David Allen meditated through our whole interview

Welcome. This is Sacred Business Stories. I'm Phil Powis. I'm joined by my co-host Carolina Vilky, and this is our Substack Live where really we just talk about what it looks like to build a business that's aligned with your deepest truth. And today I am very excited because we are joined by David Allen. He is easily one of the world's most influential thinkers on productivity. I know he's been named by Fast Company as one of the world's top executive coaches, or top 5 rather. And I feel like his book, bestselling book, Getting Things Done, really doesn't need much introduction. It spawned a movement with millions of fans. I know for myself early on, thinking back to when I was working in the tech world, I think it was one of the first things I read that kind of gave me a respite from the craziness and the chaos of my workday and allowed me to kind of sit back and reflect about what I truly wanted, which, if I connect back, is really, you know, it really connects to the journey I've been on the last decade. So Yeah, thank you for that, David. And something you may not know about him, which I was surprised to learn, and I'm excited to kind of dive into a little bit today, is he's also an ordained minister in the movement of spiritual inner awareness. Um, so again, yeah, thank you, David, for making the time to be here with us today.

Delighted to be here. Yay!

Yes, thank you so much, David, for being here with us, and welcome everyone who is joining our chat right now. If you have any questions, please post it in the and we would love to have your participation.

So, David, I think where I would love to start, we have this idea of a definition of what we call a sacred business, and that is connected to your ability to bring all of who you are forward, the experiences, the challenges you've had to overcome, your failures, your victories, and your natural gifts. And so, you know, and you can share this in any way that feels most relevant to you. But when you think about your long journey over the past few decades, What were some of the pivotal moments that you feel led to the work that's kind of unfolded over your, over your career?

