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Ep. 298: Reflecting Skills Lab
00:32:21
In this Skills Lab, we take a deep dive into the Reflect step in the GTD workflow. With quizzes, exercises, and practice scenarios, this will be a valuable opportunity to fine-tune your GTD practice. You can watch a video version of this webinar from...
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Transcript51 lines
- [00:08]
A
Okay, so welcome, everyone, to our first. I believe this is our first skills lab for the year. My name is Ana Maria Gonzalez, and I work for the David Allen Company. You may have already interacted with me in the past in any one of these skills labs that Don and I have been doing, I think from last semester for the past six months or so. In any event, my role at the David Ellen Company is the senior Master Trainer. I'm in charge of certifying new master trainers, trainers and coaches around the world, as well as supporting them in keeping up with their requirements to stay active within our community of practice, as well as other roles that I also fulfill in the company related to our partnership network. Along with me, here's John, and I can let you introduce yourself, which I don't know that you need that much for this crowd, but here you go.
- [01:09]
B
Well, there are some folks on who are new, so I'm not going to assume that everybody knows me, but my main role is managing digital products for the David Allen Company, and that includes GTD Connect. So I get to interact with a lot of individual users, individual GTD practitioners from all over the world, and it's my. My pleasure to get to know many, many GTD practitioners around the world. So happy to be here. I'm. I'm in Denver, Colorado, and Anna Maria is in a town that. I don't know if I can pronounce it correctly.
- [01:48]
A
You want to try? No. I will tell them. I'm currently in Cartagena, Colombia. I'm just spending a month long here. So in any event, I hope to be useful and resourceful. And here, John and I are here to support you and help you continue to improve your GTD practices or continue to move into the next level or go deeper or however you relate to that. Because I believe everyone in this webinar, it's at a different level, including John and I. One of the, I would say, beauties of GTD is that you're never done with GTD in the good sense of the word. That's why we refer to it as the path of GTD Mastery, not the path to GTD mastery. There's no final destination. There's always a deeper layer. There's always something more that we could probably improve, enhance, or do better. So we are part of the same group, and we're here to help you and support you today, specifically on a topic that I think we can all do more and better and known as reflecting. So, without further ado, I'm going to get started. And John if there's anything in the chat that I need to be aware of, just interrupt as needed because I'm not, I'm not looking, I'm just looking at the slides here.
- [03:08]
B
You bet.
- [03:09]
A
This is your skills lab is designed for you to again to work with your real time inventories in your practice of installing and implementing gtd. So more than this being conceptual, it's really more a lab to put things in practice. Okay. I think these are the same learning objectives that we always share with you. If you've been in one of our previous skills labs, I'm just going to put them up on screen and give you a minute to read through. The only thing I want to say here when we say test your knowledge is not really that John and I are testing you or somehow you're going to get graded. It's more like self assessing. It's more like you checking with yourself on how are you doing and how can you do better. If so. So let's get started here and let's begin with how we like to, which is kind of open it up for discussion. And for this you can always again raise your hand or type on the chat box. So reflecting gives you the freedom to experience more productive, creative and trusted choices. Why do you think that is so? This is our claim, this is what we say, and if so, why do you think that is so? We'll give you a moment to type in the chat box.
- [04:40]
B
Here we go. Well, as an overview of a complete inventory of commitments, you realize where you've been or not going and should go. Increases focus, removes distractions, creates focus. Reflecting equals perspective. Better perspective. Several people mentioning perspective, planning and direction dust off the older commitments. Only way to determine priorities. We have some savvy participants.
- [05:23]
A
I know very good. And we were very careful our choice of words when John and I were preparing for this webinar. Because a lot of what GTD promises, right, or gives you as a result of practicing it is this knowing that what you're doing is the right thing to be doing as much as what you're not doing. And you may recall from one of you may recall from the book or from hearing David in the past, perhaps that you can only feel good about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing. And that's not something that comes for free. It's the result of reflecting. It's the result at looking at everything and saying all of that I'm not doing because I'm choosing to do this instead. And this instead can Be taking a nap. It doesn't necessarily have to look as active behavior. It could also be what may look to the outside eye as a relaxing behavior. I think all the answers, John pretty much alluded to what reflecting means. Great, thank you guys. So let's continue. And John, please, if you want to add, stop me. Okay, so I don't. You'll chime in as many times as you want.
