Jon Forrester (4:02)

And Rob, today you covered a lot there. The fact that you've got that tech background that you heard about GTD so early, soon after the book was. Plus you mentioned all the other, some of the big other productivity approaches. When you were trying those other productivity approaches, was that all with paper planners or was some of that shifting into when digital and PDA things started to be available?

Michael Keithley (4:31)

No, great question. Initially it was all paper based. In fact, I remember some of the templates and kind of my, what now we would call a weekly review was getting different colored highlighters and marking out the time and figuring out what I was going to do and all the, you know, move your system from A to B to C and just all the things of the past. But it was initially paper and then once again, as a techie, I was. One of the things I have in my office is what's called the technology graveyard. So I have the original iPhone, the original Palm Pilot, the original blackberries. You know, you go down the line and I remember the Palm, I think was the first device, the Palm Pilot and all the successors of the Palm system where I tried to apply gtd and with varying degrees at the time I thought it was magic, you know, this was, was amazing.

Jon Forrester (5:29)

Yeah.

Michael Keithley (5:30)

And it really kind of led to the importance of, of a capture device, you know, and.

Michael Keithley (5:38)

But it was never, up until fairly recently, I don't think it was ubiquitous and had all of the stuff you need. So I always had a. And actually I don't remember the name of it, but I got this from the GTD connect thing, the, the little pocket thing. I would have With a piece of paper, a little pen and I always carried that. I was of course always wore a suit and tie every day to work, so I always had that available. And so I would say it was 100% paper based and analog. Then it was probably like 50 50. And this was the, the tried and true thing. And I would take those out and I'd throw it in my inbox and process it later.

Jon Forrester (6:15)

Aha. Okay. Right. So you, you actually have run the gamut of, of using everything from paper to probably a variety of digital tools by now.

Michael Keithley (6:26)

Yeah, yeah. And I would say I'm fully digital now. 99. I still use paper once in a while. Love paper. There's, there's certain instances when you're taking notes in a meeting and things like that where digital think is appropriate. But most everything is digital now.

Jon Forrester (6:44)

Yeah, yeah. Well, if you're in a meeting with and you're taking paper notes, nobody thinks you're ignoring them by crafting an email.

Michael Keithley (6:52)

100%.

Jon Forrester (6:53)

Yeah.

Michael Keithley (6:54)

And I, I try to tell, you know, as a manager and a leader, younger folks that, and they don't, you know, it's, it's a challenge.

Michael Keithley (7:04)

But that's human nature.

Jon Forrester (7:06)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see what you mean. Okay. Well, you have an unusual perspective then, having observed that the, the arc of productivity approaches going from way back with paper all the way into getting things done and then the various digital approaches to getting things done. I also think it's really interesting that you have that tech background and that's your, your work. So you are very familiar with the various tech angles on GTD too. That's a great background.

Michael Keithley (7:39)

Yeah. And I've tried many of the, you know, to do list trusted systems kinds of things over time. You know, I really settled on, on some that I think now really work best for me and why. But I pretty much tried everything and there was a long time where I used Evernote exclusively.

Michael Keithley (8:01)

And then, you know, I kind of shifted off that I still use it for reference. I think it's fantastic for reference. But Omnifocus is my kind of tool of choice. And one thing that I think is critical about both of those and now almost all the systems have that the digital systems is. So much of our incoming stuff happens via email, at least as a professional still. And being able to forward that email to an email address in either Evernote or Omniflow Focus that goes automatically into the inbox or the unprocessed area is, is a lifesaver because so much comes in that way and it Just, you know, one of the things I, I really try to focus on is reducing friction.

Jon Forrester (8:47)

Right.

Michael Keithley (8:47)

I think that any friction that you introduce into anything is, is, is difficult. And that's why, you know, I always advise people that are trying to get into GTD to always have your capture device or devices with you and make it as simple as humanly possible. But think about, you're in the shower, you have that great idea or you think about something or you're in the car.

Jon Forrester (9:11)

Right.

Michael Keithley (9:12)

Or you're. Whatever. It's just super important to always have it with you and make it as simple as humanly possible. Worry about processing it and clarifying everything else later.

Jon Forrester (9:22)

Yeah, yeah. Well, there are places like that in the shower or you're in the swimming pool or something like that where high tech device like phone is not necessarily going to be your friend, but a scuba diving board that you can write on with a wax pencil or something like that.

Michael Keithley (9:39)

Yeah.

Jon Forrester (9:39)

Would do the trick.