Well, there wasn't any, I didn't wake up one morning with this methodology. You know, it was actually a long string of what I refer to as epiphanets. You know, here's a little epiphany, here's another one, here's another one, another one. Uh, and again, I dropped out of graduate school because I was studying people who were enlightened. And then I said, I want my own. And this is Berkeley, California in 1968. So come on, this was, you know, this was right time to do self-exploration and all that stuff. So I dropped out of graduate school and went on exploration of myself. So spiritual gurus, meditation, martial arts, I got a black belt in karate. Uh, and, but none of that paid the rent. I wasn't into sort of leaving the world and going for a rice bowl and cave in Tibet. Because I like good chardonnay, good-looking women, and things like that. So I said, okay, how do I, how do I maintain a life and still keep this personal exploration game going? So I started by just saying, okay, well, do I know anybody that might need some help? And so I still didn't have a career. I thought my career was going to be teaching intellectual history and universities, you know, with a pipe and with a dog and with fireplace and all that. No, I don't think so. So I found some friends that might say, that said, yeah, David, boy, I could use some help in how I organize my office and our administrative stuff. And I'm pretty good at that. I'm Mr. Lazy. I'm Mr. Efficiency, if you like, you know, like how easily can we make this happen? How early can we leave today? You know, that kind of stuff. Been a lot of my driver. So I, I went and helped a friend, uh, and it, and it worked. You know, now they call that process improvement. I was going, no, wait a minute, how much easier can we do this? What you're trying to do? I didn't know his business. I just could watch how he was trying to work the business. And then, uh, then I got bored. We fixed it. Well, I got bored. So I've been Found another gig. And then I discovered one day they call those people something and they pay them called consultant. Oh my gosh. Could I really do that? Who knew? I said, wouldn't that be cool? Because I still didn't know what I wanted to do when I grew up. So, uh, I didn't have any kind of career path or any kind of a strategic plan about anything I wanted to do about that. So I was just trying to pay the rent. And so follow my nose and work with 2 or 3 people. And then, but also my little, you know, consulting practice started to be more successful and busy and complex. People that I was working with and things that I needed to do with them, et cetera. But because I, especially the martial arts, I learned the practical value of having a clear head. You know, because a lot of my training in the martial arts to get a black belt, you need to do a good bit of meditative kind of stuff where you clear your head. You know, and I've, you know, stole the phrase from, you know, Bruce Lee's guru or sensei, mind like water. Like, how do you get a clear head so that you can be appropriately engaged with 4 people that jumped you in a dark alley? So, yeah, but my life is starting to unclear my head. So how do I get back to that? What do I do? So I started to then just, I had a couple of gurus that taught me a couple of key things that I could do that could help with all that. And as I was incorporating these kind of best, better practices about how to keep myself clear and on top of my game. I started sharing those things with my clients. And if they implemented any of that, it produced the same results they did for me. More clarity, more control, more focus, more room in my head to think about meaningful stuff. And so that became a lot of the core of what my— we didn't call it coaching back then. I was just consulting with small business owners and entrepreneurs and so forth in my practice. And then I was doing a small little workshop for one of my clients and I had a senior guy in a And a big corporation comes to sit in on that workshop and he said, Dave, we need that in our whole company. Can you design some sort of training about what you've come up with here? I said, I don't know, I'll see. Now guys, I've never had any formal traditional education in time management, business, or psychology. All this was just practical street smarts. Things I learned for myself that worked. So I went, okay. So I designed a training for him and we did a pilot program for 1,000 executives and managers of Lockheed in 1983 and 1984. That was one of the most successful trainings I'd ever done. I suddenly found myself thrust into the corporate training world. I was like, God, who knew? They went, what? As an American intellectual history major in graduate school in Berkeley in 1968, if you told me I was going to be in the corporate training world, I said, come on, what are you smoking? You kidding? What? But it turned out that was the ripest audience for what I come up with. And they were willing to pay me for my time to engage with them on that. So I wound up over the next 2 decades or 3 decades of doing training thousands of people within the organizational training venues. And also my consulting turned more into what you now call coaching one-on-one with more senior people that wanted me to sit by their desk side and help them implement this methodology for themselves. Now, I thought most of them were making a lot more money than I'd ever seen in my life. I thought they'd already figured this out. No, they hadn't. And so, um, so that wound up being a lot of what I did. Thousands of hours I spent with some of the best, brightest, busiest people you'd ever meet on the planet, uh, spending one-on-one time with them. Desk side, you know, privately, having them implement this technology that are this methodology that I've uncovered. And then I thought I was the last guy in the world to know this, but turns out no, nobody else seemed to have figured out what I figured out. And it was bulletproof. Anybody who implemented any part of this would improve conditions in their life and their work, any part of it. It wasn't like running with scissors. You didn't, it wasn't something like some new technology or language you had to learn. It was just simple stuff that most people are doing some version of already anyway. Anybody keeps a calendar or keeps a list of groceries to get is already doing this. Keeping stuff out of their head, keeping track of things in some sort of external system that they could trust to see when they need to see it. But very few people have actually really done that. About their life and their work. So I spent, that's what I spent a lot of time doing. And finally, at some point, what the hell do I do with all this now? And I had some good advisors, you know, we had a little sort of campfire meeting at my home in California. And I said, David, you need to write the book. I said, write a book? Oh my God. How do you do that? Well, never written a book. So my first action when I pulled the trigger on making that a project was to order 3 books about how to write a book. I started to learn, do you get an agent? Do you go to an editor? Do you, how do you do, do you create a business plan for the book? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of stuff. So I wound up and I, I pulled the trigger on that in 1997, I believe. And so it took me 4 years to write a book. To get the deal, get an agent, get a deal, and then to write a draft and then get it published. So, but, you know, what gave me confidence about that, because I'm not a ta-da kind of guy, I'm really a closet introvert. Uh, so even though I've done tons of keynote speaking and podcasts and so forth over the years. About my stuff. That's, I'm really most comfortable being by myself, being alone and thinking, but that's just my style. But given that, once I decided to, and by the way, to have the confidence that I could write what I had spent 20 years or the previous 2 or 3 decades learning in all of my experience, uh, to have the confidence to put that out. Like, okay, here's what I know. Here's what is true and basic, whatever. I had it. I was meanwhile working full-time with a client that, that, and implementing this methodology. And that client is one of those in the world that you would, they'd spit you out in 2 seconds if you couldn't stand toe to toe with the best of writers. With what you were doing. This was Goldman Sachs. So 1997 to 2001, because it went viral inside of Goldman, I said, well, if they can't punch a hole in it, I don't think anybody on the planet else can. So I said, okay, so let's write the book. And so I did. And then that sort of changed the world. I had no idea whether you could put me in a book. I had no idea whether somebody could read a book and get a methodology and start to implement. I knew if they hung out with me, you know, for any period of time, they'd get it because I would demonstrate it. I could show them how to do it. I could, I could personalize it, but I had no idea that you could put it in a book and somebody would get it. So the surprise to me, the first, the first weekend the book was published, some woman that I think in Philadelphia picked up my book in Barnes Noble. And she said, David, I read your book, implemented it this weekend, changed my life. I went, oh my God. This might be scalable. Meaning, wow, doesn't have to have me personally there to have people get value out of what I've come up with over all these years. And so I had no idea how popular the book was going to be. I just had to write it, get it out of my head, get it out there. In case I got run over by a bus, I said, well, at least if somebody could pick this up, you know, they have a manual about how to get control of their life at work. I had no idea. And then of course, it became a bestseller. Fast forward, 3 million copies, 30 languages, you know, around the world, getting things done. GTD is kind of known around the world. So who'd have thought? It was not a big strategic plan at all. It was just a duh, follow my nose or my intuition or, you know, wherever spirit led me. To kind of do this, take advantage of opportunities as they showed up. That's a short version of a very long story, guys. So hope you don't mind me rambling on about that.

Oh no, it's fascinating to hear you, and I truly appreciate the way you were sharing it. And it feels to me that you were just meeting life, right? Like it wasn't like a big plan and you're just like, oh, this is available right now. This is available right now. And now I'm going to work for corporations, and now I'm going to write a book. And I was reading, uh, the document that you wrote that it's really, really good, the Finding Your Inside Time. And one thing that you shared there is spiritual disciplines teach that neutral observation is the first gate to real inner awareness and enlightenment. And I was just very excited to have this conversation with you because, uh, neutrality is a topic that I have been exploring for myself and my life. And the way you were describing your path connected to that idea, that's like, it's not good or bad. It's not what I had in my mind. It's not what I planned. It's, it's this approaching life as it is. And that's my understanding as neutrality and like putting and doing with presence what is in front of you. Um, do you relate to that? Can you share a little more like that? Like, how do you apply neutrality in your life and, and, and how we can take that as a way of, uh, living and creating great impact, for example, because then now your teachings in your book, like they have like scaled throughout the whole world, but you were just meeting every moment.

