Episode 08 | Part One: Getting Things Done

Gregory Shepard, an entrepreneur who's built and sold 12 businesses, a recipient of 4 private equity awards, TEDx speaker, and Forbes author. This is The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard.

Okay, I'm way too excited for today's guest. He's David Allen, the world's preeminent organizational guru. David has more than 30 years of experience as a management consultant and executive coach. He's also the man behind the bestseller Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. David, thanks for joining me today.

Hey, Greg. Thanks for inviting me.

People know you as the Getting Things Done guy, and your book has been translated in 30 languages. Why do you think this book has impacted so many people? so many people? I mean, I have my own question, my own answer to that, but I want to hear what you think.

I think it hits a basic nerve, Greg, that people have about completion and creation. I think people know that they're going to pay for things they commit to, that they have to then step up to the plate, whether it's I need cat food or I need a new business plan or I, I need a vice president of marketing or I need to figure out whether to get divorced or not. And I think people have a an internal sense that those things are internal commitments and those things start to create a spin internally. And if they don't manage those appropriately, that spin can move them to places that are very uncomfortable, stressful, and not very productive. Because your brain— most people are using their head as their office, which is such a crappy office.

Yeah.

And so they're trying to keep track of all of those open loops somewhere internally. And that just doesn't work. That's the completion piece, which is I need to get control of all that. I just made that more conscious and objective than just subjectively that people experience all the time. And then the second thing is once you get clear, once you kind of get your life under cruise control, then where are you going? What are you creating? How do you focus? And where do you put your focus now that you have that? So those 2 things are the essentially, it's kind of control and focus are the 2 key elements of how you manage yourself, how you manage your business. You need to make sure that, you know, your personal life as well as your business life are enough under control so you're not distracted by stuff falling through the cracks and exploding and blowing up. And then you also need to be aware, okay, where are you going? Where are you going in your personal life and where's your business going? So control and focus, not control like control your kids or the weather or your boss. I mean, good luck. I'm talking about control like having something under control, like your car. Or your, your desk or your head. And so I just uncovered the algorithms about how do you get control and focus. You know, don't shoot the messenger. I'm just reporting. I didn't make this up. I just identified what it is that we do when we get our kitchen under control and our company under control. What are the steps that we go through? And then how to make those more objective and more conscious so you could be more current, more complete, and more on top of your game instead of being buried by it.

When you talk about spin, you said, so you get your mind in spin. I mean, in my experience working with entrepreneurs is that they have what I call squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, when you're walking your dog and it just bolts off in one direction. And so, I always refer people and I'm like, you need to read this because it helps you get focused on what you need to accomplish. But you mentioned spin. Can you unpack what you mean by spin? You get your mind in spin.

Yeah. It's actually mechanical, Greg. You know, I just uncovered this sort of from street smarts 35 years ago, but in the last 10 years, the cognitive scientists have basically validated the fact that your head's for having ideas, not for holding them. And when you're using your head to hold ideas, thoughts, things I should, would, could, might, ought to, whatever, it starts to create a spin internally. You'll be waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning going, oh shit, I need cat food, or geez, I need a vice president, or what should I do about X, Y, and Z, when you can't do anything about it. That's spin. It's spinning.

Oh yeah, right.

It doesn't stop.

Right, and that creates anxiety too, right?

Yeah, you know, the biggest issue— I used to say it was just overwhelm, but it's not. You handle overwhelm just because you'd die if you didn't. But it's the ambient anxiety that if you're not in an immediate crisis mode, all the demons that come rushing through the gate. Oh, you could do this, you could do this. What about this? And what about that? What about that? And oh, you need that. And you told yourself yada, yada, yada.

Mm-hmm.

And that internal conversation of the open loops, the would, could, should, need-tos, ought-tos, commitments, is huge for most people, especially if you're the entrepreneurs that we're talking to right now, or anybody in a professional world, even stay-at-home dads. I mean, I'm sorry, how are they going to manage their life? Anybody with a busy life has got a lot of spin going on unless they are appropriately engaged with what those things that are spinning and appropriate engagement. And appropriate engagement is what my methodology is about. It's not about finishing. You don't have to wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and go to the store and buy cat food. But how about write it on a Post-it on the fridge so whoever's going to the store where there is cat food will pick it up? Now you're appropriately engaged with it. You go back to sleep.

