B (3:30)

Yeah.

C (3:31)

Hi, this is Mark.

A (3:33)

Hi, Mark.

C (3:34)

Yeah, I was just thinking, if you were going through a repeated process developing a checklist for, you know, what you would do for each of those events, then you could look through that and then you'd only have to deal with what was different. I don't know if that would help.

A (3:55)

Yeah, I would. I would probably do some. I would definitely have a checklist for as much of the. The event preparation and carrying out those events is. Is repeatable. Anything that I could put on a checklist so I wouldn't have to rethink about what's next, I would definitely do that. I have. I have some things that are like what you're talking about, Peter, but not exactly like it. It's not like a weekly event, but I do have. Gosh off the top of my head. I do a European tax report every quarter for the European or the tax authority in the Netherlands, which is called Belasting Dienst. Masha will tell me if I'm making a mess of the pronunciation, but I have a quarterly thing I have to prepare for them, and I have a checklist for it because it's fairly long. It's about three hours worth of work. It's repetitive, but I don't want to have to rethink it every quarter. Maybe a checklist would be helpful. Okay. Yep. We've got people with billing every month. Could be an area of focus. Yeah. So, Peter, you want to tell us more details about the kinds of things and whether a checklist might make a difference or a recurring project?

C (5:28)

Yeah.

B (5:28)

Well, I think the checklist, that definitely makes sense because if you can rely on it being the process repeating, then you certainly want something like that. What I'm interested in is whether, if we're going to say that you could have a checklist repeating each time, and you make sure you've gone through the steps on the checklist and if there's an area of focus to say, make sure that these Tuesday training meetings keep running. That almost raises the question, in my mind, is it even necessary to actually track each individual meeting as a project? Because on the one hand, you could say if you've got a decent checklist and you're tracking your next actions and you're aware of the area of focus, those things might be sufficient to just keep everything ticking over and keep you reminded of what you need to be reminded about. On the other hand, though, you've got the literal truth that each one would qualify as a project because you do want each one to be successfully completed. So I guess it raised that kind of question as to when you're in a situation where technically you do have a project, if you've got enough other support mechanisms in pray in place, then actually do you even need to track the project? Maybe you just need enough that will just catch you as the thing repeats. That's kind of what it got me wondering.

A (7:06)

Yeah, seems like a good area to consider that way. The other thing that occurred to me is, are there. She may know that she's going to have these every week for a year or until infinity ends or something like that, but are there things that she cannot start yet for the one that's next month or the one that's next week? Are there. Are there any of these where she. She has to wait until a certain time to even take the next action on them? As in, are they projects on hold or are they all active and she could take next actions on a whole bunch of them? Now?

B (7:48)

Yes. Now that is interesting because each event is run by a guest speaker. You need to book the guest speaker and they will come and address the people that attend the event. There will be handouts to prepare that need photocopying, and you hand them out and those kind of things. So they're all kind of small events in that respect. So each event needs to have its speaker confirmed to begin with. So if the question is, could each one of those be independently initiated or does one have to wait until the previous one is finished? That's a good question. I mean, I get the impression that a lot of these could be independently started because you could just line up different speakers. I mean, there might be some scheduling to do. As in, you might be scheduling who's going to speak at this particular date, and then you've got some empty slots to fill or that kind of thing. So I suppose the scheduling aspect might affect it. The question will also be though, who's responsible for the schedule? It might be that somebody else gets it together and then they Just put it in a timetable and she just consults the timetable. So those are the only dependencies that I'm aware of at this stage.

A (9:06)

Well, first I personally make use of a projects on hold list because they're the things I want to do within a year, but not necessarily within the next month or two. So I have what you might call a list of more current projects. The projects on hold are not someday maybes. They're definite commitments. But they're ones I don't want to pressure myself to act on or even look at necessarily each day. And that's why I asked you about the timing on them, whether she could take action on any of those events that are three months out or whether she has to wait until they're closer. Here's my next question and I hope you're enjoying the fact that I haven't given you any answer because I don't have the answer and I. And so far I've just tried to ask you more questions. How does she feel about this? Does she have, I know she's aware of gtd. Does she have any kind of tension on how she'll handle this or what she considers to be an obstacle or challenge with it?