Michael Keithley (9:41)

Well, I have, you know, just for that shower scenario, I played with a bunch of things, right. Like, like grease pencils and things. But I have a, I'm in the Apple ecosystem. I have a home pod in there. And so I basically ask Suri to add something to Omnifocus and yell that out. Yeah, it works.

Jon Forrester (10:06)

So. And does Siri do the translating pretty well? Even if the shower's running?

Michael Keithley (10:15)

I yell pretty hard. So I would say it's fairly good. It's good enough for me to remember. Gosh, what was that? You know, I just need a gist of what it was to really then clarify.

Jon Forrester (10:28)

Yeah. It's not as though you need everything spelled exactly right. This gets it off your mind.

Michael Keithley (10:33)

Exactly.

Jon Forrester (10:34)

Yeah.

Michael Keithley (10:35)

I do the same thing in the car. You know, I spend. You know, I'm sure maybe we'll get into this later, but I'm, I'm really big into AI and chat GPT and I'm using the voice mode of that in the car is, is something super exciting to me.

Jon Forrester (10:51)

Oh, okay. I want to hear more about that. I do. Well, before we hop off tools, let's see, you mentioned you're in the Apple ecosystem for the most part and using Omnifocus is that. Have you been on Omnifocus for a while? Through a couple of versions of it.

Michael Keithley (11:10)

Yeah, I have probably. I'm gonna get a guess for the last, say, five years or so.

Jon Forrester (11:15)

Okay.

Michael Keithley (11:17)

But I, as I said, I, I pretty much tried them all.

Jon Forrester (11:20)

Okay.

Michael Keithley (11:22)

With varying degrees of success.

Jon Forrester (11:24)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Forrester (11:28)

Have you switched to Omnifocus 4 and I'm only asking because I think they either have, or about to have at least a fairly significant point upgrade to 4.8 or something like that. Pretty soon they already have it. Okay.

Michael Keithley (11:46)

And once again, I don't want to foreshadow the excitement around AI, but they're building into Apple's ecosystem, something called App Intense that I think, you know, when, when Apple finally gets their Siri act together will be magical.

Jon Forrester (12:05)

Wow. We've covered the questions that I usually, that people seem to want to hear about first is how did this person hear about gtd? What are the tools? And now let's, let's end the suspense. What all have you looked into with AI? The interface between GTD and AI, all that.

Michael Keithley (12:28)

Yeah, sure.

Michael Keithley (12:31)

So I'm a technologist. I love technology. Right. So when the, you know, chatgpt moment happened, ironically, still less than three years ago, I was, I was kind of all over that and really saw the potential. And if I go back and I know that, that David Allen and kind of the GTD community has always kind of desired to have this smart app that would help lead you through a lot of the thinking of that.

Michael Keithley (13:10)

As ChatGPT kind of evolved over time, especially recently, and got functionality like memory. So it gets to know you as a human being. And I'm an early adopter, so I've connected it with my calendar and my Dropbox and email and all that kind of stuff. And so it knows quite a bit about me and it knows that I'm a GTD fanatic and I have alerts. And so if there's anything that goes on in the GTD universe, whether it's something on Reddit or something on one of the David Allen official sites or anything else, I get notified about that. So I'm keeping up to date and it, it does the work for me. I don't have to go seek it out. It finds it for me, which is really cool.

Jon Forrester (13:55)

Yeah.

Michael Keithley (13:55)

And.

Michael Keithley (13:57)

I'm, I'm playing with ways to, you know, leverage it in my system and things like that. One of the cautions I tell everybody is it's amazing, but you still have the responsibility to check things yourself because it doesn't always give you the. Certainly not the, you know, tried and true official David Allen company recommended stuff. It does 90x percent of it. But sometimes it might give you something that I don't think is, is kind of, you know, from that world. It might be from some once again Reddit form or something at Red or, you know, what have you. But when I Think about new big projects and breaking them down and trying to come up with next actions and things. I'm at the phase, after I spent three decades being a cio, I'm now doing my own kind of consulting business, doing fractional CIO work, where I'm advising and working with companies. And that's a big change. Instead of going to work normal stuff. So setting up a business and how to think about that, how to market, how to plan my time, everything else has been a wonderful resource.

Jon Forrester (15:13)

Great.

Michael Keithley (15:14)

And of course, because I do everything through gtd and it's all right. And so I have this master project and some projects within that, and each one I will say, how should I think about this? How would I break it down? What are the next actions, etc. And it's. For me, you know, I can probably get 20% of it, just top of my head, but 80% it comes up with. I'm like, that's a great thing. And then I try to drill down on that and get more on that. And it's just been really wonderful for that.