Well, that's a very good question. Well framed, by the way. I suppose the simplest answer that comes to my mind is I've always been a fan of both Zen and Stoicism, and both of them have a lot to do with accepting current reality. Not trying to, not trying to change current reality. You don't have to like current reality, but you have to accept what it is because what you resist, you're stuck with. So if you're into complaining or victimizing yourself about anything going on, you're stuck. You're hung up into that. So learning to get that kind of relationship. See, getting things done really has a lot to do with people getting clear about their agreements with themselves. You talk about getting current. Write down everything that's got your attention. Oh, I need baby food. Oh, we need to get a new— should we research karate lessons for our young daughter? Should we— should I get divorced? Should I get married? Should we have a kid? Should we move? Should we— you know, come on. All that stuff. And most people have no idea how many of those things are rattling around in their consciousness. And so objectifying all those out in front of them— that's why a lot of people kind of resist the scanning-based thought process, because the first step is to capture it all, get it all out of your head, not to organize it, not to prioritize it, not to do anything else with it other than just identify it, objectify it, get it out of your head. And that in itself can be a highly transformative process for a lot of people. They go, oh my God, you know, what the hell about? And that changes a lot for people if they just implement that stage one. Of how do I get control of my environment, then you can't just leave it there. If you do, if you leave it there, you become a list manager, a list creator, a list addict, and you just make a list all over your refrigerator, all over your life, all over your workbooks and so forth, as opposed to then, okay, how do I now get that empty? What do I need to do about those things so I can mark them off and get those things off my mind? So getting something off your mind is not about finishing everything that's on your mind. It's about being appropriately engaged with it. And so a lot of what my methodology did was define what appropriate engagement is. You know, how do I appropriately engage with my cat, with my dog, with my kids, with my wife, with my partner, with my, with my work? How do I appropriately engage? Doesn't mean you finish everything. It just means I've I've decided what I needed to do, if anything, about this and park the results somewhere that I trust I'll see at the right time in the right context. So that then my mind gets to let that go. Your head's for having ideas, but not for holding them. You know, I've discovered something 40 years ago, just experientially myself, that now the cognitive scientists have validated. The number of things you can actually hold in your head before you start to sub-optimize your your mental process and your thinking process is for. That's it. The brain evolved to do some very sophisticated stuff you're doing right now. That's a computer. That's a person. That's a thing. Here's a dialogue or whatever. That's in very current time. So it did that very well. So you could notice there's a tiger coming at me. There's a thunderstorm. There's a, we need to build a fire and so forth. So those were things that showed up and that your mind evolved pretty well to do that very well, actually fast, but trying to then have something that you need to think about, which, you know, the great, the late great Peter Drucker defined as knowledge work. I actually have to think about this email to decide what to do about it. I actually need to think about whether to get divorced or to get married or to have a kid. Actually, you need to think about that stuff. That's, that's a whole different game. And the brain was not designed to keep track of all that. It's designed to make good decisions once you give it the options. But it needs to know what the options are before, otherwise it's just a squirrel running around in your head. Wake you up at 3 o'clock in the morning. Oh God, what should I do about, oh, I forgot, oh yeah, duh. So a lot of my stuff was about how do I get clarity? How do I get clear and in control of my life, as complex and busy as it might be, without feeling overwhelmed or getting burdened by what I now refer to as ambient anxiety? It's that weird, strange feeling that there's stuff you should be doing or should be thinking about or should be making decisions about, but you can't remember what they are. See, your brain doesn't have a mind. If your mind had a mind, It would only remind you of stuff when you could do something about it. It doesn't do that. It reminds you at 3 o'clock in the morning about something you can't do spit about at 3 o'clock in the morning. Like, duh. Come on. So you need to get smarter than your mind. Your mind's a fabulous servant. Once you get, once you task it to do things and to think about stuff, it does that extremely well. That's a lot of what your training and education and experience and brings to the table when you know what you're focused on and then when you use your mind to make decisions about it, to think about it, think about options, think about ways to approach it, et cetera. But that, it's not built to remember, remind, any of that other stuff. That'll get in the way of you having a creative thinking process about the essay you want to write or the business you want to create or the lifestyle you want to foster. And, you know, you could have fooled me. I thought this would be obvious to anybody once they, once I defined what the game was, they would read it and they'd go, oh, okay, let's do this. Nah. Most people are in their comfort zone with their ambient anxieties and they think they're fine with what they're doing. Or they think they're okay with what they're doing the way they're doing it. They're not in trouble yet. Once they get into trouble, that's why I don't try to, we haven't ever tried to really teach anybody between the ages of, especially any guys between the ages of 12 and 22. They go, who cares? You know, I'm fine. Life's life, life, life. And they get to 22 and get married or get promoted or get whatever. And it's like suddenly their life becomes a lot more complex. Than they thought they could handle. And so that's, you know, that's when people start to get really interested in, okay, how do I stay in control of all this weirdness that shows up and all this complexity? Again, short version of very long story.

