There are several people who have attended Getting Things Done: The Roadmap seminar and wrote some great posts about it.
1. Terrie from O’Reilly has written a short and neat summary on concepts and/or off-the-cuff quotes from Allen. Several highlights:
- “You’ll give as much bandwidth to buying a quart of milk as you will to buying a company. The mind is a good servant but a terrible master.”
- If you decide you need to clean your garage, but you put it off for six years, there’s a part of your mind that thinks you should have been cleaning your garage 24/7 for six years. If you can park that on a list, it will get out of your “psychic RAM” – your brain can let go of it and more of its resources are available to work on other things.
- When you have an inbox, if you put reference material into it, you’ll get numb to the inbox. File the reference material, get it out of “in”.
- The system needs care and feeding to sustain. If the lists aren’t complete, they aren’t really worth it; your brain won’t trust them.
- It might be useful to keep a list of completed projects, but don’t bother with a list of completed next actions. It’s not worth it.
- Repetitive involvement. “Fake it till you make it.” — acting as-if is a powerful tool for getting there.
2. Followed on Terrie’s link track – Buzz Bruggeman, the guy behind ActiveWords software, has also written a notes for the seminar. Buzz’s post however is more full-on. If you dig into details this notes are for you:
… To manage what has your attention, you must, know what has your attention, then you have to “Un-make your agreements…”
When you know how many agreements you have made, you will make fewer agreements!
Unmake your agreements,
Keep your agreements, or
A renegotiated agreement is not a broken agreement! (you need to know what you are not doing….)
Your system can remember better than your brain! …
Getting Things Done: the Roadmap – [Terrie at O’Reilly]
GTD…the Road Map…San Jose – [Buzz Bruggeman]