Jon Forrester (15:48)

And.

Michael Keithley (15:48)

And to another example that's kind of related, that's really been, you know, super powerful for me. And the breaking down a project is we're selling our home and buying a new home that we're.

Michael Keithley (16:04)

Out in Arizona, and it's new, so we just bought a lot and we got to build a home on it. Everything else, and that's not something you do a lot. Right. And so I'm not an expert at that.

Jon Forrester (16:17)

Right, right.

Michael Keithley (16:17)

And it made me think back to, I think, getting it all done where Gracie's garden and the, you know, way that David broke that down. And I'm like, what do I need to think about? You know? Yeah, sure, you say, yeah, I gotta hire a realtor. I probably move. But I couldn't even begin to think about all the things that I had to think about that were truly projects on a GTD sample sense.

Jon Forrester (16:42)

Right.

Michael Keithley (16:43)

So ChatGPT just broke it down and it was. It was. It was magical. It was kind of like.

Michael Keithley (16:52)

I'm sorry, I'm riffing a little bit here, but when I.

Jon Forrester (16:54)

That's good.

Michael Keithley (16:55)

I train people and my staff and other people on gtd. The first thing I do is a mind sweep.

Michael Keithley (17:02)

The. The look on everybody's faces when they start to discover things that they never thought about. And they put down and they're like, this is amazing. I had that same kind of epiphany when I was doing this with.

Jon Forrester (17:15)

Oh, really?

Michael Keithley (17:16)

ChatGPT?

Jon Forrester (17:16)

Yeah.

Michael Keithley (17:18)

And so, you know, I think while AI, you still need a human in the loop, you still need to take responsibility for it. And check can be wonderfully helpful in that. I've also started to play with my weekly review because I've given it access to my calendar. And so going back, you know, a couple weeks or months to look at kind of open loops that are still there, it finds stuff that I've found is a lot better than me just like visually scanning it.

Michael Keithley (17:50)

And so it's just, it's, it's. We're on the cusp. I think it is going to be a wonderful marriage. It's really early days and I'm excited about it.

Jon Forrester (18:00)

Yeah, you're mentioning things that are, that are really specific and highly useful that way. Like it, it looks at your calendar in a certain way that you might not. I mean, look, think about the way people do a weekly review. They might be a little reluctant to do it at all because they think it takes too long. So once they get into it, they may be a little bit on the going through the motions side of things. So when it comes time to review the calendar, they might be going back two weeks, but just kind of scanning and not really thinking as deeply. Whereas a computer with just a few CPU cycles can think a lot about each and every one of those appointments that you had two weeks ago.

Michael Keithley (18:43)

It's especially looking back, I think is where I get the most value out of it. Wow. Because I take transcripts on that and that's stored in Dropbox and has access to that. It correlates that so it, it can discover action items or things that, you know, hey, did you do the, did you send the email to so and so did you follow up with this? And I. It's gold and it makes it, wow, easy and it makes you look great. Yeah, exactly.

Jon Forrester (19:14)

Somebody says, you did mention that in the meeting and I'd forgotten about it. And you're following up with me 100%.

Michael Keithley (19:20)

And where I'm now trying to kind of hone the system is, is looking forward because once again, this memory feature, which I think is probably greatest thing that ChatGPT has and as it knows more about me, it knows what my priorities are now.

Jon Forrester (19:35)

Right.

Michael Keithley (19:36)

And so I wanted to scan forward on my calendar and help me understand what the most important things are and help me prepare for those. Right.

Jon Forrester (19:44)

Yeah. Have you given it access to any of your GTD system other than calendar, for example, your next actions list or your projects?

Michael Keithley (19:55)

No, it doesn't have as of yet. A Direct integration only. Focus. I wish it did a godsend. But I do think that through this app intense technology that Omnifocus is embracing and Apple is surfacing in their ecosystem, I'm going to be able to get from here to there and watch out. I think that's going to be just turbocharged everything.

Jon Forrester (20:20)

Yeah. It can't be very long before most app and software developers are including some kind of API to talk with various AI sources that way, just because people will expect it.

Michael Keithley (20:35)

Yeah, I agree.

Jon Forrester (20:38)

Interesting. Okay, well, you really have applied it in a lot of ways then if you're using it to help with specifics on the weekly review that way.

Michael Keithley (20:47)

Yes.

