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- [00:00]
Justin Hale
Foreign.
- [00:10]
David Allen
Hi everybody. I'm delighted to be here with somebody that I could. Justin, I think I probably call you an old friend by now. Time. Time flies, doesn't it? You know, in terms of have we known each other? So here's Justin Hale. Justin is, I know he's probably the key spokesperson trainer for the GTD process with our wonderful client, our wonderful licensee partner in the U.S. now, crucial learning, they've rebranded themselves out of VitalSmarts into another thing. And Justin, you might sort of inform us about maybe that shift and, you know, and how that happened. Anyway, Justin is great and so he and I have had some, several conversations and of course I've been a resource for Crucial Learning, you know, for this addition to their intellectual property portfolio of getting things done. But I'll stop here and say, okay, Justin, what would you like people in the network that might be listening to this?
- [01:22]
Justin Hale
Okay, you left it very open. So I'm excited. I could go a lot of different directions here. But no, I'm grateful to get a chance to talk again for people who don't know who I am. I mean, in essence I'll say I'm a pretty normal person with lots going on. So just to start with the most important part of my life, my wife Christine and I live in Utah Here in the US we have four children from 8 years old down to 3, all four of them right inside that area. So if you talk about stress free, stress free productivity, that's always something that's on my mind. And so no, but for me, I've spent about the last 14 years at what was VitalSmarts when I joined it, what is now Crucial Learning. And it's always funny because if you look at the evolution of an organization's name, Vital Smarts used to be called Praxis. Grateful they moved away from that name. A little too academic for me. And now onto Crucial, Crucial Learning, which makes a lot of sense. And so we were excited about that rebrand last year.
- [02:32]
David Allen
Didn't they think Vital Smarts was, was a pharmacy, was a drug or something?
- [02:37]
Justin Hale
Yeah, I'd have to clarify that with most people at parties and get togethers with Vital Smart. Oh, what do you do? You okay, you vitamins, supplements? No, no, no, we do, we do leadership training, corporate training. Oh, really? You know, and so, yeah, it's definitely a learning company. Makes a lot more sense. And so, uh, I spent personally, you know, even just for me, going back a long time when I was in college, trying to figure out what I wanted my major to be. What I wanted to study, what did I want to spend my life's work doing? I was walking around the university bookstore and just flipping through the books and I saw this book called why we do what we do. And it was this researcher, Edward Deci. And I just, I mean, I just ate this book up. I highlighted. It was really just about a bunch of research that he had done around motivation, what drives human behavior. I became so fascinated with why people do what they do. And it led me to become interested in our industry, led me to Vital Smarts. I read some of their work, especially around influence, and I thought, I love this. This is what I want to spend my life doing. I want to take this, this knowledge, this research, this science around why people do what they do and help them be better, whatever that means. And I didn't really know what that meant. And so I started working at Vital smarts about 14 years ago and then spent quite a bit of time on the road training and speaking and teaching and doing certification courses. And over the last, I'd say six or seven years, been the primary training designer at Crucial Learning. And so that's where.
- [04:08]
David Allen
And by the way, a little sidebar on that. Tell people what you say. At least the previous to GTD and Charles's work, the portfolio, how would you describe that portfolio that you were training about and et cetera?
- [04:24]
Justin Hale
Yeah, so when I came to Vital Smarts, the founders had written a handful of New York Times bestselling books and had some training programs to go with those. So the most popular would be Crucial Conversations. People know about. Right. How to talk about high stakes issues. They had another course at the time was called Crucial Confrontation. So you talk about having to re. Explain the name of the company, say Crucial Confrontations. Wow, I hate confrontation. No, no, no, that's not what it's about. That's not what it's about. Thankfully, we rebranded that course to Crucial Accountability. Along the road, trying to talk about how to hold others accountable, performance management. And then when I first started, we developed a training course called Influencer. So at the time that was the portfolio of the courses. And primarily I was spending time training and teaching and speaking on Crucial conversations. And so that was, that was most of my time. Most of my, my energy was around those content sets. And then that's what led us to working with you, which is interesting because you spend all this time training like the same three courses over and over and over again. And so when they said, hey, we're going to partner with David Allen and we're Going to do this getting things done thing. I thought, something new. This is so cool. Something different. And it was interesting because it was really. I never thought of myself as someone who, quote, unquote, loved productivity or even even thought about that word very often. I just had a way of working, I had a way of living that had gotten to me where I was. And I found it helpful. I found it to be something that worked for my style. But in some ways I was. I didn't know what I didn't know. And so it was interesting when we, when our CEO Andy said, we're going to do this partnership before we even met with you. I went and got the book. I bought it online. I bought an old version too. I wanted the orig. I wanted, I wanted you in the old school, David. I wanted the first. And so I bought that first book and I read it before I was.