Yeah. I'm curious, uh, yeah, it totally does. And something that came up for me, I would be curious to get your perspective on because I've always been curious about my own wiring and kind of this relationship between being and doing, because I, I, you know, and I think that, you know, you talk about this idea of mind like water and kind of being in this relaxed yet focused state. And, you know, I feel like where all of our nervous systems have kind of become wired for this, like, constant sense of motion. And one of the things I noticed for myself is that I'm pretty organized, but I will, I will, I will, you know, and I've, I've over the years, I've followed your system kind of to the T, the way it was prescribed. I've also gone down all sorts of other rabbit holes and try, you know, there's been so many people that have kind of taken your work and created their variations. Yeah. Yeah. And, but one of the things that I've found is that I will, when I find myself completely overwhelmed, I will find it extremely empowering to get all that out of my head, you know, the way that you described. And it finds— and I find my way back to this calm, relaxed center, and I'm like, ah, and I breathe, right? But then there becomes this point where it starts to kind of reverse trend where it's like all of a sudden— and maybe this is kind of what you're speaking about with like being the list manager, but like it starts to be kind of a thing that starts to like enslave me in a new way where it's like I start to feel empowered, like, okay, I can do more and more. And then I hit this point where I actually have to reverse course and say, you know what, I'm going to set the entire thing aside and just have my, like, you know, my little notebook here and write like 3 things a day. And just, and I find that my whole life, I've covered whole professional life and I've been able to accomplish some pretty cool things doing this, but I kind of oscillate between these two modes, but I've never quite found the complete study of that. And I don't know if that, or the center of that, and I don't know if that's just a mythological You know, like maybe that doesn't exist, but I'm just curious to hear your perspective on that, or if what I described is something that's pretty typical, or yeah, just any thoughts you have around that.

It's typical stuff. Most people, it takes about 2 years once they get excited about GTD, Getting Things Done, and they start to create and create and create, create more stuff. Oh, I could do this. I could do this. I could do this. Oh my God. And at some point they find themselves overwhelmed and they go, well, wait a minute. I don't think this is what Getting Things Done is really about. And it's not. And then after about 2 years, they come back and go, huh, David, you were right. It's not about getting busier or working harder or more hours or any of that. Sometimes you got to do that just to put your, you know, shoulder to the wheel and sometimes you got to do that just as an appropriate way to engage with stuff. But for the most part, no, not about that. It's about appropriately engaging with your life. You know, there are a whole lot of things I do that are not on any of my lists. But I have the freedom to do that because of my list. So I know what I'm not doing.

I love that.

And I go, that's okay. I'm going to have a beer or a glass of wine or walk the dog or, you know, just experience nature behind in my yard. And the freedom to do that. See, people meet me and they go, David, you're nothing like I thought you were going to be. They thought I was going to be buttoned down and corporate. Anal retentive and all that. And I'm not like that at all. I'm a freedom-loving guy. I mean, I'm into following my intuitive creative hunches, you know, plan as little as I get by with. But I came up with this methodology, so it allowed me to do that. So very few people really fully implement this as a lifestyle, as a thing. If they do, that moves them to a whole different level of game. So, you know, you've been on and off the wagon. You know, life's off the wagon. As soon as you have some new vision or some new goal, it's going to throw you off the wagon a little bit because you now got to recalibrate, refocus, rethink, you know, and readjust, you know, all of your commitments based on the new thing you're, you're identified with. That's fine. That's cool. That's, that's life. You know, you wouldn't. You would not want to have any challenges because you wouldn't grow. But staying on top of those so that you are appropriately engaged with the next challenge, that's the game. But I don't know what to tell you about how to do that permanently. You know, I've done that now for, God, I started getting involved with this stuff in 1982. What was that? 46 years ago, something like that. So now it's just the way I live and work. I still have stuff in my inbox because I just got a book somebody sent me, an old friend of mine wrote this book. So I have to figure out, do I want to read this thing? Do I want to write her back? What do I need to do about that? That's the only thing in my inbox right now. But it's still something that I haven't decided exactly what I need to do about it, but it's there. And so it's a trigger. Well, come on, I just turned 80. So You know, I don't get away from any of this if I want to keep clear and, you know, keep focused on what I want to do without being distracted. I still have to capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and then make good decisions about how to engage.

Mm-hmm.

So is that a, is that an okay response to what you just said?

It, it does. It helps. And, um, Yeah, I think that, you know, my— the way I've thought of it, at least the last few years, is I think I, for a while, I started making that a problem or making, you know, and, and I've just realized that I just have these different cycles I go through and I never— I, I generally don't drop the ball. Of course I do in the way that everybody makes mistakes here and there, but I find that just allowing myself to kind of honor the ebb and flow and realize there are times where I need to be like very structured and in the seat and like that level. And then there's other times where I need to let myself step back and be more spacious creatively. Yeah, I think that's, but you know, but then—

That's why we came up with, you know, what we discovered was the sort of the typical pattern for people is about every 7 days to do some sort of some version of a weekly review, some sort of review of what's new, what's changed, what's finished. You know, what do I need to now decide? Because you don't have time to do that day to day, hour to hour. You got too much stuff showing up. But you can't let it go too long and build a backlog. As soon as you have a backlog, you can't trust anything you're doing. Because there might be something in that backlog that you know or intuitive, have an intuitive sense that might be more important than whatever you think you should be doing. So you better keep it clean. So it's like, I can never, like, I empty my inbox like I take showers and brush my teeth. If I don't, the scuzz factor just gets too high. So you guys have habits you already have installed so you can stay somewhat sane and clean and somewhat current. But most people haven't really, really done that to a significant degree so their whole life could be like that. Yeah. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Bishop. Go ahead, Carolyn.