Jon Forrester (20:48)

You mentioned this a little bit. Have you found that the quality of the answers you're getting about GTD are good enough for you? Or does it occasionally give you something that's completely misdirected? Like no, stop capturing. You're capturing too much. It's okay to keep stuff on your mind. Do you ever get a really bad answer?

Michael Keithley (21:11)

Yes.

Jon Forrester (21:11)

Okay.

Michael Keithley (21:12)

And I used to get a lot more bad answers than I do now. And I, I think about this in many areas, not just kind of GTD and specifically talking about ChatGPT and AI. I think that you've got to constantly be honing things. So I'm a continual learner, I listen to podcast, I do RSS feeds, you know, blah blah, blah. And I'm very Darwinian. If I'm not getting value out of it, I cut cut loose right away and I have minimal core of things that are really high value. One of the things, you know, I keep harping on this memory feature of, of chat, I tell it prioritize trusted sources like David Allen's official site over Reddit or news articles or other things. And so over time, while I still get kind of junk answers, sometimes it's getting a lot better.

Jon Forrester (22:11)

Ah, very good. Yeah, initially when I was. I haven't looked at it at this in the last couple of months, but as of a year ago, up to a few months ago, some of the answers it was giving were based on almost more like Google search rankings, where if a site had a lot of Google search results and it was reliable that way, AI would say, well, this is a GTD source. But there are plenty of sites that have a lot of visitors that have very low quality GTD advice on them. So if it's getting better about that and gives you the ability to prior tell it how to prioritize, then yeah, that's really important.

Michael Keithley (22:57)

Another somewhat related example of what you're talking about. I'm a huge inbox zero guy way back from Merlin man's 42 folders back, you know, God knows how long ago that was.

Jon Forrester (23:11)

Yeah.

Michael Keithley (23:12)

And since then there's been a lot of articles and press that kind of, you know, don't agree with that. And I was getting a bunch of junk around that and I said, look, use 42 Folders website, the original man one as the authoritative thing on this. Not, not kind of, you know, Wired magazine or whatever else it's been getting at. And so I think you have to work at telling it where you believe kind of the authoritative stuff instead of letting it default to Google rankings or other things.

David Allen (23:47)

Yeah.

Michael Keithley (23:48)

You put in the work, you'll get the value out of it.

Jon Forrester (23:51)

It's kind of. You're a cio. You understand what it means to have to filter the quality of information so that you can 100% stuff that's usable.

Michael Keithley (23:59)

Yep.

Jon Forrester (24:00)

You're essentially giving the AI search parameters and saying, prioritize this, just like you said. Correct.

Michael Keithley (24:07)

That's. And that's true of anything, I think, you know, Wikipedia can be great or it can be garbage, you know, so you have to, you know, and that's where I think sometimes people are lazy with AI. You know, if you think about like a 8th grade kid that says, hey, I'm doing a paper on, you know, so and so Thomas Jefferson, and then they get busted because the teacher's like, you didn't write this? You know, kind of. Yes, but it could be really wonderful research and help them along and speed things up and help them do a real paper. But if you're just lazy and just outsource the AI and trust what it has, it might hallucinate too, you know. Yes, that's getting a lot better. But it still happens. And that's why, you know, I always coach people. You have to take responsibility and you can't be lazy. If you're lazy, it's. It's just not gonna be a good outcome.

Jon Forrester (25:05)

Yeah. And these days there are also. Academics are keeping up with that so well that they have their own sites that they can put the text through to say, did my student write this herself himself or. And give a kind of a ranking there. Well, it looks like this was about half. Half done by AI. The other half was original human composition or it was assisted by AI. But you can say that you can trust that the person wrote this and understands the ideas and.

Michael Keithley (25:39)

But kids are smart. I mean, it was the same thing pre AI with Google and there's, you know, my daughter's in college and she's, oh yeah, dad. So you put it in AI, then you put it in this thing and it dais it. And then you put. It's like they have a whole spy versus spy kind of deal with that.

Jon Forrester (26:00)

Maybe this gets into the ethics of AI. So what do you think of that? If your daughter composes something with AI, but then she dais it, at what point do you say somewhere in here she's learning a lot about the subject and it doesn't matter whether how much she's using AI to do it, because if you asked her a question about it, she would understand it.