- [06:50]
B
I just had had a thought this morning when I was thinking about that we're doing a webinar on reflecting that most of us have such a strong bias toward action, taking action all the time. And that's. That's okay. We just need to also develop that other side of it which is taking time to stop doing and just reflect.
- [07:15]
A
It's true. And God, I don't remember, but I was just listening not long ago to a podcast by one of the Thai's brothers, monk from Buddhism. To make a long story short, I think it was called the Art of Laziness or something like, you might have seen it too, John. But any events, there's a lot of power in doing nothing. That's the bottom line. And in quote, being lazy or what can be judged as being lazy. And you may all have heard from David too, that he's probably the laziest person you would ever meet. He likes to say that meaning why put more effort into something that doesn't require it. And it's just the result of our own disorganization. That's one way of looking at it, but also understanding and learning when to pause. And in this podcast that I was listening, there was a line or two, or at least what I remember that they were saying. In being lazy, you're actually being generous not only to yourself but to others. Because as you stop and pause, you can more carefully listen and then know what to give or how to be there for that, whoever that other person is. So this could be a whole other webinar. But what we're trying to get into here, guys, is there is so much value in pausing. And reflecting has a huge component of pausing. Otherwise you can't reflect.
- [08:51]
B
We have a funny comment here from someone who says when we were talking about taking a nap, she says, in that case, I just woke up from a one hour reflecting session.
- [09:01]
A
There you go. We can just rename it, let's give it a new title so that it doesn't look as let's move on here. So which one of this is not considered reflecting? So take a moment to read through the four answers and Give us the right answer in the chat box. Which one of this is not considered reflecting?
- [09:30]
B
Yep, here we go. Lots of. Lots of C answers. I see. As we said, this is a savvy group.
- [09:38]
A
Perfect. Correct C is the only right answer. And there's no wrongdoing in doing emergency scannings of your email. I don't know that if throughout the day. That's kind of where the tricky part was to this question, to this answer. Because we do teach that there are moments, if you happen to be from one meeting to another to another to another. Right. That you will want to or need to, or have to do a quick check on your emails, as in an emergency scan, to see if there's, you know, if you're needed or someone's requiring your answer given your role or given what your areas of accountability are at work. Right. But not to be confused, not to confuse that with reflect, because reflecting requires an element of pausing. So excellent. Is there something like emergency reflecting? Well, what do you think, Sebastian? And why. Why would you want to do that? Or why would you need to do that? Or isn't it a contradiction in itself?
- [10:46]
B
I remember a few years ago talking to a guy who had some family medical thing show up suddenly, and he said he had to increase the pace. He was dealing with so much so fast that he had to increase the frequency of his reviews. He went from a weekly review to more like a daily review. That's the closest I can think of to an emergency reflecting session. I don't think he would call it emergency anymore. It just happened that he needed to review more often than he did before.