Sorry. Just, we have a question here from JP and he's asking if, is letting go the ultimate purpose of GTD.

Yeah, letting go is the ultimate purpose of life. You know, control is the biggest human addiction. Mhm. And let go doesn't mean, uh, ignore it or, or fail to engage with it appropriately. Letting go just says it's the old zone and, you know, And Stuart kind of idea, wait, look, you have to accept current reality. You may not like it, but you better accept what it is and then start to cooperate with what that is. Because as soon as you start to complain or feel like you're the victim of whatever the circumstances are, you're not in control. You're being controlled by the world. And by the way, the world is fine. I look outside and go, it's not overwhelmed at all. It's fine. It's been doing what it's done for 2 billion years. You know, it doesn't give a shit about climate control or whatever. You know, it's been up and down forever, all over everything. So it's only the way we are engaged with that world that creates the problem. And so how you are engaged with that world is your own problem. The way you're engaged with that world is different from the way your kids or your partner or your, or your, your boss or your, or your staff. The way they are engaged with that world, they're all quite unique to them. But the principles about how do you disengage from that world or re-engage in a way that you're appropriately engaged with it, those are key principles. And those will be true 100 years from now. So that's why, you know, I've been blessed to have uncovered a methodology that won't change. It's true for everybody. If you're 8 years old or 80 years old, or no matter what your business is, no matter what your philosophies are, no matter what you, if you want to be in control of your world, you need to capture, clarify, and organize the results of that in some sort of reflective capacity. So you feel okay about how you're engaging your attention and your activity. And then you need to focus on your priorities. You know, why are you on the planet? What's important to you? What matters to you? You don't care who you marry as long as what. You don't care where you live as long as what. You don't care what kind of work you do as long as what. Well, those are good questions to answer. And even then, you know, it's not going to help you necessarily decide which email to write tonight. So then you need to drop down another level, not down meaning negative or bad, it's just drop down operationally. Okay, so what's your vision of fulfilling your purpose wildly successfully. 5 years from now, where do you want to be? Where do either of you guys want to be 5 years from now? In terms of career, lifestyle, whatever. Now, if you get clear about that, is that going to help you decide which email to write first or respond to tonight? Yeah, a little bit more. And then you need to decide, well, what do we need to accomplish? What do we need to finish within the next year or two to make sure that vision happens? Our goals and objectives and plans. Yeah, right. And then you drop down to another level, which is, okay, what are the things I need to maintain so I'm healthy to get there? Your health, vitality, your finances, your relationships, your fun factors, all the stuff that you need to maintain, not finish, but that you need to maintain at some level so you've got a healthy company or a healthy organization or a healthy body, you know, to get where you want to go. And then you have all the projects you need to finish. Oh, I need to get tires on my car. I need to research this. I need to, I need to, you know, and they got projects. Most people have, if they really get honest about these commitments with themselves, most people have between 30 and 100 projects. If you include the personal ones as well. Things you need to finish that one action won't complete it. Everything from get tires on the car to hire a new senior manager, to hire, to, you know, sell the company, buy the company, uh, or move. Get a good job. I don't know, whatever all those things are that people have rolling around inside there. And then you have all the actions you need to take to buy any of the moving parts of any of those above things. And most people have somewhere between 50 and 200 emails to send, websites to surf, stuff to buy at the store, stuff to talk to your kids about, stuff you need to do. And don't shoot the messenger, guys. All I did was decide was look at what we actually do and how we make these decisions and how we get appropriately engaged with our world. And I just defined what those were as simple as I could. I couldn't get any simpler if I could, but that was as simple as they come.

Yeah, I think, um, I find it fascinating and I really love hearing you say that that's the purpose of of life, letting go, you know, because I think so many people, especially some people that are in our world, they find structure and they find things like what you're describing right now as almost being in conflict, or they, they believe that these are actually the things that are impinging on their sense of personal freedom and creativity. And in my experience has been actually the opposite of this, right? Like it's almost like if you're a painter, I mean, of course there's all forms of modes of creative art, but, you know, generally you have a canvas, right? You have that box. And then within that, on, with, on that canvas, then you have the freedom to express.

And the way I think— Organizing your brushes, you organize. Yeah, totally. Organize about things you actually just love to do. Just playing golf or painting or playing the piano or whatever. If you love doing it, you don't think about organizing. You just think, that's what I have to do so I could get it done when I feel like I want to get done. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And, and what I was gonna say, the way I think of it is like, you know, everything from my perspective starts with this idea of desire, right? It's like, okay, what do I what I truly want. And then from that space, I need to set intention, which that intention I feel is where, at least for me, a lot of this kind of organization and structure and things like what you share with GTT come into play. But then ultimately, at least my experience is then I have to— I use that to kind of get out of my own way. And this is where I feel like the idea of allowance or surrender comes in. And, you know, I'm curious, kind of going back to You know, I could even, you know, maybe find a connect this back to your early journey when you're like, all of a sudden you found yourself. And that's fascinating to me. You find yourself speaking to 1,000, you know, executives or in a corporate environment or something like that that you mentioned. My sense is I could be wrong and probably at some point it did make it onto your list, but I don't think that was the thing that was on your list. There's probably some desire and intention that came forth first. And then you allowed what to show up, show up. And so, yeah, I'm curious if you could speak to kind of that dance between— we talk of this as like structure and like essence or your creative essence. And yeah, I'm trying to put that for you.