- [06:16]
David Allen
I was already 55 or 60 years old, by the way, when the first book was written. So, yeah, it was the old David Allen.
- [06:22]
Justin Hale
The makeup work they did on that front cover is excellent. So. So it was great. So we. I read that and I just, I just ate it up, every last bit of it. And I just was so engrossed in it. Because for me, I mean, for us as an organization, our big mission is, hey, we're going to take not just any skills, we want to take the small handful of skills that are legitimately life changing, meaning they'll impact you at work, they'll impact you at home. So they're a holistic skill set. We want to find those small handful of skills and we want to go around the world and give people these skills. But that also means you have to.
- [06:59]
David Allen
Have the ability to be able to.
- [07:00]
Justin Hale
Create learning experiences that actually help people acquire the skills. And so when I was reading GTD for the first time, even before going through the David Allen Company version of the training, I was reading it with this mindset of, oh, I mean, this is very skill based, right? I mean, this is very down to the core of, like, behaviorally, what do I do here and there and in this moment. So I just love that. But I also thought I can immediately feel the impact of how this is going to benefit me in all areas of my life. And so it really spoke to my, like, vital, smart soul in the moment of saying this just feels like a member of the family in terms of our overall mission.
- [07:38]
David Allen
I have to sort of insert here too that the people who've experienced crucial conversations have said something like, I mean, one of the Best descriptions of it is our most important conversations. We are the most negligent at knowing how to do well.
- [07:58]
Justin Hale
That's right, that's right. Yes. We like to say, and I think.
- [08:01]
David Allen
That'S such a great description of, you know, crucial conversations. And you know, to your point of the let's, let's reduce this down to the zeros and ones of what are the behaviors that really make a big difference that you can actually learn but you're not born doing and that you actually have to train yourself to do. And so that was intriguing to me to see the parallels between, you know, crucial conversations and gtd because gtd, you're not born doing or knowing as to your point, it's like, oh, oh my God. And yet once you learned it, you went, oh, of course, you probably went.
- [08:42]
Justin Hale
How did I not figure this out Right, Exactly. Yeah, that's so true. We like to say when it matters most, we're often at our worst. I think that's true for both crucial conversations and gtd. And so it really is one of those moments where. But it's also so rewarding because you look at it and one of the reasons why I have stayed doing this work for so long and specifically with crucial learning, is how rewarding it is. So going out and you've experienced this, I'm sure thousands of times I go out and I would teach a crucial conversations class and I'd have somebody come up to me at a break and say, I've needed this for decades to be able to have this conversation with my spouse, or I've needed this for six months because my 16 year old daughter and I don't talk or I've needed this for three years, I'm stuck in my career, I have no idea how to speak up to my boss and share my opinion so I can be heard. So when you get those kinds of those messages, you get emails from people saying this saved my marriage, you get emails from people saying this accelerated my career, saved our team, our company, our hospital. You just say, wow, this is the best kind of work I could be doing. And so for me, that's really been my sustaining energy around all of this work. And of course it starts with myself. I think even if I was doing work that was fulfilling other people, but I personally wasn't getting the benefit of my own life. I don't know how fulfilled fulfilling it would be, I would enjoy it. But it's the fact that it fills me so much. I mean, when I first was learning crucial conversations, some of these Others coming right out of university, I didn't, I didn't have the skill set to be able to deal with tough issues. I probably was just. I would just shut down, right? I just wouldn't say anything. Something goes wrong, you just got to sit there and hope it goes away. Most people would say I'm averse to confrontation. I don't, I don't like tough conversations. And it's not because they don't realize how important they are. It's because they have no clue what to say. They have no idea what to do. And so they would rather just go the easy road and not say anything. And I think that that's true to what I. What I noticed with my own career, with my own productivity journey, my own journey around managing my life's work was, you know, I, I would do what worked. And when things got tough, when you'd like to say, when the waves got big, I'm not sure I knew what to do outside of what I just naturally was inclined to do.
- [11:06]
David Allen
Interesting, though. You know, as you describe that, though you're, you're educating me a little bit. I think the lack of ability to handle a crucial conversation is a much more dramatic and immediate aha for people than the aha's they might get about gtd. Because, as you probably know, the people most attracted to what you and I are doing relative to GTD are the people who most people would say need it the least. They already know the value of organization. They already know the value of outcome and maybe action thinking, or at least a little bit. But they have, they've run out of space. But I don't think it's quite as dramatic an emotional appeal. What do you think?