Right.

If you take, take that to its maximum levels all the way across, you know, entrepreneurs have to wear so many hats. All those hats and all those responsibilities and accountabilities and then open loops about the bank and about the party and about the investors and about my partners and about should I hire and about, oh my God, should I fire? And oh yeah, yada, yada.

Yeah, yeah. All constantly. I mean, I noticed this like when I meditate, you sit there and meditate and just thoughts just flying everywhere. So that is spin. The distraction is spin.

If you think about the mechanics of it, that part of your mind, if it's only in your mind and not in some sort of trusted external brain system that you review and engage with regularly, like your calendar. That part of your head that's holding that has no sense of past or future, it seems. So all that stuff is spinning all the time. That's why your brain reminds you of stuff when you can't do anything about it. Your mind actually doesn't have one. If your mind had a mind, it would only remind you of stuff when you could do something about it. That's brilliant.

Anybody—

come on, anybody listening to this right now, do you have any dead batteries in anything anywhere? Where does your mind tend to remind you that you need batteries? At the dead ones. Duh. That's kind of dumb, right? If your brain had a brain, it would only remind you about batteries when, when you pass the right size live ones in the store.

So the brain is triggered by something it needs. But the thought of that, like you said earlier, it's for having ideas, not storing ideas. So it has an idea when it sees the battery and knows you need a battery. But it didn't store it.

Correct. And the cognitive scientists have now proven based upon tests and research that they've done, that as soon as your head is hanging onto more than the 4 things, you will start to diminish your cognitive capability. You'll do worse on tests. You won't be as good or bright or sharp or free to make good conscious, intuitive, intelligent decisions about what you need to do. And most people, quite frankly, I'm at age 75, I'm going to be a little cranky and direct here. Most people are being driven by latest and loudest, not by what's the cognitive, intuitive, intelligent thing that their inner spirit, their soul, their, their heart, their gut, their liver is telling them.

Yeah.

This is the thing I really ought to do right now. You know, whatever your source of that sort of inner intelligence is, most people don't have access to that because of all the distractions of all that other stuff we just talked about. But it's just mechanical. You know, this is not a belief system. This is not a religion. This is just— look, just go read the cognitive scientists that have written this in the last 10 years.

Yeah, or just pay attention to yourself for a day, right? You know, I know for me, I have to have like list after list after list to keep track of everything that I'm doing and anything that I'm thinking, any kind of idea I have using what you said, which is so brilliant, I write down. I think of it as like hard drive storage and random access memory. You know, my hard drive just doesn't store very much. Random access memory just comes and goes really quickly. So that fits perfectly with what you said.

Well, it is sort of the RAM of the brain. You only have a certain amount that fills up and you're screwed, you know, in terms of other things you want to be able to do. So emptying your head. And again, I don't know how long I'm going to be preaching this. I learned it 35 years ago and I can't tell you how many people I've just, and how many folks I've been talking about. It's called Your Head Is a Crappy Office. Folks, stop keeping stuff in your mind. But it is such an ingrained habit for most, most adults, you know, because your mind is so seductive. It's just gonna so convince you, oh, I thought about it. Of course I'm gonna remember that. It's so important because it's me and such a great idea. Oh yeah, right. And then 2 minutes later, when you're thinking of the next obviously thing that you're not gonna forget, you forgot, you forgot the first thing.

Yeah, it's like it replaces the thought with the newest thought.

Right. But it, but it, but it didn't go away. If it If you did, you'd be healthier. It got stored subliminally in the spin.

Okay, so it's back there, but you can't access it.

You could try to access it, or it will access you at random weird and awkward moments.

Oh, and that's why you have that right before you go to bed, you can't go to sleep and you're freaking out because there's 50 things spinning through your head.