B (10:15)

Well, I get the sense, I mean she's definitely going for the gtd. I've got her set up and she knows that it's worth doing. I get the sense from her that as long as there can be a. The weekly rhythm can be on cruise control, that ought to be enough. I mean, it falls into a rhythm basically of have I got the handouts provided so that I can then take them and photocopy them right there on that morning that the event happens. That's the bit that's quite sort of where the time frame is quite short. So at minimum it falls into that kind of rhythm where you know, the Monday I need to make sure that by then I've definitely been given the handouts from whoever's speaking and then, and then print out a master copy and then the next morning go to the event venue, photocopy all the handouts to hand them out. So at the bare minimum, the prod, those kind of events have that kind of recurring set up to them. So that's a rhythm that could probably, that she could probably get into quite easily and feel quite comfortable with. I think, I think the larger thing that she will be looking into as she settles into it is that question of do I just settle with just sorting these things out week by week in a fairly short sighted way or do I need to pull back and see the bigger picture of who's booked further down the line. If that becomes the case, then we might be looking at a slightly more complex requirement in the system.

A (11:54)

Right? Yeah. And from what you were just saying to me, those are some. Some of those things would be day specific, perhaps even time on a particular day specific actions, which means we're talking about something that goes on her calendar. I'm going to allow Sebastian to talk because he raised his hand. And if somebody else would like to talk, just raise your hand. Yes.

D (12:23)

Hello, can you hear me?

A (12:26)

I can, but I don't speak German. Can you speak in English instead?

D (12:29)

I'm going to try. Hello? Yeah. As to the question from Peter, I think I would be inclined to organize this with TikTok events as long as this keeps this repeating event scheduling of my mind and only if I need more detail because, you know, where I'm coming from is I'm really afraid of having too many projects on my list and too many next actions on my list. I sense that my system, it has to incorporate everything. But as long as I don't have to, it's also nice to not have too much in my lists. And if, for example, in these repeating events, and this is how I do it, for example, with billing or other more complicated repeating events, if I'm okay with having a tickler, that then reminds me that I have now to put a project and maybe a next action or an NPM session into my system, then this is sufficient for me and it doesn't clog up the system with repetitive events and with repetitive planning. So maybe this is another perspective.

A (13:43)

Yes. And let me just. For anybody who's newer to the getting things done methodology, I'm going to step back a couple of sentences and you mentioned npm. Will you tell us what that stands for?

D (13:59)

It's the. It's the new processing module. I don't know whether you heard about it.

A (14:04)

No.

D (14:04)

It's a natural planning model. It's the model that I should know.

A (14:08)

Better than to tease you about anything because it comes right back at me twice as hard as I tried the first time.

B (14:13)

Oh, me.

D (14:15)

It's a natural planning model and it is the model that David suggests to use to plan and think and structure projects, which is very attractive. And actually, if you would allow, this would segue to my question. My original question that I had when I raised the hand before Peter asked this important and interesting question that I wanted to address. My original question was to you and to other experienced practitioners, how Often do you NPM a project? I sometimes get the impression that the recommendation is do it at the beginning of a project. But I respectively disagree. I often do many NPM sessions and I even do an NPM session as a post mortem to the project because it's very interesting to compare like a, like a post mortem NPM to what you originally envisaged when you were planning the project. So I would be interested in your perspective on that.

A (15:20)

Okay. And I'll just say that as soon as I give this answer, Claudia, I'm going to invite you to talk because you've been patiently waiting for a couple of minutes here at least. So Sebastian, I would say anytime you want to run the natural planning model on a project is fine, whether it's beginning, middle, end or postmortem. Postmortem is an interesting idea because you could look back and say here's how I thought things would go. And the outcome I thought, is that really what happened? I can just tell you from my personal experience of several projects in the last couple of years that David's wife Catherine has come in once we started a project and said let's run the NPM on this one. We need to, we need to do this more formally. It's big enough that we need to really get a little more formal about it. So for me it often comes down to how big the project is. If it's call it let's the minimum a two step project. I probably am not going to do natural planning model because externally, because I've already done that somehow in my, in my mind and I know what needs to be done. But if I were building the Golden Gate Bridge, I would be doing the natural planning model and revisiting it regularly. Okay, Claudia, what would you like to add?