- [11:20]
A
Right. Because there are times, given what's happening in your life that things are moving and changing so fast that you may have to, and let's use two different terms, you may have to reflect on your system in order to bring it back to current. Meaning this project already expired. Here's a new one. That one changed. This one got delegated. This one I'm putting on hold. That one's getting moved to someday maybe. So that I can understand, when we usually refer to doing emergency scanning of your emails throughout the day, it's because you're looking for those emails that require an action on your part, which is more the result of clarifying, not of reflecting. Typically when you're reflecting, you're not doing it within intent of taking an action, but more with the intent of bringing your system back to current, to having it complete, to being consistent. So it's two very different approaches. So, yes, Sebastian, I think there could be a need for a quick scan to see what requires an answer on my part. And that's more of a spawn out of clarifying. Or you know, I'm kind of cheating on my clarifying practice, but intentionally meaning I have to do it otherwise there may be a problem. Right. It cannot become your daily practice because you then will never get your in to zero. Because when you're doing an emergency scan of your, let's say, email, you're not doing it with the end in mind of getting to zero. You're doing with the end in mind of let me see what's out there that requires my immediate action. So two very different approaches. Hopefully I'm explaining myself, which is not the same as reflecting. So the danger is seeing something that draws your attention and time away for a less important task than what you are presently doing. Correct. Candy, you're totally right. That's why this cannot become a daily practice. And again, when we're reflecting, we're doing with a different intention that when we're clarifying. So hopefully we'll see more of that as we go through the webinar today. Let me ask you here. Which type of reflecting, whether that's daily, weekly and or yearly, is strongest in your GTD practice? And you can take a moment to share that with us.
- [13:37]
B
Some of you may even have a routine where you have a monthly or a quarterly review. I know a couple of folks who actually have a checklist for a quarterly review that's different and looks at a few different things than what they do in a standard weekly review.
- [13:54]
A
Correct. So is there anyone that is the strongest for you and which one do you think you need? Room for improvement?
- [14:02]
B
Okay, as far as strong, we have a yearly and a weekly need to set up all of them.
- [14:12]
A
Yay.
- [14:13]
B
I love that solstice equinox reviews need improvement. Interesting. Clayton, I didn't have you in mind. I was thinking of somebody else who does farm work. But that would fit with a solstice equinox focus.
- [14:30]
A
And you're right, John, I could have. Or we could have also asked which type of reflecting Daily, monthly, Quarterly. By yearly, right? I mean there are reviews frequencies within the ones that we've listed here. So whichever applies to you. The point here is it's kind of acknowledging which one I'm doing really good at and which one or which ones do I know I can do better.
- [14:55]
B
Daily weekly is improving. Someone mentioned the the yearly review between the during the week between Christmas and New Year's is a great time to reflect. I do A mini session daily. Good, good. I need to improve. The weekly review between Christmas and New Year is great because it feels relaxing. The challenge is to get that same relaxed feeling on a daily and weekly basis. Right?
- [15:26]
A
You could, if you basically repeat the behavior that you did during that week, it's the result of your behavior, it's the result of your engagement. Right. During that week that gave you that feeling of relaxation that you can also experience on a regular basis.
- [15:53]
B
Right?
- [15:55]
A
So if you think of the horizons of focus that we teach and the frequencies of the reviews, they kind of match each horizon. And that's why, as John said, they're folks that have monthly or quarterlies kind of built in within their frequencies of reviews. So daily typically refers to the ground level, right? Calendar and next actions. Weekly will typically everything will include the previous. I'm not going to keep on repeating myself. So weekly will include as well Horizon 1, which are the projects inventory, which is your projects inventory. And then as you move higher and we look at Horizon 2, that will include your areas of accountability. And that would be monthly. And then you can move even higher and you go quarterly. And that would also include, you know, horizon three, your goals or however, whichever term you use, which are, you know, you're probably anywhere from a year and a half to two year outcomes that you've put in motion or committed to, and then by yearly, and include as well your Horizon 4, which we refer to as your vision, more like things that you're putting in motion for the next three, four to five years. And then yearly will include your Horizon 5, which is your purpose and principles. Taking a deeper look at who am I, why am I here, what I have put in motion, it's in alignment with who I am and why am I here kind of thing. They sort of match the horizons and the frequency is daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, by yearly, yearly. So you can always think of that in that way. I'm not saying it has to be. It usually matches that frequency. It's good advice. A rule of thumb. Well, if I don't know when to do this review, what's the frequency that you suggest? And that's the frequency that we suggest. And you may have it different and that's perfectly fine too. So let's look at daily reflecting. So we're going to start at ground level, as I was just referencing the horizons. Basically, when you do daily reflecting, no matter what, whether you want to or not, you got to look at your calendar. It's one of those that even if you are sick, you may have to look at because there might be something that you agree to that needs to happen on that day. And if applicable, you will also look at the appropriate next action list. You don't necessarily have to look at all your next actions on a daily basis, only if applicable. Let's say you have a day of, I don't know, conference or you're traveling or whatever that may be that does. The only thing you can do is whatever time your calendar full travel day, and therefore there is no space room to review the next actions list because there's no purpose, there's nothing you can do about any of those because you don't have neither the time or you're not in that place. So that's what we mean by daily reflecting or daily reviewing. What do you look at and when and where or why?