Yeah, or you're trying to meditate and you're going, oh shit, I need cat food.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, I get it.

Or whatever.

I usually, when I start meditating, I have to have like a notepad Because I cannot get the thought. It'll just keep— thing will ping me, ping me, ping me, and I'll just sit there and write everything down until it stops.

Me too. I'm a fellow student here, guys. Yeah, I have to do this exactly like you're saying you're doing it. Me too. It's not that I figured it out and now I don't need to do any of this. Are you kidding?

It's like you figured it out and now you know for sure you need to do it.

I know the game. I'm in the game. I can't stop the game. So I just, I just kind of know how to play the game.

That's amazing. See, this is the kind of stuff when I, when I read it the first time, I was like, holy smokes, because I thought, you know, being somebody who has autism, I thought it was crazy. I thought it was me or an autism thing, you know? And then I read it and I'm like, wait a minute, this, this is normal. This is everybody. This isn't just me. I'm not special here.

Yeah, well, ADD or ADHD is only a different way to approach incoming and external communications with yourself. So it's not a— it's actually not a disease. I mean, I suppose there is a— I mean, I don't know. I don't want to pretend to be an expert.

Well, the spin is like hyperspin, right? You know, it's just moving even quicker. Like the thoughts come in, new thought comes in, new thought comes in, and then there's like a bottleneck, and then you kind of get panicked, you know, because there's so much stuff building up.

But that's why once you started to build at least some elementary strategies, as you have, Greg, in your life, And a number of other people I've coached and, and have talked to, you know, that's why there's such success created, because you're just so creative and so, and, you know, creating so many cool things, you know, associationally. Oh, that reminds me about— oh, wait a minute, that we could— oh my God, oh my God, oh yes. That's the sort of the elementary version of that sort of attentional, uh, distractibility. But it also could be You know, cool ideas. And so—

Yeah, it's— what I learned is that if I don't— I mean, now I write down everything, you know, but what I learned is that if I don't write it down, I might as well have not had the thought.

Correct.

'Cause it just gets deleted and overwritten by the new thought.

Yeah, it doesn't go away. That's the problem. If it did— and by the way, that's fine if you're able to dismiss your thinking and say, okay, that doesn't matter, it'll come back in appropriate timing. If you're really sort of, uh, elegant at mindfulness training or meditative stuff where you can say, wait a minute, that's a thought, that's a cool thought, I'm going to let it go though and let it come back in if there's an appropriate time for it to come back in. And so there is a— there is an internal process that you can get pretty sophisticated with, with yourself about that.

Oh, interesting. I didn't— okay, so if you can have the thought, let it— you know how they say it's like a slideshow or a cloud, you're watching a cloud go by? So you can have the thought, let it go, and then welcome it back when it's a good time for you to have that thought.

Or if you want some California non-nunu stuff, you ready?

Yeah.

Okay. There's a way to get stuff off your mind in your mind. If you're out for a jog, for instance, or you're in a shower and you haven't bought one of those waterproof pens and things. I actually have GTDers out there who bought, you know, a little thing in the shower that they can write. It's the same thing.

I have one of those. I have one of those in my shower.

So, so if you don't want to bother with that, that's okay. If you're in a place where you can't write something down, you're either jogging or wherever, but you go, I want to remember that, then what you do in your mind is see yourself in your mind as clearly as you can back where you could write it down. Like, imagine yourself back in your office or at your computer or at your phone or whatever it is. And then see yourself and then imagine yourself with as much elegance and emotional spin as you can put.

Oh, wow.

What a great idea. And you see yourself doing that back where you could do that. And then let it go. Because your brain, given its associational qualities, will tend to go— when you walk back into that environment, it goes, wait a minute, I've seen this before. Boom. And it tends to bring it back. So 90% of the time that works for me. It's literally a way to let your mind have an idea, park it somewhere that you say, I think when I get back into this context, you know, it will likely come back in because that's how your brain works. Again, it's just mechanical. It's pretty subtle stuff, but it is mechanical.

