GTD NYC Presentation: "Using the 'Impact Journal' to Succeed" with Augusto Pinaud

Good night, my name is Augusto Pinot, and thanks, Ray Sidney-Smith and the whole GTD New York, NYC group for having me here today. It is an honor to be here, even if it's remotely this time, for the second time, sharing with you something that is really exciting to me. Tonight we will talk about The Impact Journal. So let me start by the definition of impact. Impact is the effect or influence of one person, thing, or action on another. I want you two guys to remember this because my only goal today is to show you how to get a tool and use it to the effect or influence on one person, you. My name is Augusto Pinot, and I help people create small changes that produce big impact. I am a bilingual coach, a writer, and a public speaker, and I help people when they have lack of clarity or when they are going through life and work challenges, or when they simply need to be or want to be more productive. I have learned that small changes done consistently and together produce big impact. And that's one of the things I teach. And I would love to teach you some of that tonight. Again, after a successful career in sales and a few side hustles, as a bestselling author in 5 countries, as a coach, as a writer, as an entrepreneur, Now I decide to write my own description, and what I'm doing is helping people to connect invisible dots for people and organizations. So let me explain a little bit what I meant with that. It was through the art of observing and connecting those invisible dots that I was able to have a success-driven career in sales and business development. Many of my professional achievements were done in highly technical, competitive, and international markets. It's been that ability to look at those invisible points that has allowed me to be that successful on what I was doing. So fast forward to today, I'm using those same observation skills to help professionals and executives connect their own set of invisible dots. I coach people on how to find the hidden signals among the noise they have on their life, how to rediscover their own common sense of purpose, and how to be more productive in their life and work by committing to the impact of their results. So let's jump into more interesting things. I want you guys to consider these 3 things. Where do you want to go? Where are your impact priorities? And what are your daily and maintenance tasks? The first one, I hope you guys understand. Where did you want to go? You need to know the where. Then you need to be aware of what makes impact into that. And finally, you need to understand what are your daily and maintenance tasks. And by the way, getting things done is awesome on that last one. The problem is that most people that try to live only on their daily and maintenance tasks tend to lead an empty life. They eventually reach that place that I call success that tastes like failure. It's not more simple if you decide that now you are going to live only from the place of impact. Most likely what will happen is they will cut your power, water, and other services, and you will simply create a vortex of problems around your life. And even if you decide, well, you know what, I'm just going to focus where I want to go. Well, the problem with that is that if you do that, that component without action will take you nowhere. So these three elements are not in a vacuum. You need the three of these elements. And what I'm trying to show you today is how you can put them together. So let's be honest, if you don't know where you want to go, how you are going to get there, how do you know which task, which projects are going to cause impact, are going to get you closer to that? If you don't know where you want to go, doesn't matter. It is that reason that this is so important. This is, if you must, the compass. This is what set the direction and what should set the direction of everything that you are doing. Then you have your impact priority and goals. So let's talk a little bit about impact. As you can see in here, your impact is surrounding your where. In a bit, I will get a little bit more into what this means and why this is so important. But let me show you something else first. Those are your daily and maintenance tasks. Your goals and priorities sit between your where, the orange circle, and your daily and maintenance tasks, the purple one. So when you look at that, it sounds simple. So what is the problem? You know, I'm sure you know where to go, you know, therefore you should know where your priorities and goals are. For me, that was exactly the issue, and for many of my clients— that's exactly the issue. It seems that for many people, they know where they want to go, and they can work with their task, their daily and maintenance task, but they have not really an easy way to connect them. The problem most people have is they have 2 out of the 3. No wonder it's so hard to connect where you want to go with your daily and maintenance task. The 'where do you want to go' bounce inside your daily and maintenance task, and every once in a while they make contact and you get clarity. But sadly, soon they will move and you will lose that. If you don't know where you want— where you are going, any road will get you there. You don't know where you are going, doesn't matter. I know more people that have taken any road at a certain time of their life than the people I know that they're always taking the right road. It doesn't matter if you walk in a weird road or in a random one. We all have done it. Okay, maybe not you, but many people I know and I have coached, including myself, have. It is hard to work on a road and follow a bunch of tasks and hope that those tasks keep you on track. Honestly, most likely they will not. As important as your daily tasks are, they are going to