- [19:15]
B
A comment from Josh about the value of the yearly review. And it's a time when it's not a time for getting involved in doing things. It's correct, meant to be reflecting, not doing. Which always shows up when we talk about the weekly review. And what bogs people down is often they find that they've veered off into doing instead of staying with reviewing, reflecting.
- [19:44]
A
And you all know that review backslash reflect. You know, in the past we used to call step four review. Now it's called reflect because it includes it's more than just reviewing. It's the step that it happens immediately before engage or engage happens immediately after review, review or reflect. In other words, unless you're doing the weekly review, if you're looking at a list, as in a daily review, you're looking at it because there is a strong possibility that you are going to engage or do any one of those items on your list. Otherwise why bother? That's why we say only look on the next actions list that it's applicable. Like, if I happen to be here in Cartagena for a month, why would I be looking at my home list for as to what I refer to as my permanent home, it's pointless unless I'm doing my weekly review. But in a daily review, why would I do that? There's no possibility for me to get anything done from that list. So whenever you're reviewing on a daily basis, you're doing it because you have a strong possibility that whatever it's on that list, you have a chance to get done. Otherwise, don't bother. Unless of course, it's the calendar because you committed to that and there's, you know, it's your date, specific actions, your time Specific actions or your day specific information.
- [21:15]
B
Right. So if you're, for example, in an all day meeting, why look at a bunch of lists that you can't do anything about? Let's assume that you're in that meeting and you have to be on and paying attention and you can't be pretending to multitask and do something else. If you're, if you're in a situation like that, there's really no need to look beyond your calendar. The calendar says, okay, I'm going to be occupied all day here, so there's no point to me looking at what's on my computer list, what's on my waiting for list. I can't do anything about any of those anyway.
- [21:47]
A
Correct. So here's another question. How much time do you need to spend reviewing your system daily? A few seconds, a few minutes, at least 30 minutes, or as much as you need to feel comfortable what you're doing. Go ahead and think of your answer and give us the right answer. And this one's very tricky because it has several right answers. I'm just letting you know, guys, I.
- [22:13]
B
Think we've got all Ds.
- [22:17]
A
Well, this is a very sophisticated group.
- [22:20]
B
Thomas also says A or B are usually enough since my system is current. Good for you. Yep.
- [22:27]
A
Well, the only wrong answer was C.
- [22:33]
B
Yes. Because we're not big on making up arbitrary rules that are false structure that you don't really need.
- [22:40]
A
Yeah, exactly. And so, and someone may say, look, it takes me 30 minutes, which is perfectly fine, but we've never said such things. Or you probably have never heard that from David. At the end of the day is exactly what Dee says, however long you need to feel comfortable with what you're doing. And that could be a few seconds, a few minutes. It varies. It depends for actually it depends for everyone and even depends on the day. There may be days that it requires longer and there may be days that requires less. So the only wrong answer, let's say, would have been C. So let's do a short exercise here and go ahead and open your calendar and look at the next three days and see if there are any next actions that you need to add to your system or any time that you need to block in your calendar, given what's coming at you. Or maybe you change your mind now you have to reschedule or renegotiate something. Just take a few seconds. That's an exercise to put this into practice and see what, if anything, needs to change or get added. Given this short review. And let's Check and see. And you can do that in the chat box. Did you change anything? Did you add anything? Did you take away anything?