Yeah, that's— I'm learning here. I've been through the book, I don't even know how many times, but I have it on my desk right now, actually. So Getting Things Done, the methodology has been taught by training companies in 60 countries around the world. And you're world famous for being an expert in personal organization and productivity. And I wonder, how did you get there? I mean, did you just have a thought like these things we're talking about one day and go, I think I'm going to do this? I mean, how did you, how did you do this?

I just wanted a job, Greg. I just wanted somebody to pay me for something I could do because I didn't know what I wanted to do. I, you know, I— again, if you've read my Wikipedia, I had 35 jobs by the time I was 35. I was just kind of banging around trying to explore who I was and sort of my own personal self-exploration, you know, game. That's what I was involved in. But I needed to pay the rent, so I just had jobs and jobs and whatever. I said, God, it'd be really nice to have a job where I could help people. As I got involved in the personal growth game back in the '70s and '80s, you know, Berkeley, understood a lot about, wow, we actually can change our experience of life. We can get more of a sense of freedom, more of a sense of control and confidence in our life, you know, by learning certain techniques and being able to apply them. And so some of those techniques, you know, wound up being some of the core elements of, you know, what I uncovered, which is your agreements. You know, what are the— what happens when you manage the agreements you make with yourselves and with other people? What happens when you don't manage them? The downside and the upside when you do. And so that became essentially, hey, that's kind of cool. And then I, as you know, I had a mentor and I had— I learned some of these techniques mostly to keep myself clear as my life got more complex. As I started to move into, you know, after all those jobs, you either become a consultant or flake. So I said, let me take the positive route. So hung out my shingle, Alan Associates, 1982, '81, '82. And then started to say, okay, what can— how can I help people if I just walk in and see what they're doing? It'd be really nice to have some models that really worked. So I began to explore those, and first for myself, because of my work in the personal growth world and meditation and spiritual practices and martial arts. Got a black belt in karate in my 20s. I discovered it's really nice to be clear, very practical to be clear. 4 people jump you in a dark alley, you don't want 2,000 unprocessed emails somehow hanging around, right? So—

All those jobs, do you feel like this bumpy road was caused from the busyness in your head? And then that gave you— like, it seems like that would give you clarity on what's going on, right? If you have job after job after job, you have to be thinking, why is this happening? Is there something that I'm doing? And then have some deep insight or something?

No, I was just more—

No, not really, huh?

No, I was just going— I was more in agony about what the hell am I going to do with my life, you know? I sort of discovered— I'd sort of tasted God, truth, and the universe, you know, in terms of, you know, some of my own inner spiritual experiences. That was my primary focus, my primary value and attention. And I say, yeah, but I got it— rice bowl and cave is not my style, so So how do I somehow maintain this world? So it was really about just trying to, trying to get control of this world so that I could focus on my inner world.

Wow.

And that was, that was a lot of the driver of this. But then I discovered some of the stuff I discovered for myself, turned around with the little consulting business I had and shared that with my consulting clients. And it produced— these techniques produced exactly the same results for me. More control, more focus, more space, more, you know, more coolness and more on top of my life. And I went, wow, that's cool. So that came, that's, you know, kind of what became sort of the core of my, we didn't call it coaching back then, but I was just consulting to friends and small network of small businesses and entrepreneurs that I was working with. And then somebody in the big corporate world saw what I was doing and they said, wow, David, we need that in our whole culture. Can you design something around this methodology you've come up with that we could then reach a lot of people instead of just one at a time. Then created a successful pilot program for 1,000 executives and managers in Lockheed in 1983 and '84 with this methodology, and it worked.

That is so cool. And you might have noticed that I'm super excited for you to be here, but we have to stop right there. Coming up in part 2 of my interview with David Allen, the mastermind behind The book Getting Things Done. David tells us how he changed Howard Stern's life.

Howard, he kind of got this. It allowed him to maintain his— the series business, all of his radio businesses and his other entertainment businesses, and still have them get time to learn to paint, which he always wanted to do.

Thanks for checking out The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard. Get more on Greg's business Operating Support System, BOSS, at GregoryShepard.com. This has been a production of Forbes Books Radio.