GTD: Lean for your head

A different kind of flow

In Womack and Jones' classic, "Lean Thinking", the concept of flow denotes a state of unobstructed progression through a value stream, unhampered by waiting or wasteful steps.  This only occurs during a small fraction of a product's lead time, of course.  But as we synchronize operations, reduce inventory, and remove wasteful steps, we get more flow.  And more flow means lower costs and faster delivery to the customer.

I always found it interesting that Womack and Jones used psychological flow as an analogy to introduce the concept of flow in a value stream.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-sent-me-high-ee") described psychological flow in his 1990 book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience."   The book provided a scientific study of a phenomenon we have all experienced, when we effortlessly focus on a task for a long time, allowing ourselves to be completely absorbed. We often refer to a flow experience as "being in the zone" or "in the groove". 

Flow is a relaxed, joyful, and hyper-productive state.  When we experience flow, we can get tremendous amounts of work done without any sense of effort, and it is usually very good work.  Superstar athletes and great artists are always pursuing flow experiences.  Just watch Tiger Woods play golf, or attend a recital by a world-class concert pianist.

Knowledge workers also pursue flow experiences.  As a young man I wrote the code for the core of an Object-Oriented Database System during a forty-hour session where I hardly slept at all.  So much for work-life balance, but flow experiences are just that wonderful.  They really help bring meaning to work, making worthwhile the tasks that are not as fun.

Getting Things Done (or: Getting Flow Back)

As my career evolved and my work life became more complex, flow experiences became less frequent.  The work I loved doing (writing, abstract thinking, teaching, mentoring, reading, reflecting) was constantly "chopped up" and interrupted by the day-to-day turbulence of building a small company (I'm on my third now).  There were too many hats to wear, too much work to be done, and never enough time to just sit down and think. Sound familiar?

I always wished there was a way to find flow experiences more frequently and more reliably.   Willpower, when exercised, helps.  Meditation and martial arts help too, I'm told, because they strengthen our ability to focus.  But I always thought something more proactive was needed, something that would help us identify and remove obstacles to psychological flow.

The good news is that such a tool exists.  Over the past two years, I and several of my friends and colleagues have been benefiting from GTD, David Allen's system for maximizing personal productivity.  As we shall see, GTD has very interesting similarities with Lean and I will detail some of them here.

Allen’s book, “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”, is now a New York Times bestseller.  Fast Company Magazine called David Allen “one of the world’s most influential thinkers on productivity”, and Jeff Irby at Bearing Point referred to him as “The Henry Ford for the Digital Age”.  Business 2.0 Magazine placed David Allen on its 2006 list of the fifty most influential people changing the world of business today.  So what is behind all this excitement?

GTD is not a time management system as much as a set of practices for focus management.   It helps people achieve short-term and long-term goals while effectively coping with day-to-day surprises, opportunities, and setbacks.  GTD amounts to a very effective methodology for resilient goal-directed action.  And, it yields immediate practical results.

GTD: Designed for your brain

David Allen’s work is based on his observations of the strengths and weaknesses of the human mind.  In-process inventory is not just found in business processes.  Perhaps the most wasteful inventory is found in our own heads.  The set of unacknowledged or unfulfilled commitments to ourselves or others; everything from our life goals to our grocery list - it's all inventory.  Unless we have our mental inventory under control, each of these commitments  continue tugging at us, draining our energy, and distracting us from what we are trying to focus on. The bigger that pile of commitments is, the more overwhelmed and less in control we feel.

Another observation Allen makes is about the limits of human memory.  Short-term memory is good for generating ideas, solving problems, and making decisions.  Keeping appointments and to-do lists in memory is rather more difficult.   Human memory is also fairly limited in terms of the amount of context that can be considered at any given time.  All this implies that we should not be trying to do too many things at once, and that we should divide work up into small, manageable chunks. 

Allen stresses the necessity of setting aside time for defining work, so that when we have a task to do, we don't have to second-guess ourselves and revert to project planning or goal-setting.  By collecting and processing our own mental inventory, we reduce the stress and anxiety generated from unacknowledged commitments.