E (16:53)

Well, I had a question about next actions with due dates. So if I have a project like I will get a manuscript, let's say to edit and it has a due date. So how do I, and that's the D U E date that it's due back to the client. But how do I, how do I track the. Do the due date dates of it, where I want to work on it, Do I make it a recurring task? Do I flag it? How does, how can I, I know that I could chunk it down and say, you know, do edit chapters xyz, but it's not really that because I don't, I don't know how much I'm going to work on it. I just want to make sure that I'm Working on it in advance of the due date.

A (17:54)

That's a good question. Off the top of my head. I can think of several ways you could do it. You can book time on your calendar to work on it. You could. Gosh, yeah, I guess. And that I'm just thinking of too many answers here. You could book time on your calendar to work on it. I like, I love the pun of the due date. D U E and the due date. Do that. I think that that reveals a lot. Oops, let me see. Irina is saying click up. There is a start date to a task and a due date. Okay. And Sebastian is saying that's where lawyers would enter lots of pre deadlines in the calendar. But this is madness. Yeah. I would you. You might have seen that we scheduled a webinar next month for best use of your calendar. Managing your calendar and many of you know this already but there are three things that go on the on the calendar. Time specific, date specific and date specific information. So if, if you're putting a lot on your calendar, I'd just be really cautious that you actually do do what's on your calendar at those times and don't be shuffling it off regularly so that you can make maintain trust in your calendar. And the other kind of vague answer I have, and then I'm going to hope that somebody else would like to speak up about this is what would get it off your mind. What gets, gets these things off your mind so that you don't have to. When you wake up at three in the morning or when you're watching tv suddenly have a thought. Oh, have I tracked that enough? Have I put enough markers in my system to tell me what to do when.

E (20:00)

Yeah. The thing with start dates though, I know that, I know, I think but that's the start date. But then what's the recurring, you know, work on it date? You know, I, I don't know. What do you think about flagging? You think that's not a good, that's like an overuse of flags maybe. Or.

A (20:23)

Again, this is all my personal opinion. I'm not, I'm not speaking for David Allen or anything like that, but.

B (20:31)

I.

A (20:32)

Would be really cautious about flagging. I, for me, when I start thinking, oh, it's going to be tempting to flag something, it's a sign that I'm, I'm really busy not doing a review often enough and need to reconsider my commitments all together. It's a sign that there's too much going on. This happened to me two months ago. Kelly And I took a hike one day. In the middle of that hike, we decided it was time to be done renting and we were going to buy a place the next morning. We looked at the first place, made an offer, had it accepted, and we're in escrow by the end of that day. It was a 19 day escrow, which set off a whole string of projects, including. I'm not going to go into all the details, but anyway, let's just say for one month I was so crazy busy that I was tempted to start flagging things. And that told me that I need to actually go kind of the other direction. Slow things down, review more often, move some things to projects on hold and that kind of thing. So that's my answer about flagging and I'd love to hear from others. Sebastian, unmute yourself whenever you're ready.

D (21:52)

Yeah, thank you. First of all, I really relate to this issue with the doing time. It happens to me all the time. It's a real challenge and I can only chime in there and also confirm it's all about reviewing. It's all about doing daily, weekly, bi weekly reviews. And I'm convinced I don't live up to that model standards. I fall off the wagon constantly. But I'm convinced if I would review accordingly and if I would adjust the frequency of my reviews to my workload and to how I feel constantly. So if I would review intelligently, then there wouldn't be a problem. Because each review, of course, always includes a preview and a planning perspective of what's on my radar for the next few days or weeks or whatever is the next interval until the next review. And can I allot time to that or do I have to move something else to projects on hold or do I have to ask for help or what do I do? I'm not a fan of time blocking or blocking time in my calendar, but that's purely because my calendar is moving and is shifting daily. So it doesn't work for me. It may very well work for you to block time or at least block context time or context specific times in your week in your calendar. And that may also help. For me, it's all about reviewing and I have to do this more often. I say this to me every time I talk about reviewing. Reviewing, actually.

E (23:33)

That'S really helpful. Yeah, I think reviewing is a key.

