Tim Noyce Advies

Birmingham University in the UK used to have something called a “lecture cube” for gauging the speed or uptake of a lecture. It was red on two sides, white on two more and green on the remaining two.

Depending on how the students placed them on their desks, the lecturer would see a field of colour in the audience that would let him know if he was too fast/obscure (red) or too slow (white). Green meant just right…

This sounds like a device that would be useful in big meetings. Looking around the room and seeing a lot of red would mean you have wandered off topic.

I recently blogged about using GTD in large organisations: it is an ongoing story. I have been working with an IT department and we have been using GTD as a way to ”cascade” the goals of the whole company all the way down to individual projects and next actions.

The key insight is that even the most beautifully crafted strategy is just “stuff” for you until you have made very explicit what you are going to do about it. Hmmm, we know that to do when we want to get clear about dealing with stuff, we use the fundamental thinking process. The way it works in practice is that managers at each level in the organisation look carefully at the vision and goals that they have been handed and use GTD-thinking to “boil them down” for their own area.

Of course when you are a manager many, even most, of your goals will be reached by delegating projects. That means you then need to run a negotiation with your direct reports and hash out exactly how they are going to respond to you: they may surprise you. Our experience so far has shown that people closer to the day-to-day operation have very useful things to say about what customers want and how services can be improved. That may of course mean you want to add some things to your and your boss’s plate, too…
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I have a confession to make…. Recently I let my home inbox pile up for more than three weeks. It got bigger and scruffier all the time and started lowering at me while I tried to do other things. Of course something like that has a double whammy for me. I have all the guilt about stuff piling up that anyone has, plus the fact that I am a GTD coach, I teach this stuff, and should of course never have that kind of problem. Ahem.
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At one of my speaking engagements in a school I asked a few of them what was “on their minds too much” and was told by a student that he wanted to catch up with one of his subjects. So I asked him what he would do to achieve that and he said, “weeeel I suppose I’d have to start by reading the standard book”. But of course that is a sustained effort that stymies lots of adults, let alone 11-year olds. So I told him how to trick himself into doing it….
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How do you use GTD to improve management processes in an organisation? How do you ensure that people are working on things that are vital to the company? Something rather exciting has been happening to me in the last few months. End of last year I spent some time working with a department head who had very much “got” GTD, specifically because it had helped him to survive when he found himself doing two demanding jobs at once.

What started out as simply spreading the GTD principles out to his teams, training and coaching them, turned into much, much more. [...]

The nice thing about GTD is that you can keep coming back to it and discovering a new layer of meaning…
I am a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but I finally think I get Horizons of Focus…. you know, the 10,000 foot to 50,000 foot “altitudes” David Allen says ”stuff” turns up at. [...]

I have a dual relationship to GTD – I use it to keep my own world straight and I coach other people in implementing it too: I see it from both sides… Very often I find that things I picked up from David Allen’s books or podcasts resonate with me straight away, but some things have to wait for me to rack up the appropriate experiences. Today the afterburner kicked in. [...]

When I was a child my school gave us road safety training by teaching us to repeat ”Look Right, Look Left, and if All’s Clear, Cross the Road”. They had to change that when they noticed that some children were standing on the edge of the road, reciting the “Look left, Look Right” mantra and then stepping out into traffic…

This came to mind because I recently coached someone who had had a short GTD training (not from me) focussed on Outlook workflow. When I sat down with him he had his folders already neatly set up and had considerably reduced his inbox, but the first thing I saw on his Next Action list was “Alice”. [...]

I have suddenly found myself involved with two completely independent GTD departmental roll-outs at the moment. Both of them are cases where a senior manager got big benefits from using the method on his own workflow and then naturally wanted to obtain the same effectiveness hike across his whole department. [...]

You must have noticed: I learn a lot of GTD from doing things with my kids. I find children a good model: the main difference between kids and adults being that grown-ups are way better at inventing some specious reason for the daft things they are doing… [...]