tend, they tend to derail you from what you really want to accomplish, from what is really important, from what will produce that impact in your life. When I begin my research for Connecting Invisible Dots and the work that produced the impact journal you will see tonight, I begin asking clients, other coaches, productivity experts about the where, their principles or goals for impact, their task. And I was really surprised that the answer I almost universally got— I ask if they opened their system in the morning or night to check those impacts, to check where they were. And the universal answer was, I didn't want to see the system. I knew there were going to be things nagging at me, things that I didn't want to do, things that I ignore. Things that I conveniently forgot, so I didn't open, so I didn't need to see those things. And so did I. And for that reason, most nights I missed the opportunity to create impact in my life. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Wayne Gretzky, the Canadian hockey player, said you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Guess how many shots I was missing because I was simply ignoring my priorities, my goals, and my where? Yep. You read right, and you hopefully you guess right. 100%. So I begin calling again those friends, those experts on the productivity area, you know, the ones that I know don't do these kind of things, the ones that I think do much better than what I'm doing. I talked to one, the other, and another, and after many conversations, I reached an interesting conclusion. I knew a lot of productivity, productive people that were missing exactly the same shots. They weren't doing much better than what I'm doing. The most interesting thing for me was that I wasn't the only one not looking at those tasks in the morning or in the night or in the middle of the day. So think for a moment Are you doing differently? And if you do, let's talk after this, after this. Otherwise, let me continue with the ones that are with me in this boat. So obviously something was missing. The question was, what? My answer was the Impact Journal. You can complete more and more of this daily maintenance task. You can double tomorrow what you do today and double the next day. You can even do stuff and write them down so you can cross them and feel that you accomplished something, that you have done it. And you and I know people that have done that. Your daily and maintenance tasks are important, don't take me wrong. As I said before, if you focus only on impact, your life will collapse. But let's be clear, with your daily and maintaining tasks, you may be able to do fun things, you may be able to do the things that you enjoy, you may be able to bring your favorite ideas from other systems, but at the end of the day, all that you will get is a temporary satisfaction that you crossed something as done. Most of the time, it will not bring you closer to the path, but distract you to the past that you are trying to get the path of your dream destination. So let me share with you what I knew. I was missing the opportunity to create impact. I wasn't acting on my impact task. I wasn't getting close to the place I wanted to reach. And I wasn't paying attention to many of my tasks. So as I said, my first step was to go back to the books on productivity. I began reading them as if I had missed something in the past. I needed to understand what I was calling impact much better. What I found was really fascinating. So in the impact arena, There are basically two schools, Dr. Stephen Covey and the David Allen School. So Dr. Stephen Covey basically says, you decide where you're going and plan everything from that high level to the lowest task. Buy bread. Interesting, except that I have no clue where I'm going. I'm not sure if I need bread. So you go then to the David Allen School, and David Allen says, well, nope, that's not how you do it. You begin from the bottom, buy bread, and then from there you build up to your mission in life, or 50,000 as they call it. The problem is, by the time I reached 50,000, everything in my life changed. So let's talk about the impact journal. The impact journal is designed for you to define the direction, your where, your priorities, and revise them daily. And for every 13 weeks, you evaluate not only where you are, but also where you are going. So the impact journal has basically two pages, a morning page and a night page. So your morning page is designed to center you on what are going to be the next hours of your day. So you begin the day with an inspirational quote. From there, you go to what you are grateful. Studies show that if you begin your day with gratitude, your day is better. You deal better with what happened, your attitude is much better. Then you go to your where. And your where is usually your top 3 personal things and your top 3 professional things. So I have coaching clients who have time and space for my mind and my spirit, be the light of Christ, be an amazing husband, be an outstanding father. On the professional side, my first one is teach people to connect invisible dots. But I have people who says be the best realtor, provide for my parents, provide for the, help grow the business. So really you need to define what are those things, what are those where, where are you aiming? From there, we are going to have the goals and objectives. So that's what the 10 things you're trying to accomplish in the next 13 weeks. And then we are going to write the what I want. The what I want is what you want to accomplish in the next 3 years. With 10, studies show that we overestimate what we can do in a year but underestimate what we can accomplish in 3. What this will allow you to do is revise them often enough, hopefully daily, that you are going to be able to see the opportunities, grab them, and run with them. And after