A (23:38)

And you may be seeing this in the chat. Chris says for client projects, I prepare a schedule and put it into project support. Helps me review whether I'm on target, whether I need to catch up or renegotiate. Renegotiate. That's. That's a good one.

E (23:53)

So, okay, so let's say there's a project that it's edit this manuscript, it's due on a particular day. What is the next action then? How do you, how would you express the next action? Work on or, you know, I tend to just put, you know, copy edit, blah, blah, blah, manuscript. But I don't know, you know, that's kind of the same as the project name.

A (24:20)

Well, edit the copy or copy edit would work for me as a next action. Again, I hate to keep doing this, but I'm going to turn it back to you and say, when you look at your lists, what makes sense to you, what attracts you or works for you as a way to name that action? If you pick a verb that is really specific about what you'll be, what someone would see you doing when you're doing that action, it's more likely to attract you to it. If you pick a verb that is a little more vague, like decide or something like that, it's not going to be quite as compelling to bring you into that next action. Chris, how about you?

F (25:13)

Hi, can you hear me? Okay?

A (25:14)

I can.

F (25:15)

Brilliant. So the kind of projects that I have in mind are software development ones. And they tend to be anything from maybe a day's work to several weeks. And they're also notoriously difficult to estimate. So what I do is I come up with a schedule of where I think I'll be at particular times. And I don't put it on my calendar, but I put it into project support. And then when I'm reviewing, I can see whether I'm on target or whether I've misestimated something. And then, like I said, I can either I can either work a little bit harder or I can renegotiate with my clients. And I found that's really useful. And I found it's helped me know whether I can take on multiple projects at the same time or not as well. So I don't know how these projects relate to the types of projects that you're doing, but maybe it's an idea that could help.

E (26:09)

Yeah, definitely.

A (26:11)

Interesting. So, Chris, when you're. You said you're in software development and you say more about whether you do mostly a. I'm going to throw out a couple of words. Agile, waterfall, any. Any of those apply to how you approach your development and maybe influence how you call next actions name projects?

F (26:38)

Yeah, so I use more of agile methodology than waterfall, but I'm a solo developer, so I don't necessarily do any of the named methodologies, so I don't follow Scrum or anything like that. But I take some of the principles from extreme programming, if that something that you're aware of. And in terms of naming my projects with the software development ones, I tend.

A (27:04)

To.

F (27:06)

Name them the way the client refers to them because that helps me with my communication and then my project plan. I might break down what that means to me.

A (27:17)

Got it. Okay, let's see. Masha, would you be willing to ask your question out loud? Let me see what I can. If I can find you in the list here. There we go. Masha has a great comment here. I have some projects with very many options that I could work on right now. So these are all next actions. There are a few of them, though, that I like doing first. I think about flagging these tasks, but I'd like to know how I should handle these according to gtd. Masha, I set it up so that you can talk if you would like to. And I'm going to give you my quick answer to what you just asked. In a recent interview, David Allen was asked, how do I decide what to work on next out of all my choices? David usually has the kind of formal GTD answer about the criteria for choosing what to work on next. This time, though, he. He shook things up and he said, do what you feel like doing. Do what you'd like to do. The interviewer replied, what if what I'd like to do isn't what I should do? And David's answer to that is, keep doing what you'd like to do, what you feel like doing. Because eventually what you'd like to do will be what you should do. All right, let me see if I can get back to the Peter, you had your hand up a couple of minutes ago, and thank you all for the terrific participation here.

B (29:09)

Oh, yeah. Am I still audible?

A (29:12)

Yes.

B (29:13)

Great. Yeah. Well, that was just another thing about that question about what do I put as the next action for edit manuscript and that kind of thing. I always think it's really interesting making that transition between something that's a scheduled task and defining the actual next action. Because if we're asking what's the very next physical thing that needs to be done, that could actually get more subtle and interesting. Because in the work schedule it might say something like edit manuscript, that might be the next task. But if you boil it down to the very next action, for example, it might turn out that there's some little obscure other thing you need to do. So, I don't know, maybe there's a document that's needed as part of the manuscript reviewing process, and it's in a shared drive somewhere that you don't have access to, and you have to email someone to ask for access, for example, that kind of thing. So I think it's always. I think it's always very important to. I think, as you were saying, when you say, what can you visually imagine yourself doing as the very next physical step? Sometimes that could still look a little bit different from that generic description of what the task might look like. So I think it's always good to approach that next action question quite fresh. Even if there's something that looks straightforward on a schedule. Was the only thought that came into my head about that one.

