limiting.

Yeah. And it's also a good way for decisions. Like, ah, I don't know which way I should go. Should I change jobs? Should I move to Amsterdam? Whatever. Start doing practicing, rehearsing scenarios in your mind about whatever that future scenario is and see if that's feeling expansive or contractive.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Yogan Champkin asked me to. I hope I pronounced that okay. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it down in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know what did David say that really left its mark on you? What rule did you like the best? What clip really inspired you? Leave it in the comments and I'm gonna join in the discussion. I also want to give a quick shout out to Alejandro Baltazar. Alejandro, thank you so much for picking up pick up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It really, really, really means a lot to me. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourselves and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.

I think over time people develop their own signature, and I think it takes a while to find out what your signature really is. So I'll fast forward a little bit where I am now. We never really marketed ourselves. As I began to build a little company around the success of the book and brought in other trainers and coaches and presenters and started to build some product around that— still not a huge company, I mean, there are only 20+ of us, you know, doing that work, but we're partnering with other people out there— but as I started to do that, we really realized that the brand had kind of run out from under us. GTD, which was the shorthand for Getting Things Done, became this global thing, kind of like Kleenex and Xerox, and we didn't own it. I mean, we owned it, but we it was kind of running faster than us. And we really had to rethink, how are we showing up out there in the world? Because people would meet me or meet us and go, wow, you're nothing like what I expected you to be. I said, what do you expect me to be? They said, well, corporate, left brain, and hardworking and rigorous and disciplined and whatever. And a lot of people go, ah, you know, I probably should, but that's not me. Well, that's not us either. And so there was a disconnect between how we were actually showing up in the world and people's perception of us and the reality. So we had a really smart guy help us think through this. It's really about being authentic. So those really tie together, call— what's my signature? What's the David Allen signature? If you go to my website now, if anybody ever saw it a year or two ago, it looks very different now than it did then. Because what we decided was, look, take the tie off, you know, because I'm really kind of a hangout, spontaneous, you know, kind of guy, which is really a lot of what my methodology is about and what the message is about. But initially, we had targeted the market of the people— those are the people, the high-profile professionals and fast-track professionals were the ones who were probably in the most pain in terms of overwhelm and that could use the methodology most to begin with. But the truth is, it's for anybody, and it's now spread around the world. And our signature, in other words, our expression is much more aligned with who we really are. So we didn't really have to go anywhere. You know, many times the problem companies have is their marketing is a big ta-da, and they can't deliver on the big ta-da. Well, our tada sucked. We were delivering huge value and people were having transformational experiences, but it didn't look that way. So we said, well, there's a lot of people we're not reaching because there's kind of an inauthenticness about what we were doing.

That's been aligned now with the new website, the new brand.

Yeah, yeah, much more so. Whether it works as a business, I don't know, but it's certainly a lot more fun. Okay, totally. I don't have to show up and try to be somebody else or have to deal with people's perception of me not being who I really am. And so, you know, maybe more approachable, lowering the bar for people to be able to engage and to engage with me. You know, early on you have to kind of, you know, everybody, you know, probably gets a nice business card so that you look like you're bigger than you probably really are. You know, you start to kind of create an image and a brand around, you know, who we think we really ought to be given, you know, so we can attract people and not turn them them off. But at some point, you really need to kind of catch up with that and allow yourself to just kind of be who you are and let the world come to you that are interested in you. Okay, makes sense. But that's been as much a personal development development as a marketing development on my side.

Okay, that is fascinating. So it's another— again, there's two things happening here. As you develop in the personal development, the marketing, those two things are aligned and they're important for them both to create a successful business.

I think so, you know, but I'm not— I haven't studied all the successful businesses to say that's how they did it. I do know that in the world that we're in now, because it's so transparent and social media can spread word like crazy, and you know, that essentially that transparency— the more authentic you are, probably the safer it's going to be. So you don't have to, you know, worry about trying to be something that you're not, or gee, they thought of me as that and now I have to be that for them and then I have to be that for them. Just makes life easier. It does make life easier. Whether it makes it more profitable or not, I would think so. But I think the world gets attracted to authenticity. I agree.

And that's, I think, where the world is.

Because it's so transparent, inauthenticity, I think, shows up, at least subliminally, if not directly. Yeah. So, you know, people out there trying to create marketing campaigns that really aren't who you are, or trying to show up as something that's just somebody just writing ad copy, but then your engagement with the company, you know, doesn't hold up to that or doesn't match to that. You know, that's tricky business.