See, the people that you would say they're the most being kind of people that I know, they are highly, highly productive. They're doing all kinds of cool shit. You know, so it's interesting because the people that, that I know and have known over my 80 years, who I would say most represent being, you know, the being aspect of it, are highly productive people, highly creative people. They don't stop doing that. They just use that as a medium essentially for a lot of, you know, what's showing up inside of them.

And, and, and connect.

It's a false dichotomy. It really is. In order to really do, you need to be. In order to really be, you also really need to do. Assuming you're on the planet. If you're on the planet, you're here for a reason. And it's a doing thing. You can't stop doing it. Even going to the bathroom, stop.

Try.

You can't. You're going to keep moving, keep doing things. You're, you're, you're, we're teleological. You're always looking towards something. Even if what you want to be is being, you're going to be moving toward that. What do I need to do about that? Okay, well, how about sit down and light some incense and relax? Take a deep breath. Yeah. What you're doing now is, it's just you're doing based upon, you know, what you think is going to get you to being. Get back to being, but you're already being. That's the weird thing is everybody is already as spiritual as they ever need to be. They just need to recognize that. Duh. I say duh, but that's taken me decades to try to even learn a little bit about what that's really about.

Yeah, I know it's a fascinating conversation because you mentioned that too, like your world cannot be ignored. And sometimes we have this illusion that like, for being, I want to find myself, let's say, we need to withdraw yourself from the world. And the way you are, like your methodology, and it's, it's that the way I can hear what you're saying is like, it's the opposite, right? I just need to find a different way to engage to what is right now. And it's not that I can shut the door, even though sometimes we would love to, or go up in the mountain and be alone. So I am being in that moment. The real being only happens in relationship to the life that I'm experiencing. Am I hearing this correct? So it's kind of like embracing more and more and more.

Well, one of the reasons that I came up with sort of the fundamentals of getting things done, you could trace it back and sort of re-engineer this back to something that I became aware of spiritually with a small s, not a capital S, but just the things you can't see. But your world, my world is about completion and creation. Those two things. You're here to finish stuff and then create stuff. You couldn't tell me anything you're doing that's not one of those. And for the most part, a lot of Getting Things Done was about completing. I need to look at all the stuff I've started that I haven't finished yet that are taking up space in my consciousness. So there's a complete aspect of it. And then there's, okay, once you're really clear, now what? Duh, what do I really want? Oh, what a question. What am I going to create? And so completion and creation are the two real key aspects of what getting things done, what the methodology was that I uncovered. I didn't make it up. I just recognized it. That's what we do here in the world. And complete could be, you know, a thousand lifetimes that you need to finish with your karma, you know, and it could be, you know, uh, you know, complete dinner you promised your kids you're going to cook, you know, so, and anything in between, but all of that's probably about the same thing. So you're here, that's all you, you couldn't, you couldn't not do those. You're into completing and creating all the time. In our culture, most people have created a lot more than they have completed. So that's why a lot of my work has been getting people to clean the rig up. You know, if you're not sure what to do, clean a drawer. Go wash the dishes, go wash the clothes, go do, you You know, go clean them, go finish them. And I guarantee you, once you do that, you're gonna go, oh wow, okay, now I could go, you know, then you're gonna generate this energy because you're closing a loop, you know, that you put out there. So I don't know, I never found anybody dispute that given their experience. So, so there, that's what appropriate engagement is. What do you need to finish? And then what do you want to be producing? What are the new things you want to then produce to finish?

Yeah. So on that topic of creation, this is a perfect opportunity to ask a question. I'm sure you've been getting a lot of this over the past few years, and I know my friend Joel interviewed you as well, but on this topic of creation and completion, you created this methodology before AI kind of has reared its head in society now. And what I see with that is like, you know, people, it's like this very addictive drug. Like people feel more productive than ever. Like they've got these AI agents creating more tasks, more ideas, more content. And it seems to me it's almost, I don't know if I've heard anyone say this, but like it almost feels like it's becoming the new passive scroll that's replacing how people have used social media in the past. But it's even more incredibly addictive because you feel like You're getting something done. You feel like you're creative. You feel like you're being self-validated. And so I'm curious on your perspective of this. Like, do you see with that today where we are, is the problem the same and just faster? Or, you know, is there anything else? That's right.

You know, it's better to be hooked on ChatGPT than to go shoot people off the balcony. Come on. There are worse hobbies to have than to geek out, you know, on all the wood view stuff that's out there. But come on. AI and social media itself is nothing more than the old laundromat bulletin board. Everything from lost cat, you know, to, you know, here's what we had for lunch. God knows, you know, so what? You know, so if that's how you want to spend your time and what turns you on, floats your boat, it's like, well, why not? Not dangerous.

What I, what I see are other things you want to be doing.

Instead of that. And you're using that as a way to avoid your path.