- [11:47]
Justin Hale
Yeah, I agree. At least, at least at first, right? So to your point, when you, when you talk to people, I mean, it's easy to look at, whether it's the news, whether it's politics, whether. Wherever you live in the world, when you talk about a crucial conversation, people immediately go, that's what our world needs. We can't talk, we can't discuss things. So it does bring up. And to your point, people think about, just this morning with my family, just this morning with my boss, disagreement, different opinions. I mean, that is emotionally charged for people. And they think about how tough it is to have those conversations. So I agree with you. And I think that it's interesting too, because a lot of people I work with, it's funny because they will, when I work with them with gtd, I'll say things like you know, here are some of the behaviors that we find that when you do consistently, you get these incredibly impactful outcomes. And a lot of people say, yeah, I do that. And yet I'll say, wait a second, wait a second, tell me about your daily experience. And they'll say, oh, I'm overwhelmed and I'm burnt out. That's a big word right now. I'm burnt out. I just have so much. I just can't focus. I'm just distracted. I'm letting people down. And I said, wait a second. You're telling me you do these behaviors and yet you're experiencing these outcomes? I'm not so sure you're as self aware. I think that I get the impression that throughout our lives, more people have given us feedback about our poor interpersonal skills at times than they have given us feedback about our poor productivity skills. I think about starts back in college when you do teamwork and they have a team project and there's always those one or two people that don't pull their weight and nobody says anything. We all say, oh, now we know who those two people are. The rest of us are just going to have to do it all. And we just accept that. Okay, sort of accept that. And I think that that carries over into our organizations. And from a productivity standpoint, people aren't as self aware as they should be. They assume that where they got comes from what they did. And often that's not the case. And so, and so I think that it's that moment of self awareness that people lack often. And then when you start to actually dig in like you and I do with people and they start to realize there is a direct and disproportionate connection between my poor results, my poor outcomes, my poor emotions and my own poor habits. You know, I was the other day, I was, I love this, this quote we were posting online on one productive minute. This idea that you don't, you don't rise to the level of your productivity aspirations, you tend to fall to the level of your productivity habits. Right. Like it. And so this idea of wherever your behaviors are really determines your success. And I think a lot of people aren't as aware as they should be of their own habits.
- [14:20]
David Allen
Well, I guess probably because anybody who's going to give them the feedback about that has got to be better at it than them. And how many of those people have can you count on one hand, you know?
- [14:32]
Justin Hale
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, that's right.
- [14:35]
David Allen
And you know, for a boss to hold somebody accountable to their project list means they got to have one.
- [14:40]
Justin Hale
Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
- [14:42]
David Allen
So, you know, it's kind of the blind leading the blind out there, I think, relative to gtd. Interesting perspective on that too, but interesting too, because. Hope you don't mind me sharing this. I mean, one of the reasons I think Andy and you guys were interested in developing some new IP was you got some funding from private equity that said interested in growth. And you already had your IP pretty much matured and formulated out there. Wonderful, by the way, in terms of your instructional design, your technology base and so forth that you're using for that and how well you market it too. But then, you know, it was delightful to then wind up, you know, just almost serendipitously through our conversation with Andy about, well, what are we missing about how to build internal trainers inside of organizations? And, you know, we had 120, you know, vitalsmarts had 10,000. I think we're missing something. What are we missing here? And so, you know, that was a wonderful and very creative, I guess, maybe 12, 18 months. I don't know how it spent us, how long it spent us to create the relationship, but I guess we were the first sort of IP that then Vital sports and then crucial learning took on. But lovely that it mapped to the DNA, as you stated earlier, about just these crucial behaviors.
- [16:12]
Justin Hale
Yeah.
- [16:12]
David Allen
That makes such a difference for people that they can learn and that they're not born, you know, doing so.
- [16:20]
Justin Hale
Yeah, it was, it was a very easy, it was a very easy transition too, for us, because like I said, when you start to read the book, you start to get a feeling for it. You say, oh, this, this is, this is highly impactful, personal, professional. It does all these things. It's behavioral. There's a research that supports it, which is a big thing for us, a big qualification. It can't just be ideas that someone thought of and have no support in terms of the research. Now, you did come up with these ideas many years ago, but now the research is clearly saying, yep, that's been the case all along in terms of how the brain works and, and, and, and memory and stress and all these things. But what I find interesting, that was really fun for me. One of, one of my, one of the books I really, really love in our space is a book called Rookie Smarts. And it's this woman, Liz Wiseman. She lives in the Bay Area. She wrote a book later on called Multipliers as well. But her book Rookie Smarts is all about this idea of her argument really is to say, when you're hiring, really, you're trying to hire someone for a great position, the tendency is to hire someone who's maybe overqualified because they'll be so skilled, they'll be successful. And she actually argues the opposite. She said, you should hire people that are slightly under qualified. But she says what you really want to hire for is someone who thirsts to know what they don't know. Right. There's power in this pursuit of knowledge. And the sometimes the best people to have are the people who are trying to figure it out, people who want to know, who want to learn. So I bring that up to say I was helping design the crucial learning version of getting things done training. While I was learning getting things done for the first time as an individual, as a participant, a lot of people might say, well, that seems odd. You should be an expert of many years. You should be a practitioner of many years. And. And I remember saying to my team, and we sat around, we went through the David Allen company version. We were first being introduced to the content, and we all sat down and just talked for a day. What are your impressions? What are your thoughts? Where are some of the nuggets, those kinds of things? And I looked at everybody and I said, hey, we are never going to be in the position we are in right now, which is in six months. We will be experiencing what we like to call the curse of knowledge. We will know too much that we'll never be able to be in the position we're in right now, which is we are sitting in the position of every learner we are going to sell to and teach to in the future. We are new to this. We are looking at this through the lens of someone who's just being exposed to it. And our experience right now is what our learners will experience. So we better take all the value we can from being new to this in this moment. So I think that was really actually helpful for us to not fully understand it because we didn't have bias.