- [24:00]
B
How this exercise, because we just tricked you into doing a part of the GTD Weekly review. So if you were beating yourself up for not doing a GTD Weekly review, now you have to close up. Okay, Mark added three next actions. Will deleted an old placeholder, added the weekly review. Very good. Birthday coming up. Holiday Monday, not marked.
- [24:34]
A
Okay, so it could be as simple as that. It doesn't, it doesn't require that much more effort. It's just pausing for a moment and taking a look. And you may remember from your GTD Weekly review there is a step that says, right, look at your upcoming calendar, look at your previous calendar, all with the intention of bringing it back to current. So it's, it's very quick and easy, very simple.
- [25:00]
B
And I think this is a great demonstration of how even just a couple of minutes of reflecting turned out to have a lot of value for people because they, they saw things that needed to happen. Either delete, add, renegotiate.
- [25:14]
A
Right. And again, the more current your, your system is, the more you're going to trust your system. Or the opposite to be true. Right. And I even think years ago when I was teaching gtd, John, I would always remind people that a system, it's not a system unless it's current, complete and consistent. So if you really want GTD to be your system and that way, you know, trust it and not have it on your mind, you've got to do the work at keeping it current, keeping it complete, and being consistent in your use of it.
- [25:49]
B
Right. David calls that the three C's. He was. I believe there's an article in the document library called the three C's.
- [25:58]
A
There you go. Okay, so now let's look at this practice scenario and I'm going to let you read it and then let us know how. What advice would you give?
- [26:11]
B
Daniel says, Daniel is stressing me out. Me too.
- [26:19]
A
Daniel needs help.
- [26:24]
B
Yes, and Mary has some tough love for him. She just says, do the work. This Daniel scenario reminds me of that saying, says something like, when you find you're in a hole, stop digging. Couple of smart comments here. Well, they're all smart, but one stands out. The calendar is for scheduled spots, not tasks.
- [26:45]
A
Correct.
- [26:48]
B
And David's asking, do maybe some of those actions need to be clarified more better. Good point. It's possible Daniel's adding things to his lists, but not really clarifying them completely. Has he done a weekly review? If not that's what he needs. Carve out time for a mind sweep and weekly review. Combo. Good combo urge, fake due dates. Good advice. Daniel should listen to you all.
- [27:23]
A
And maybe there's a Daniel in the room, but, you know, there's so much in here that we could probably dissect because there's a part of me that when I read and see he's repelled by daily reviews of his list because the list feel overwhelming. My first question would be, you know, why? Why would your list feel overwhelming? I mean, the, the number of items on your list doesn't necessarily have to equal an overwhelming feeling. I have had clients with hundreds of thousands of things on their lists and they actually experienced mine like water. It wasn't until they put it on the list that they were able to relax. So, number one, does he have the next action like one of you were saying? Does he need to further clarify? Because sometimes it's a result of adding three steps down the road instead of the very next action that in itself will be potentially a source of overwhelm. Or did he really take the time to clarify to that level of identifying what the specific verb for that next action is? Or did he just dump a thought on the list? Because that would also contribute to confusion and, and feeling overwhelmed. So there's a lot that we could probably kind of discuss around that very first sentence.
- [28:44]
B
Exactly.
- [28:46]
A
Let aside what he's doing, which is, oh, let me take whatever I have here and this list, and in an attempt of, I don't know, probably increasing my sense of control and kind of finding a strategy to get it done, let me put it on my calendar. That's another approach because as some of you were saying, the calendar, it's only for date specific actions, time specific actions, or day specific information. And if these reminders are not specific to a date or time, why put it on the calendar? So it's basically polluting. It's taking the pollution from one and moving to the other, which is not going to help.
- [29:24]
B
No, not a bit.
- [29:36]
C
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 it's like walking into a library going, 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 learned Microsoft Word to begin with, for instance, I read the manual, wow, this is really cool. And I started to use the tool and didn't 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. And I remember and 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 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.