Episode 08 | Part Two: 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.

Welcome back to the second part of my interview with David Allen, the bestselling author of Getting Things Done. David, some of my biggest heroes are Steve Jobs, Gandhi, Richard Branson, And to me, you're the Elon Musk of productivity, just breaking all the barriers down and fixing things. You're my productivity mentor. Is there some success story of people you've interacted with in your career that you could share?

You know, there's several, but some of them I can't just because of confidentiality and my coaching, I can't share. But somebody who was quite public about all of this, For 6 months anyway, was a guy, and he says I changed his life, a man named Howard Stern.

Wow.

If you ever meet Howard, we actually had breakfast together in Beverly Hills one day. It was like total mutual fanboys. It's like, oh my God. Of course, he's about a foot taller than me.

Yeah, he's huge.

So there's a picture of me somewhere. But Howard, he kind of got this. It allowed him to maintain his— the Sirius 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. And so, you know, Howard, just all you have to do is go back. I, I'm, I'm willing to share this because Howard did this over radio for 6 months.

Yeah.

Oh my God, you guys gotta roll David Allen. If you don't, you know, you're stupid. Will Smith and, and Robert Downey Jr. have been champions of my stuff, and they've been a little bit public anyway. They've mentioned You know, my stuff. They give their books to their— all their people. Of course, they're running— all of them, Howard and, and, and, and Will and Robert, are all running business, big businesses, in addition to their entertainment careers.

Yeah, a lot of people don't know that, that a lot of these celebrities are also entrepreneurs.

Oh, huge. Yeah.

Benjamin Franklin said, lost time is never found again. And I think time management is the most important thing for entrepreneurs. Organization, time management, all that sort of thing. Productivity in general, which is what You know, your, your getting things done focuses, right? And I wonder if in your research and working with people, specifically entrepreneurs, why is it that when you talk to entrepreneurs that they can be so smart and so talented, have subject matter expertise, but then they're just all over the place? For these entrepreneurs to manage this, the suggestion, Jet, you made earlier about just writing things down and stuff. How do they do that in a day when things are coming at them? It's like a bug in a windshield. The entrepreneur is the windshield and the bugs are just bam, bam, bam, bam, all these different thoughts and things they have to act on. How do they make time to manage all of these thoughts and all of these things they have to worry about on a daily basis?

It actually doesn't take a lot of time to do it. You need to learn what the process is because you're not born doing it. I worked with a lot of entrepreneurs who started to get this and they said, wow, it's fine to have the bugs keep splatting on my windshield, but I need to wipe it off. I need to then decide what it is and where it goes. And so I don't keep the bug on my windshield.

Right.

And what do I do with that? That won't happen automatically. We're not born, you know, doing this. What's so strange is because, as you probably know, Greg, I mean, the stuff I came up with is stuff It's easy to do. Everybody's doing versions of it. Anybody who's keeping a calendar is already doing this. They're already writing stuff down and putting it, you know, come on. So the bug on your windshield is, wow, the banker wants to meet with you 'cause they wanna give you $1 billion, but let's meet on Thursday at 3 o'clock. I guarantee you that entrepreneur is gonna write that somewhere.

Mm-hmm.

So that sense of learning how to be present amidst that maelstrom, that's a martial art. I just figured that out. I figured out what the martial art is. I still have to do it. You know, it's not— it's— you don't take a pill and then you never need to do this again. Come on.

It's constant, right? It's constant, like being healthy.

Yeah, but the cool thing is it's like, wow, how cool is this? How many opportunities do we have that things are not static, that it's changing, that we have these new opportunities and things to do? I empathize with the entrepreneurs that say, yeah, there's a lot at stake here. You know, I've got a lot of creative ideas. How do I manage that? How do I manage all these different hats that I have to wear, you know, in the process? And that's why it becomes that much more critical for them to externalize all this stuff, get it into some external brain, you know, list down all the possibilities and then categorize them appropriately.

One of the things that I wanted to ask you is, you know, I always think about this, you know, in Sean Covey's book, you know, he talks about the whirlwind. And I think about the whirlwind because a lot of people, they go into the office and it's like they snap down the safety harness in a roller coaster. And then all of a sudden the day's over, the roller coaster ride releases you and you walk away and you don't even know what happened in the middle. I say people, it's surface noise. And so it's like walking into, you know, when you go into the shade and there's a bunch of insects and you walk into it, it's just, they're all over the place. And those are all these random thoughts, this whirlwind of Static that you walk into. So what you're saying then is that each one of those individual insects in that static haze of thoughts are individual thoughts. And as you start to manage these things, there's less and less of them. Is that sort of the, the idea then? If you— otherwise, when you're jotting them down, they're in your subconscious and it's just this constant, like, haze of little tiny thoughts that are just eating at you and cause anxiety.

Well, if you don't give appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves. As soon as I need cat food pops into your head twice, you are inappropriately engaged with your cat. So if you don't handle that, cat food takes up a whole lot more room than it should, right?

Yeah.

The counterintuitive and yet intelligent thing about GTD is you need to be as equally rigorous about the little tiny weird stuff as you do about the big stuff so that the little tiny stuff doesn't take up more room than it should.

So when you think about this now, this whole COVID thing, you got all these people working from home and this situation and this podcast is really timely 'cause all these people are working from home now and they find themselves not just being distracted by work, but also being distracted by being at home. What would be your advice, I guess, for people who are at home, working at home for the first time? A lot of these people have never done this before, so they've never had to face the obstacle of distractions in their personal life and business life in the same moment, in the same venue.