- [18:51]
David Allen
Totally, totally, totally elegant and cool.
- [18:55]
Justin Hale
Good for you. Yeah, it was so fun. I was so fun in that way. And it was also the beauty of it. I mean, of course that's painful, but that's also the beauty of it. I would call you and email you. I mean, you were there with us, I think, for a week, and I would come to you and ask questions you thought were probably so simplistic, but for me were the challenges that now I see new learners, new, new people introduced. GTD are Experiencing just like I did. And now of course I have the curse of knowledge because sit here and say, how could you not understand that? I mean, it's so simple. It's just boom. And it works. And I remember looking at you asking things, whether it's about projects or whether it's about, you know, next actions in a day to day format, or how things interact with each other or tools questions that I had. And I asked these questions over and over and over again. Things that were difficult for me at first to kind of grasp or get onto. I remember having this really funny conversation. We're in the middle of the training and our good friend Ana Maria, who's who's been, you know, a master trainer for you for many years and just an incredible practitioner and just a great friend and she was training us. And this was the first time I'd been exposed. I mean, I read in the book, but the training really hit it home. First time was really being exposed and being trained on this idea of, hey, maybe you should consider organizing your next actions according to context. So she teaches this idea. And my mind goes, whoa. Like I never really thought of that. I had this to do list. Every Monday morning I would print off this Word document and just said at the top to do list in red. And it was just, that was it. And I printed off every Monday and I carried it around with me to every meeting and I would add things to it. And then on Friday I would update the Word document and then I would print it off again when I came back to work on my morning. And I trusted this thing and definitely worked, worked pretty, pretty well for me for the time. But I said to her, she shared this idea and I thought, wow, that's pretty interesting. But I also thought, wow, that's pretty scary. And I was, I was, because I had this way of approaching things. And I looked at her in the middle of the course and I said, Anna Maria, I'm going to be honest with you right now. I just want to be transparent. I believe you that this will help me be better and more efficient, have what I need when I need it, but I'm not yet sure how that's going to work for me. And she was great about that. I just was sharing my fear of like, I get it and I've never thought about it, but I'm scared, I'm fearful, I'm worried, I want to go here, but I just feel so comfortable where I am. And you're telling me if I try some of these things, I'm going to go here. And that fear that, that, that moment of apprehension, that moment of excitement of something new, of can I try this out?
- [21:21]
David Allen
What if it works? Work?
- [21:22]
Justin Hale
What could happen? What could that mean for my life? All of that I tried to bottle up as I thought about how do we design a course that welcomes that, that transparency, welcomes that vulnerability and also then guides people along in an effective way, the way Ana Maria did. But to your point earlier about being able to help someone who's maybe not an Anna Maria or an experienced master trainer, I wanted then to be able to say, how do I design a version of this course that someone who is pretty new to it could train and actually help someone else who's even newer to it be able to feel the confidence to be able to try these things out. How do we make the course in some ways trainer independent so you don't have to be a 10 year expert to be able to stand up in front of a room, teach the course to a group of people that are maybe you're two months in and they're brand new and you can stand up there and look like an expert and still inspire and enable them and help them grow in ways that, that you yourself are still trying to figure out, but that you could still help them have that experience. And so we want to create a lot, you know, good.
- [22:24]
David Allen
Yeah, I'm saying that's. I think one of the things you guys have done so elegantly is to build a model that you could take a nurse practitioner or a nurse manager, you know, because you've had so many in your early years served so many healthcare clients for which oh my God, that they can learn to manage crucial conversations, how much improvement to human interactions and feelings happen in those kind of environments. So yeah, God bless you. I mean, good work. At the same time, being able to build that. Well, I use the analogy because again, I got a black belt in karate in karate schools. The schools have different belts, but usually they're sort of white belt, yellow belt, green belt, brown belt, black belt. That's a traditional kind of a model. We found that a yellow belt, which is sort of the first level of graduation, could teach a white belt as long as there was a black belt available. So as long as they had the model of what the total thing looked like, the yellow belt could say, well, I don't know how to do that one yet, but I know how to do this one. Let you and me work this together. And so building a model that maps to that I thought was just Elegant in terms of how you guys have done it.