A (30:42)

That's. That's a. That's a great insight there. I often find that if I'm not drawn to something on my list, it's because it's not granular enough. So edit might not be granular enough. If I don't have access to edit. Once again, I'm gonna. I'm gonna tell a story about Catherine. She sent a document and asked for. Asked for edits and things like that to it. Before I went into edit it, I had to make sure I had access to it. And then yesterday, somebody that I had asked to edit a document said, I'd love to, but you need to give me permission. So it's helpful to make sure that whatever the next action is is really granular. If it's too granular, I don't know how that would happen, because if it's too granular, I do it, and then the next action after that presents itself somehow. So I think it's always better to go very granular rather than something that's more general. Don't know if that's helpful, Claudia, but there we go. Next, stuff that is really helpful.

E (31:53)

I think that. Yeah, I think that is. All of these suggestions have been great.

A (31:58)

Good, good. Okay, let's see. Next up is. Well, let's see. Peter's got another question about how do you advise running the natural planning model for a group? I'll answer and then I'll open it up to the rest of you for your experience. We at the David Allen Company have done this as a group on projects for as far as I can remember going back. It works. It. It works really well. You can do it in person or over a zoom session like this. Just kind of take people through it occasionally. It can require some Editing of the. Or negotiation on what, what things are. But with the tools we've got available now, you can be editing in real time and people will see changes within seconds. So that it's. We've found it to be really helpful and easy to do as a group, either in real time or asynchronously. And that's, that's what I'd have to say about that. Anyone else want to jump in? Please do.

G (33:23)

I'd like to give a short message to those of you who've been participating and playing with GTD Connect for a while and sort of remind you that all of us with this GTD methodology and this set of practices go through cycles. You know, I still go through cycles myself initially. There's kind of the inspiration and there's a lot of material to ingest and to get familiar with. And so people oftentimes when they first come onto Connect, are just potentially overwhelmed by how much information there is. In a way, it's just a huge library where we've been able to archive so much different information from so many different perspectives and people and points of view, and so understood that, like walking into a library go, gee, where do I start? So that's oftentimes the initial phase of this. And many people, after a year or two, you know, probably get on some level or some plateau where they go, well, I kind of got it now. I've got my system set up and everything's fine and I'm fine tuning. And you may find yourself at that point also finding yourself saying, gee, I'm now becoming a resource of this methodology for people around me, you know, people asking me for assistance and help in this. And we've seen in the forums a number of people now sharing ideas about how to get your teams more involved or families more involved with this information. So some of that information is in there as well. But I think you'll find yourself going through cycles of this and you may find that much like if you've ever read a software manual. I remember when I read when I learned Microsoft Word to begin with, for instance, and I read the manual, wow, this is really cool. And I started to use the tool and need the manual anymore. As a matter of fact, a good example of that right here, the manual for this camera that's taking this picture right now. Initially I read this, got it all set up. That's really cool. And that's really fine. And so pretty much everything was onto cruise control. I didn't need to go back to my library to make this really work. And then, of course, as I started to get more sophisticated in terms of the stuff I wanted to do, got more inspired about some things I saw other people are doing, I go, how do I do that? Went back to the manual. I went, oh, God, I didn't realize I could do that. I didn't realize I could do that. I remember at least two or three iterations of going back to Microsoft Word back in the days when there actually was a manual for that, as opposed to just all online and realizing, oh, my God, I didn't realize that. Oh, I could do that now. I could do that now. And I think that's what you might find with Connect, too, is that it's a gold mine of stuff. Well, many people have read getting things Done, you know, more than three or four times, and every time they read it, they get something new out of it. So I think you may find Connect the same way and probably even easier because, hey, it doesn't take much to just click on, surf around, see what might be new or what might be of interest to you, and pay attention. You know, there's more than meets the eye in there.