Michael Keithley (26:22)

Yeah. So, you know, being a technologist and being a cio, I have a more tech bent on this. But I remember back to when I was going in college and in my first semester I had this young professor that mandated that we get calculators and we had these HP12C calculators. We had to learn this thing called reverse pulse notation, which we all of course hated. But then we saw the value of it. Yeah. And then the next semester I had this old fuddy duddy professor that didn't believe in calculators and said, you could, you're not allowed to use it and you know, you won't learn anything and blah, blah, blah. And what I recognized pretty quickly was I'm now doing rote stuff and I'm not focusing on the actual, you know, philosophy and the stuff I'm supposed to be learning. I'm wasting my time doing this. And it showed me the value of the tool.

Jon Forrester (27:20)

Right.

Michael Keithley (27:21)

And then pretty soon everybody had calculators and computers and you know, like, you know, I'm sure people, I don't know if they still memorize the multiplication tables or not, but, you know, so much of it can be done with, with devices and technology that that's really the, the leverage point of, of learning.

Jon Forrester (27:41)

Right.

Michael Keithley (27:41)

I think back to later on when Google and it was like, what is open? You know, book test in the age of Google that has everything? And then so I kind of apply that to AI and I think that, you know, there's a lot of discussion around what the implications could be on jobs in the future, etc. I share that kind of concern and I think it's super important that the younger generation, like my daughter in college, really embrace AI. Right. And the, the reality of it is more than likely the.

Michael Keithley (28:16)

Teacher is using AI to grade the thing and the teacher's aide is using it, and the students are using it and I just hope that they can recognize that and do the higher level, whatever the concept is, that they're trying to teach the kids less about that rote, you know, math that I was doing with calculator.

Jon Forrester (28:36)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I suspect that if the, the teacher and the, the grad assistant for the teacher take your daughter out for coffee and just say, talk to us about this subject, she would go on and on and prove that she really knows the material. Whereas if they're only basing it on the text of a paper she wrote with or without AI, they might not really get how well she understands it.

Michael Keithley (29:01)

Exactly. And it's part of the education and the preparing for life is leveraging the tools as they emerge.

Jon Forrester (29:10)

Yeah. That whole idea of not allowing kids to use a calculator, but that was when calculators were replacing a slide rule. And at some point somebody would have said, no, you're not allowed to use a slide rule to do your work.

Michael Keithley (29:24)

Exactly. And it goes on. Right?

Jon Forrester (29:26)

Yeah. Right. Well, it's interesting. I suspect that by the time she's finished with college, the AI will have changed the job market and like that. So it's very good that she's already involved with that.

Michael Keithley (29:39)

Yeah, for sure.

Jon Forrester (29:41)

What other thoughts about GTD and AI, other ways you might have used it in your, your practice or ways that it's changed your practice?

Michael Keithley (29:51)

Yeah, you know, I've incorporated it into my kind of management style with my employees and while not everybody gets on board, you know, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink kind of thing, I would say 60 to 70% of the folks that I've managed over the years have taken to it. Right. And for all the same reasons that I've been using it for so long and, you know, haven't fallen off the wagon like, like the other diet type protein. And the, the, the key thing for me, once again, is a subtitle, Stress free productivity. And once you really rationalize and understand, you know, David always says your head is for, you know, what it's good for, what it's not.

Jon Forrester (30:37)

Oh, yeah, right.

Michael Keithley (30:38)

And I think the, the, the benefit of GTD is, is really stress free and, and freedom. And it's the freedom to, you know, not have the, just the distractions that stress brings with, you know, things. And it really allows you to kind of focus and engage in the moment.

Michael Keithley (31:01)

In ways that no other system, you know, I've seen does. And it's, it's universal enough. I'm a big believer in using David's words, all stuff right matter. I don't, I don't make any distinction between is this a work thing or a home thing. It's all stuff. If it's on my mind, if I've committed to it, I have to deal with it. Yeah, I want to capture that in a way. The least fraction friction possible, the easiest way I know it's there, I don't have to worry about it. I'm not going to drop that ball. I'm still going to make that commitment.

Michael Keithley (31:34)

And I just, you know, I love so many of the sayings that David has. You know, I. There's not a single meeting that I don't go into. And I said, okay, we're here for an hour. If we. At the end of this, what does wild success look like? What is that picture? Right? And so many people go, oh, that really changes the frame of the whole thing.

Jon Forrester (31:55)

Oh, we should think about what we want to achieve in the meeting before we go into it and get 100%.

Michael Keithley (32:01)

You know, and when you're breaking down like projects and actions, what does done look like? Let's begin to use a Stephen Covey thing. Let's begin with the end in mind backwards. And I just live by that all the time. And I find it's been a lot of people really kind of. Wow, that's refreshing. Let's do that.

David Allen (32:34)

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, 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, 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 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 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.