- [23:43]
Justin Hale
Yeah. Thank you.
- [23:43]
Catherine
Yeah.
- [23:44]
Justin Hale
What we tried to do and watching a lot of your approach, because when I was going through it the first time, I had the advantage that probably 99% of people don't, is which I had you. I had access to you and Ana Maria. And so one of the things that we had talked about as we sat down, as we said, there'd be massive benefit, of course, if each person could see a model of the way David Allen approaches this. Not to copy him, but to understand the black belt. Belt and say, let me watch the black belt. Let me go. Okay, let me. Let me. Now that I understand the principle of what he did, let me make it work for me. And you had a number of videos online, and I said, some of these should be in training. People need to hear. Hear us teach them about clarifying and then watch someone spend 90 seconds clarifying and go, oh, there it is. Or hear about the importance of being deliberate about capturing. And then watching someone capture for two minutes and going, ah, that's what it looks like to do this thing that's.
- [24:33]
David Allen
Like trying to learn to swim by reading a book. You know, it's.
- [24:37]
Justin Hale
It's. It's amazing.
- [24:38]
David Allen
I don't think it can do that.
- [24:40]
Justin Hale
It's amazing how often when I'm teaching, say, crucial conversations, and I will say, I'll teach them a skill, for example, like how to create psychological safety when the other person gets defensive. And we'll teach the idea, and they'll say, oh, that's really brilliant. I love that. And then I'll say, okay, now we're going to practice. Then go, right. Like, right. And I look at them and say, I mean, if you wanted to, you know, kick a soccer ball like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, and you could just watch them, you know, read a book, or I could tell you how they kick a ball. It'd probably be fairly helpful, but you probably would never kick that effectively. But what if I took you out on a field and gave you a soccer ball and made you kick 10 or 12 or 20 or 100 or a thousand? Don't you think you get better faster? And they're like, okay, I get it. Practice is one of those things that's so essential to behavior change. And deliberate practice, the right kind of practice, where you're getting feedback from a coach, you're trying it again, you're doing it over and over and over again in the right way, is something that people are very reticent to do, it's uncomfortable, which, by the way, means it probably works. If you look at the research on deliberate practice and acquiring skills to become an elite performer, one of the things the researchers say is if you're doing a type of practice that you really hate, you're probably doing the exact kind of practice you need, right? And so if you're sitting there, if you're good at shooting free throws in a basketball court, you probably don't need to shoot free throws. You probably need. Need to be shooting in the corner, three pointer with someone in your face. And so I think that when it comes to gtd, it's the same kind of thing. And that's one of the things we try to implement was this idea of, I want to see someone do it, and then I need to be forced to do it myself, which makes me uncomfortable. I often like to sit back and just be inspired and then end a training program. Wow, that was so inspiring. And yet I don't do anything different. But if I'm forced during the training, say, in crucial conversations, to be given a scenario and to have to turn to someone who's also been given the scenario, they play the role of sort of the responder, and I have to use the skill I just tried. And they get to. They get defensive back at me. They make it feel like real life, and I have to then use the skills I just learned. Wow, that's much more valuable than being told, here's a little script to address defensiveness. You know, I mean, and so at gtd, it's absolutely the same way. And we try to implement that so often of saying, I taught you how to capture. They go, that's so cool. That's so cool. No, no, no, you do it now. You know, especially when we're doing a virtual course, they say, okay, take three minutes and capture, capture around the space right? Now look around where you're at. Where is something hanging around that doesn't belong where it is the way it is? Start capturing that, right? And. And they start to go, oh, okay. And so this sense of learn, do, learn, do is something that we really value and we've tried to implement with gtd. And I think that people who actually, after they actually get over their sense of okay and they start practicing these things, they go, oh, I thought I got it before, now I get it. And now I realize that I don't know how to do it.