Yeah, that's kind of what I see where people have all these open loops and they feel like they're being productive. They share that they have a bigger mission and they feel like they're getting something done. But to your idea of completion and creation, they'll have like 20 different things in flow, but none of them are actually kind of making it out into the world. And it feels like the speed at which you can— like, I'm a huge AI user. I'm not saying I have no problem with AI, but I'm just curious about how we harness that that potential, um, you know, effectively so we don't get in that loop of just like unfinished business, essentially.

AI and ChatGPT. I use ChatGPT several times a day. So, you know, I love that. It's very fast decision support. While I'm meeting with you guys, who are you guys? So I'll do ChatGPT about you guys and suddenly go, oh, okay, well, that's kind of who they are. You give me a context. Fine. That's great. A lot faster than Google was, but it's still the same thing. It's not making decisions. It's not going to tell you what to buy your mom for her birthday. It'll give you a lot of options. You know, if you tell her that here's her favorite color, here's the things she likes to do, here's how old she is, here's where she lives. Oh, you got some ideas? Yeah, it's got a lot of ideas. That's cool. So nothing wrong with that. That's cool stuff. You know, if you know what you're doing, it's a great time to be alive. If you don't, you're toast.

That's a good way of putting it. So now we all just need to figure out how to, how to know what we're doing and not be toast.

Yeah.

I'm going to have to put you on that list.

Why are you looking at that? Well, I care about my mom and I like to support her for her birthday. Wonderful. Yeah. Good reason. Why not? So, yeah.

Yeah. And I guess going back to the question and reexamining, like, how do I want to engage with that, which is, you know, everything that you were sharing. Um, I have one question for you, um, that I read and I'm just, I would love to hear, uh, more of your perspective. You said that it's easy to sacrifice the higher orders of business for the lower. Um, is this connected to the conversation about desire or can you develop a little more on that?

Uh, now a lot of people don't really know what they're doing business-wise until they kind of clean up. That's why I, I, a lot of my focus has been having people clean up because that makes it a lot easier for them to then clarify where are they really going. I've never coached an executive and had them finally come up with all the projects that they got out of their head that they didn't change their priorities over the next 2 to 3 weeks. I didn't tell them. I didn't tell them, here's what your priority should be. No, it's not my game. They just did that, got engaged with this methodology, and then automatically got clearer about higher horizon stuff. And some people, rare, but some people need to focus on the higher horizon before they can even deal with the day-to-day stuff. Well, excuse me, what is your job really? Oh, that's a really good question. Let me try to define that. And then that tells them what they still have open loops about and what they need to do. But that's rare to find somebody who wants to start at that level in order to get down to the action level. But for most people, you know, your actions, by the way, if you look at any of your act— I don't know if you guys are keeping lists of your next actions, but if you are, you look at each one of those actions as a reason that's on there. And you could back that up, reverse engineer, why is that on there? It's because you care about what? Because you have what? And it will automatically lift your horizon. So sometimes easier to get to your horizons starting from the ground up as opposed to the other way around. But either way, it's a whole, it's a hologram. It's a holographic thing. So you can start either where. You want to start with your vision, you want to start with your purpose, you want to start with your principles, you want to start with your job description, you want to start with your project list. I don't care. Start wherever you need to. Because you're going to need to get all of that out, and all of that as objectified as you can, before you're going to be really present. Easy. Thank you.

I know we're coming up on—

You fooled me. I thought— I thought most people would have learned this who were up to any level of sophistication in their life, but no, not at all. Most people, interestingly, the most people attracted, the people most attracted to my work are the people who need it the least. Interesting. There's already people that are organized. There are already people that know the value of systems. There are already the people know that they could produce value, got them where they are. Uh, they just are out of room. They have no more space. I coached a guy, probably the most successful entrepreneur I've ever met in my life. And I could tell you his story, but, and I said, why are you talking to me? He said, David, I wake up with million-dollar ideas. I don't know where to put them or who to give them to or what to do with them. He did. He built Groupon. That's how he has his own jet. You know, so this guy is one of the best, but he was just out of room. And so it's the people who really, really, really are out of control don't even think they need this. So they, they're just like, no, they just are tolerating whatever their comfort zone's letting them tolerate.

Yeah, they're not even aware that there is a problem, like the overwhelm or the anxiety or just being busy all the time is just such a way of being that they don't even recognize that there is another way of maybe relating to life.

That's why most people don't either implement GTD or fall off the wagon or stay off the wagon is because their addiction to ambient anxiety.

Yes.

See, if you, the more excited you get about having, being really clear and really free, of all this stuff, the sooner you're going to fall out of that. As soon as you get back to being really free and really clear and you go, oh, this is how it should be, this is how it is, you'll stay there. But it's the more, the more excited you get. See, a lot of my job has been to just model what it's like to have nothing on your mind. And I just have a life that's, you know, the way I live my life. Not that there's, you never have nothing on your mind if you're conscious, but As long as whatever's on your mind is what you want on your mind, as opposed to being distracted. You know, that's a cool place to be. So a lot of my job has been to just sort of model that, that that's something that you could get to. Most people don't even know that they could, or that there is a there to get to. Mm-hmm. Good for me.