that, what has my attention this morning? What happens when you begin filling up your impact journal is you're going to remind, oh yes, I need to order coffee, oh yes, I need to buy food for the cat. Don't go to your system as you're doing this exercise. Write it down in there, and then when you finish, transfer to your daily and maintenance task system. Then we have the night page. The night page starts with the question, today has been. And one of the interesting things working with my clients as well as myself is how powerful that question is when you don't think about it. Many times you get home and you're grumpy and you sit on the journal, today has been, and you think you're going to write awful and instead you write wonderful. That immediately shocked your system and made you think, what made you write that? And what happened is, yeah, the last half an hour may have been awful, but the rest of the day was really good. What that allows you to do is to put your day into correct perspective. After that, we are going to do again the where. We are going to type or write again your goals and objectives. And then we are going back to gratitude. But see how the question changed. Now it's today I was grateful. So it's for you to search what you were grateful about the last hours. And at the beginning it's really, really tough, but over time you begin to appreciate the little things that are happening through the day. Then you go back to your 3-year goals, what I want. And what I want could be material, could be non-material, could be everything you want in those 3 years. And finally, at the bottom of the page, there is a space for habits you're tracking. Why? Because it's important to keep track of them. And you are going to find, as some of my clients has happened and has found, that tracking those, you begin getting more of them. So, so how we do this? Well, I, on the journal, I recommend people to take at least 3 days to set this up. The first day, make a list of your personal priorities and have fun. Okay. You don't think, oh, 3. Okay, fine. House, wife, and kids. No, no. Have fun. Envision that. That's how I have clients who go and said space and time for mind and body. You need to have the feeling what that priority is. You need to Define it so you get a really strong one. On your day 2, then we are going to do the same, but now for your professional, for your careers. And again, have fun. If you want to write the novel, then imagine what that means to you. It's not, oh, I want to publish a book. No, no, what that means to you. On day 3, we are going to work on the next 10 years, on the next 3 years, sorry. Dream what you want. Dream not only where you want to be, what kind of material things, what kind of experience, what kind of adventures. You know, go wild, go big. And after that, then look which ones are you going, which are the 10 you are going to be focusing. In the next 13 weeks. As you do this, you are going to be and discover a level of clarity that you may have never seen before. So I begin talking about impact, and I said it's the effect or influence of one person, thing, or action on another. The first problem is that I want impact on more than one thing. And the second problem is I want to do it often enough. Let's be honest, my concerns as a parent of an 18-month-old baby are completely different than the concerns I have now that she is 11. And it's going to sound scary, but it's going to be completely different than when she is 14. Add to that equation my son, our house, organizations we want to help, my parents and my in-laws who are getting old. Impact is a fluid concept. You cannot handle a fluid concept with a static system or a static answer. And that is the problem with the Covey School as well as the Allen School. It, they seem that they aim is way too rigid. At this time in my life, my influencers are all fluid. They change, they evolve, and I'm sure yours too. And that's exactly where the problem is. Therefore, I need to understand that in order to create impact, I need to see the end of the road while at the beginning of the same road and predicting where I'm going to be at a certain time frame. I was exhausted after trying to think that for one of them, forget about all of them. But you guess right, sometimes after you see certain things, it's hard to unsee it. And that begins bothering me. And that's exactly what put me time to research this Impact Journal. The question was how I was going to manage something that was fluid, but give it at the same time some structure. At the beginning, I tried for myself and my clients a month. It was too short. Then we get into 6 months. Now it was too long, too many things change. That's how we reached 13 weeks. 13 weeks so far has proved to be challenging enough to envision, but at the same time fun and fun enough to accomplish. So I got fascinated with that word number and began playing with it Monday through Sunday for 13 weeks. That's why I chose that the impact is for the next 13 weeks, family, personal, work, doesn't matter. If you don't consider that doing that it is going to completely change your current output or impact, nothing will. That promise and guarantee I can make. So remember these 3 things: where do you want to go, where are your impact priorities and goals, and what are your daily and maintenance tasks. Where do you want to go? You really need to know and feel where. Your daily and maintenance tasks, you need to do those tasks to keep you alive and functioning and be part of the society. And as I said, that's where Getting Things Done do an incredible job. And finally, your impact task and impact system, this is the tool that will connect your daily task and the place you want to go. Thank you very much, and again, my name is Sigouz Toupinat, and I help you create small changes that produce big impact.