- [27:24]
David Allen
That's why I don't know. I mean, I'm sure you've heard my story over the years that, you know, in the early days, I used to do most. Most of the seminars myself and, and two days. And I assumed in two days I would cram together almost everything that I put into the book, you know, in gtd, you know, in the early years. And people would be hypnotized. They'd think, this is fabulous. And they, you know, I was good presenter, as you are, too. And they'd walk away enthralled and not do anything because it was just way too much for anybody to try to integrate. I didn't think it was that much because, you know, as, you know, it seems so simple once you kind of get. It's like, well, sure, just go write everything down and decide next action. Make some lists and you're. And, you know, review them weekly and you'll be cool. Yeah, well, duh, you know, how. How common sense does that seem to be? But as, you know, how rare to find somebody who makes that a habitual practice of their life in a way to do that. So that was one of the things so attractive about you guys was your ability to be able to understand the instructional design aspect. And I'm certainly one of the worst players of the play about that in terms of instructional design. How do you get people to actually change their behavior based upon it? So I had to step back a bit and swallow kind of hard to be willing to step GTD down to the basics and be willing to say, yeah, that's fine. If, if, if, if that's all people get, they're going to get a lot out of that that will improve their life and their conditions and their intersections, you know, in life out there. And so I had to be. I had to make myself comfortable with that. But I had to know that there was still the black belt model out there in terms of the, you know, the more serious stuff around. And, you know, we're exploring, you know, possibilities of expanding all that as well, even with you guys. So. So talk to me a little bit about. Well, either, either, you know, push back on me or reflect on what I just said, and then I'll ask you about your own path.
- [29:30]
Justin Hale
Yeah, I, Yeah, I think. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that it's a, It's a. So one of the things that I struggled with when I first went through gtd, and I knew that if I struggled with it, most people struggle with, which is this idea of a system. Now, what I understand now is that a system of habits and tools that work together is more powerful and sustaining than just A handful of tactics, right? Like you could give people a handful of productivity hacks. And sure it may help here and there, but it doesn't really create the kind of bold promise that we give people in gtd. I mean that's the part that's powerful and yet risky about what we do is we say stress free productivity or we at least say you're going to get a lot more productive in the most meaningful ways and a lot less stress. And that's a huge promise. And yet the only way you can deliver on that promise is through significant change. And so that system of doing, capture, clarify, organize, reflective, engage, when done, consistently brings about the real full realization of the promise. But when you overwhelm people with the system up front, sometimes people go, I could never do that, I can't do that. I don't know if you remember this, we had this really interesting phone call and now I understand it better, but we were having this phone call, you and I and Catherine Maria was on the call and I said, look, I said I'm starting to better understand how each of these skills really build on each other. When you do one and do the next, it creates this beautiful system and you can trust it and you let things go and ah, stress reproductivity. But I said if I could force you to tell me if people left the training and only learned one or two things, what would you want those one or two things to be? Your first answer was well that's good, I want them to capture, clarify, organize, reflect and engage. I said no, no, that's five things I want you to tell me two. And it was interesting because Catherine, Anna, Maria were yeah, well maybe if we. And then they need to connect. And I said look, I understand that but if just let me force you just for an exercise sake, it was only one or two things, what would it be? And they kind of said well and they were kind of finding ways to just say capture, clarify, organize, reflect and engage in different ways. And you finally said okay guys, let me just stop here. If I could just get people to get stuff out of their minds and decide on the next action, that alone would be life changing. And I said that's great, I'm not going to cut everything else out, but I want to understand from you if people only left because we know from the learning theory, right, that people typically forget a ton of what they learn. You give them this much and they walk away really realistically remembering this much. And so my question was what would you want this much to be and you talked about getting off their minds and deciding on next actions. And so for me, it was sort of really also understanding the core. And I wanted people to be able to say, hey, look, guys, when you go through this training, you're going to see a lot of stuff, but I want you to pick one or two things. And if you do those one or two things, I'm actually going to tell you right now, it's going to make a significant change in your life. And guess what? As you get comfortable those two things and you add on a third, you're going to feel even better. And then a fourth, and the whole thing, you're doing it all. You're not even going to be able to believe what you can expect. Right? And so helping people feel like it's okay to crawl first, don't feel pressured, because now there are sometimes people said, well, I'm capturing, but I'm not doing the other four things. I mean, it's like, it's okay, it's okay. If you capture excellently, you're going to experience some amazing benefits. And once you really start crawling and then you can stand up and start walking, you're going to feel more comfortable doing those other things. And so that's always been something we've been trying to emphasize for people is don't feel overwhelmed. We don't want you to throw this whole thing out because you feel like you can't do it all at the beginning. You're going to naturally start doing more of it if you can start excelling at one or two things. And I think that's been true for me as well.