How GTD works

When we process our mental inventory (as well as incoming email and items in our physical inbasket) it has to go somewhere.  GTD helps us develop a trusted information system to reliably store different types of information (projects, actions, checklists, documents, , etc.)   This system is usually implemented as a combination of a physical filing system (for documents and statements that need to be stored in paper form), an electronic filing system as a hierarchy of folders on our computer, and a specially configured calendar/task manager.  I myself use Outlook with a special GTD plug-in.  My rolodex, calendar, and task lists are synched with my mobile phone, a Palm Treo. 

Most people can only focus on a single action from a few minutes up to a couple of hours.   Anything that requires more than one action step is deemed a project in GTD, and each project should have a well-defined next action that allows progress to be made.  Aside from projects, GTD also identifies higher-level horizons of focus, such as areas of responsibility, yearly goals, five-year vision, and purpose & principles.  These are usually represented as mind maps.

Weekly and daily reviews help GTD practitioners define their work in terms of projects with well-defined outcomes and ready-to-execute next actions.  Higher-level horizons are revisited less frequently or on an as-needed basis.

Instead of a single overwhelming to-do list, next actions are classified by contexts, such as calls to make, emails to write, things to do on the computer, errands to run, things to do at home, etc.   Actions must be doable - they cannot be projects in themselves, and they must be small enough to be performed within minutes rather than hours.  (My only exception to this is writing, which I usually do by allocating several hours on my calendar.)  A special "waiting for" list allows us to register that we are awaiting a response or a deliverable from someone. 

Life in the GTD lane

By ensuring that action lists stay relatively short, our personal productivity is enhanced tremendously.  This is analogous to what inventory reduction does for value stream performance in businesses. We can prioritize our work on the fly and rapidly refocus on different contexts and projects.  For example, if I find myself arriving early for an appointment, I can look at my calls list on my handheld and make a couple of calls.  That is the advantage of well-defined work -- when we are in "doing mode" the work we did in "defining mode" pays off in spades.  We always have doable and relevant next actions lined up.

This sense of “being on top of things” and being able to fully focus without interrupting ourselves is what Allen refers to as "mind like water".  Just like a body of water reacts to a pebble hitting it and then regains its smooth surface, an advanced GTD practitioner is able to perform previously defined work as a rapid-fire sequence of next actions while smoothly adjusting to big and small surprises as they emerge.  Sounds a bit like the Pull concept in Lean, doesn't it?

Conclusion

Just like Lean helps us achieve flow in value streams, GTD helps remove obstacles to psychological flow for individual knowledge workers.   When all of our unresolved committments have been processed, defined, and placed in a trusted system, there is much less distraction caused by our own subconscious.  GTD also lets us deal robustly with external interrupts.   We are taught to negotiate uninterrupted time, handle interrupts on the spot and resume where we left off, or simply agree to handle the matter at a better time. 

There is a lot more to GTD than I have been able to convey in this brief posting, but I hope I have convinced you that it is worth further investigation.  I would go so far as to say that familiarity with GTD should be mandatory for any serious Lean practitioner.

Here are some online information resources for those who want to learn more:

• David Allen Company web site – www.davidco.co
• GTD|Connect online community – www.gtdconnect.com
• GTD plug-in for MS Outlook: http://www.davidco.com/store/other.php
• Other useful products: http://www.davidco.com/store/catalog/
• Office Zealot blog: http://www.officezealot.com/gtd/
• 43 Folders Blog: http://www.43folders.com
• Other Blogs – mentions of David Allen - http://www.technorati.com/tags/david+allen
• Yahoo Groups:
• GTD - http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/Getting_Things_Done (4300+ members)
• Ready For Anything: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/Ready4Anything (1300+)

Here are some tools you may find useful in conjunction with implementing GTD:

• Mind Manager from MindJet - a mind mapping tool
• Anagram – automacting extraction of address information in Outlook emails
• Jott - free service: send voice notes to yourself or others by phone;
  automatially converted to text and sent by SMS or email or even to your blog
• ActiveWords - improve productivity with keyboard shotcuts on Windows, reduces time to find files and lauch applications
• Outlook GTD Add-In from NetCentrics
• Vitalist.com - a web-based system for supporting GTD, looks very slick