Thank you. And I know we're almost at time, but I wanted to kind of come back to one, at least one more point, which was You know, kind of talking about this other part of your life, the ordained minister piece. And you kind of mentioned earlier in the interview that, you know, you were kind of into your own spiritual path and working with gurus and this and that. And then you recognize, well, hey, I don't, I don't want to be broke. I enjoy, I think you said a Chardonnay or something like this. And so then you started looking for ways to satisfy that part of your life. And, you know, and I don't, I'm of the same mind as you. I think there is a way that some people are called to bring that spiritual aspect to the front of the work. And then there's other people where, in your case, it seems to me it's been a huge part of your inspiration, but there's no need or, you know, perception of need that this needs to be at the forefront. And so I'm just curious if you could chat a little bit about how you see the intersection. You know, we say a lot of times we use this phrase, everything is connected. And so in your life, where do you see kind of the intersection of your business persona, your life as a professional, and then how the spiritual aspects of who you are and your beingness have influenced that or intersected, if that's clear.

Yeah, no, that's a good question. And years and years and years ago, you know, I met sort of my spiritual coach, a guy named John Roger, and sort of hung out with him till I could I got everything he knew and I never got an end to what everything he knew. So he wound up doing a lot of the coaching of what I came up with and basically learning how to send the light. If I send the light to you guys, I'm doing that right now. So I'm meditating essentially all the time. I'm thinking about the light. I'm thinking about, you know, if I'm in Amsterdam, it's a great city to people watch because they're because everybody's on a bike and everybody's walking and everybody's out. And it's great. And so, you know, many times I just spend my afternoon or spend waiting for a tram just sending light to everybody on the tram or getting on the tram. And so learning how to send light is just a, you know, how much it happens. I just have to go on the working hypothesis that it works. It makes a difference. Somehow that's there. So as long as I'm giving and loving, whatever I'm doing, there's nothing else to do. That's sort of the endgame of whatever it is. So even in business, it's like, well, I need to send light to this situation that seems troublesome right now, or it's an issue. So I'm sending my best wishes for it to show up for the highest good. So for the highest good is a good thing to build into all that so that You know, kind of whatever happens, you know, you don't know what spirit has in place for everybody or everything that you're involved in, but it's like, as long as you put it in a context of, look, for the highest good, I send light to have this have some sort of positive outcome for everybody involved. There's, you know, there's no other work to do, frankly. It's kind of what I, that's just, that's what I do on a you know, almost a daily basis. Sometimes I forget and don't even think about that because I'm involved in other stuff, but oftentimes that's how I spend any of my time that I'm not truly actively engaged in something, is sending light, sending best wishes. That's why when I read the paper every morning, God, it's tough. But I read the New York Times headlines anyway, and I send light to everything going on in the world as I'm reading it. That's a habit I have. And The Guardian. So I read the New York Times, I read The Guardian. And basically I'm just sending light to all the headlines and to all the stories that are going on out there around the world. I have no idea, you know, how much effect that has. Nor do I care. Thank you. Has an effect for me. Yes. Like, oh, that's a better thing to think about than to fret about it, worry about it, cry about it, complain about it, whatever. Does that make sense?

It does. Yeah. And I think the way you describe it, it's probably like one of the best ways that I've heard, or at least that I to the being and the doing, to the conversation that we had before. Like you're here doing this, but the being is active there. Uh, you know, it's not the autopilot, like you were, you're shining your light, like everywhere you go and engage, uh, with life and whatever is coming to you.

Thank you for that. What else is there? Yeah.

And I, I really thank you for sharing that part of you here with us. And I don't know, maybe you have and I just haven't come into contact, but it— I've never heard you speak of these topics specifically. And, um, yeah, I just think it's really helpful to— for people to see examples of people who've had what I perceive as such worldly success, but to see how there's a rich inner life, you know, running underneath this, and to see that these things are not, in my opinion, actually in conflict with one another. And so, yeah, I'm just really appreciative of you being willing to go there and even say the things out loud.

I give my thanks regularly to the powers that be that somehow I was able to create a career and creating something that does nothing but improve value for anybody in their life and worth if they implemented any of it. And, you know, make a living out of it. Like, wow, how cool is that? It gives me the opportunity to then focus on the higher stuff. I mean the, you know, subtle stuff. Anything? Yeah. Cool.

Caroline, any last, last questions before we, we bring things to a close? Actually, I wanna just look at the chat real quick to see, um, we had some really great comments. I'm not sure if they had any specific questions here. Let's see. Um, yeah, just a nice comment from JP. Loved your GTD tickler file concept, uh, kind of decision freezer, trusting that sometimes the next best action is simply to take no action. Which is the dimension I discovered after many years of practicing GTD. Monique, yeah, thank you. Um, yeah, any other, any other last questions before we close, Camila?

Well, I have a lot of questions, but we are running out of time, so I respect the container. I just want to say I, I really appreciate, uh, this conversation and being here with you and with everybody listening to us. Thank you.

This is fun. Thanks for the invitation, guys.

Yeah, thank you so much. We really appreciate you being here with us and thank you for those of you that joined us live. And David, we always do like a recap of these, so we'll be sharing that out. I'll send you the link just in case you're curious to see it. Um, but a lot of people will be seeing it there as well. So thank you again for your time and much love and appreciation.

Bye.

Thank you, everyone.