- [33:02]
David Allen
So, no, that's very elegant. And I don't know if I have any people that are listening or watching this, have heard me talk. This story said, years ago, when we designed the Notetaker wallet, I said, just this little piece of system, if you put that in somebody's hand, is going to actually increase the value in their life because they're going to have something. They go, oh, oh, oh, you told me about this. Let me write that down. And suddenly they're going to start to experience something simply by this. I had this fantasy. I said, look, if people really got the value of something like this, and we had it made in China, we had it, you know, we trying to figure out how to design it and so forth. We went through. Katherine can tell you tons of stuff, figure this out. I said, if I could just be in the direct, in the mail order business, put this out there on direct mail and just you know, go to the, go to the post office and get checks every week because how many people are buying such a cool thing? Nobody bought it. So I sort of had to give up that idea. So in a way, I was not allergic to the idea of stepping down the process into something that was just valuable, that what people were people willing to engage, engage with it, you know, and somehow, you know, make it profitable enough to keep doing it, you know. So yeah, yeah, so let me poke at you back again in terms of your personal stuff. You're an elegant trainer. Every time I listen to you, read your blogs, read all that stuff, I go, God, this guy just adds glisten gold to everything that we do. And so as most people who have heard or read your stuff know that you're one of the most articulate people I've ever met about this methodology. So what do you, what have you learned recently in doing this training and doing this work? I would suggest that I'm 76 as we're recording this. And so I keep learning stuff kind of surprises me. Oh yeah, David, you teach that stuff? Oh yeah, that's a cooler way to do that or whatever. So I'd be curious, Justin, in your relatively young years, you know, and relatively short period of time, but elegantly engaging with this material, what have you learned? What do you keep learning? Especially teaching it, teaching it. As you know, you don't learn until you teach.
- [35:28]
Justin Hale
That's right. Yeah, I learned a lot teaching it up front. But what I will say too, I said I would say that learning it's helpful. Teaching it's even more helpful. But living life has been for me the, the most important piece of what's helped me discover all the new uncovered elements of this methodology. So, you know, even looking at my journey from before, like I said, I came to GTD with a Word document to do list. I left GTD with that same Word document, but now organized in a different way. Now with the project list at the bottom. Now organized and lists by context. But I was still using a very low tech tool. Coming from a guy who at the time was spending time training at Facebook and Google and these high tech companies and I was using a Word document to manage my productivity. I mean, it was pretty for someone who was younger too. It was like, wow, like you're not really hip, are you? And yet in the moment I thought, well, the tool itself works for me. Let me get the methodology down. So I literally used a Word document, I think for the first three months while I was really trying to still get things going and use the habits. And then three months later, I graduated to something called a Google Doc, which is the exact same thing as a Word document, but just in the cloud, right? Still very, very low tech, but I needed to be able to access it on my phone. And then it wasn't until maybe another three or four months that I then felt comfortable enough that I was doing my habits often enough that I moved to a more high powered app because my habits were where they needed to be. And I thought, okay, now an app would accentuate what I do rather than try to replace what I wasn't doing. But my experience was what really made it work. So this is the really interesting part. We were right in the middle of developing getting things done for Vital smarts version. And we had two little boys, three and two, Ethan and Jack, two little boys, super energetic, I mean, just crazy, bouncing off the wall, typical little boys. And my wife was pregnant with our third. And along the pregnancy there became some serious complications where at about 24 weeks, 40 weeks is full term, 24 weeks. She was admitted in the hospital and the doctor says she needs to stay here until she delivers this baby. We want to try to keep that baby in there as long as possible. So like that, overnight I was turned into a single father. And this is right in the middle of our development of getting things done. I was still on the road training, I was trying to develop this course, I was working with the team. And so I remember hearing a lot of people when I was out teaching GTD and other things, they would say things like, you know, I'm doing okay with my gtd. It's just. But, you know, things got busy and so I need to get back to it. And I. And that echoed through my mind when this happened. I thought, here's a moment where I can say to myself, let me set this aside so I can address some of my life's waves that are happening, so to say. Or I can sort of lean in and trust that the best way is through. Right? Like using these methodology. I mean, David keeps saying GTD is not just about getting things done, it's about being appropriately engaged with your work and life. And the most, the best way I can be appropriately engaged right now is to take care of my sons, help my wife, support her in the hospital, manage the house, right? That's how I can be appropriately engaged. So rather than saying GTD is something I do, in addition, how can I use GTD to be appropriately engaged in this moment? And so it was one of those moments where, once again, I was new to it. I mean, I had been. I had been using GTD for six to nine months. I was still a newbie to this stuff, trying to develop a training program about it. And so I remember saying to myself one night, I had my mom take the kids for a night, and I went to Christina and I said, okay. And she, she. She'd been a teacher for a number of years, but at this point had decided that she wanted to be home with the kids. And so I said to her, I said, I need you to tell me everything you do while I'm at work every day. You know, tell me nap times, tell me all this stuff, tell me laundry, tell me house, tell me cleaning, tell me everything. I need to know everything. And I just captured it all, and I made them all projects. And now some people might say, wow, that's so insensitive. I thought, no, what would be insensitive is not showing enough