Those people need to define essentially what their space is, where they need to do work, where they need to then spend time with kids, where they need to spend time doing other things and managing all of that, and then getting agreements with any other You know, people involved in that process. You know, interesting, I mean, as you mentioned that, I mentioned, you know, one of our biggest champions was the head of executive development for a small little company called Siemens. Small little company. 450,000 people, right? He was in charge of basically 5,000 executives in terms of their own development. And Nick was a great champion of our stuff. And, you know, being a German and being in Munich and being in their head offices, for him to to decide that he needed on Fridays to work from home to do his weekly review. He said that was so out of his comfort zone as a German company. It's like, oh my God, wait a minute, you're at home, you know, as opposed to, you know, being on the gate. And so he was there. He said his biggest problem initially was his wife would come in and go, oh gee, dear honey, could you?

Yeah.

Actually, so she got coached by our coaches there. And then she got it. She understood. So they're then creating boundaries called, okay, this is work time. This is a workspace. This is where I do that.

And creating boundaries means talking to your spouse or your kids or whatever and saying, hey, listen, this is my time to do this kind of thing. Is that what you mean?

Exactly.

In your TED Talk, you said the art of productivity is a martial art, and you've brought this up a couple of times on this call. A lot of people don't do martial arts, so if you're not doing it, then you may not understand. and connect that reference?

Martial, as opposed to just art, means you're dealing with surprise, you're dealing with engagement, you're dealing with challenge on you. That's the martial aspect of it. If you're a ballerina or pianist or whatever, you still have the challenges that the art gives you that you need to deal with. But the martial artist has to deal with, wow, how do I get— how do I appropriately and optimally engage with something I didn't expect that's pushing itself on me that could kill me? Right? That's why I say, you know, GTD is a martial art. It's like, oh my God, how many things are piling up? Anybody listening to this, things are piling up while you're listening to this. Right? They're attacking you from the left corner. Right? That email. Right? That thing, that, that, that idea, that whatever are coming at you. So these things are coming at us, not only from the external, but the internal. Oh, yeah, I should, I Ah, here's an idea, whatever. So in a sense, you're being— I hesitate to use the word, but in a way, you're being attacked by opportunities.

That is exactly what happens to entrepreneurs. They get attacked by opportunities. And constantly in my investment companies, you're— it's like constant telling them to focus on something. They're, they're just all over the place.

Sure.

And that's it. They're getting attacked by all these different opportunities and ideas and stuff. And this helps them manage. I tell them all to read it. I'm like, you have to read Getting Things Done. You need to read this.

Yes. Well, it helps clear the deck so that you can make better intuitive choices about how you engage with that opportunity or that new input. If you're loaded up with a whole lot of unconscious, uncaptured, unclarified, unorganized stuff that's landed in your life, you're going to be driven by latest and loudest. Don't shoot the messenger, guys. Prove me wrong. That's what's going on out there for so many people. So you need to capture the stuff that has your attention, clarify what it means, You know, what's the next step? Is it something to move on? And what does moving look like? And what would the final outcome be you're committed to? And how are you going to organize the results and reminders of that in some sort of trusted external brain so your mind, the crappy office, is not trying to manage the relationships between all those things? And then how do you step, step back and review and reflect on the whole gestalt, essentially, of all your commitments? I just talked to a guy a multi-billionaire actually, who's got 60 enterprises. And he's come to us for some potential coaching to help him deal with what he's dealing with. And that's a lot of what we're dealing with now is the most highly successful people are the most hungry to be able to get more room, more space, less stress, to be able to then manage the value they know they can be creating. But they're just, they're all filled up. They got no more room.

Mm-hmm.

How does somebody like that manage it? And basically my thing is, look guys, you need to get a map, at least on the wall. Show me your 60 enterprises, take a look at them. And then at least once a week, take a look across those and go, wait a minute, what's got my attention about that? So— That's a really good idea. Yeah, being able to step back and see the bigger game at these multiple horizons is absolutely critical. But you can't just go—

You know, I don't do that and I should do that. I really should do that. That's not in your book. That's amazing.

You could infer that in the book that says, okay, what are all those things you're committed to at that level that you need to pay attention to, that have your attention? Some of them are— many of them are on cruise control, but the ones that aren't, that needs to be a red flag. But you— how often do you need to see that? Only you know that. But I would guess that once a week is about what you need.

Yeah, I mean, I'm going to do that as soon as we get off this podcast.

I would identify all of those things, enterprises, engagements that I'm involved in right now that I should— and I use that with quotations. There's a great sign to have on your desk called Don't Should on Yourself Today. That all those things that you should be paying attention to, not because anybody else said, but because you said. And then you need to then pay the appropriate attention to what that is. Oh, that's on cruise control. That's a good control. Oh God, that reminds me. You know, I met a guy that ought to meet these people, right? And that's then where that kind of review and reflection process, which you could and probably should include in your weekly review, would really make you feel much more on top of your game.

I mean, this podcast is amazing. Now people know why you have an international bestseller. I mean, well, in a short amount of time, you could just straighten out somebody's random thoughts. It's amazing.

I may have scared everybody. So I don't know. I don't know how to say it any simpler than what I've done. And it is a simple process, but it's not simplistic. And it doesn't happen by itself. You can't trust that just because you think of it, it's gonna happen.

That's true. I am just in awe. I can't, I'm just so excited that I even get to talk to you, that I got to speak with you the first time. I'm fangirling all over the place. I don't even know how good of a job I'm doing on the interview because honestly, I'm making notes while we're talking and just very, very excited. International bestseller of Getting Things Done, published in over 25 languages. Time Magazine says this is the defining self-help book of its time. I'm really, really grateful. Thank you so much, David Allen. I really appreciate your time and energy.

Hey, Greg, my pleasure. You're such a delight to hang out with. And everybody out there, hey, stay healthy, stay safe, wash your hands, laugh, you know, and we'll get through all this.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

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.