respect to the amazing job my wife had done by saying, I'll figure it out. Instead, I said, I want to know everything you do, and I want to do it just like you. I mean, I'm so grateful what you do. I want to figure out what you do, and I want to keep it all going right? And so I made projects out of all of it. And it wasn't even as much about that stuff is about saying, let me make sure that can keep going so that my kids can have feel normal psychologically and keep in their flow. And that when we come to the hospital each day to see their mom, that we're not worried about anything else. All that stuff is on autopilot. We've got to figure it out, systems covering it. We can come here each day, we drive 15 minutes down the road, and the two boys can come and play. Play Doh with their mom and read books with her mom and visit with her in the hospital. And we are only thinking about that. So it was about get the system, get it all figured out so that we can be present and focused. I started doing two weekly reviews a week. They're probably each about 45 minutes or so, But I thought, I'm going to double down. I'm going to double down to make sure I'm in full control. Because I also realized there's no way I'm going to be able to do everything that I was previously committed to. So I got to do some more weekly reviews to start getting a feel for where I've passed my threshold of what I can actually finish. I need to start renegotiating. I need to start declining things. I need to go back and have crucial conversations with people. And let me be clear, my organization was amazing. I mean, right off the bat, at the time, my manager, Emily, said, what do you need? Let's clear your schedule for all your travel days. I will take care of that. I will get someone to take this, this, and this. What can you give us? What do you need? How can we support your family? She was visiting my wife in the hospital. Our leaders in our organization, I mean, they were just amazing. But they just said to me, what do you need? And they were so great about having those renegotiation conversations. And I can honestly say through all of that, my wife ended up being in the hospital for 52 days. And then our son was delivered, but he was so premature, he ended up being in the NICU for 80 days. So the wave didn't really get smaller. It just changed a little bit. And I continued to double down on my habits so that I could be present, so I could be focused, so I wouldn't miss things that needed to be taken care of in that moment. And I can honestly say it wasn't easy. But I can honestly say a seemingly overwhelming situation did not overwhelm us. I can honestly say that in that moment, I felt in control of what I could control so that I could be open to manage the things that I can't control and I didn't expect would be coming at us. I could be ready for those things. And so to your question. My personal experience of GTD has most importantly and most powerfully come from just stuff that's happened in life that I had no anticipation of? Right? That just happens. And so you can ask yourself, am I going to set this aside or am I going to use it to get through and to grow in this moment? And what's so funny now is now my boys are a little bit older and they met you a few years ago. And I was trying to explain to them, you know, some context of who you are. And I said, hey, because they're pretty good about saying, when I want mom and dad to get something, I will. I won't just tell them, hey, we are out of this, or I want more of this. They'll say, hey, dad, will you put blank on the list? And I said to my boys, when we met you, I said, this is the guy you have to thank for the list. And they love that. Right? And so it's become more of a habit now. I'm not saying my 8 year old is a GTD expert. What I'm saying is they're starting to understand more clearly this sense of presence and focus. I put something over here so that I make sure it gets done in the moment, needs to get done, but that we're not always trying to remember things all the time, that we have a lot of fun, we spend a lot of time playing sports and joking around and wrestling and watching movies and spending time together. And so for me, the experience was massive. And then going out and training it to people, I think the training was helpful, but also certifying people, teaching people how to teach it was really helpful. And they would say, this seems like a challenge to me, Justin, that I would find myself digging in even further, trying to read more deeply. The research, trying to read other books that you've talked about have been helpful for you. I listened to as many of the GTD podcasts as I could and then I would just try things out and try things out and try things out and then teach people and watch them try it. And to your point, watching people try stuff that you've taught them and struggle was so helpful for me to notice what works and what doesn't. And I think that it's interesting because at the beginning of my journey I was very dogmatic about the methodology, it must be done in this way. And then over time I've become much more of sort of a hands off, like, let me teach you the principles and you need to make it work in a way that works for your life. And I always, they say, well, is it okay for me to do this? And you said this to me at the beginning and I've slowly figured out how, how you think. And I said, they'll say, is it okay for me to do this? And I said, well, is it working for you? If they say yeah, I said, great, keep doing that. And you said that to me early on, but I remember being like, no, but David, I want you to tell me the exact right way. And you were like, justin, if it works for you, then do it right. I'm not here to tell you exactly how to live your life. I'll give you the principles of what I found to be helpful. You make it work tactically in the way that works for you. And great. And so I'll often turn that back to people. What's the exact right way to do it? Okay, well, what's going to help you create the greatest amount of stress? Reproductivity? Do it that way. And I think that that's, that's the journey people need to have on their own.
- [44:36]
Catherine
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, of view, and so understood that it's like walking into a library going, gee.
- [45:20]
David Allen
Where do I start?
- [45:21]
Catherine
So that's oftentimes the initial phase of this. And many people, after a year or two, 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 method 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, 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 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 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. There's more than meets the eye in there.