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Hello everyone. My name is John Forrester and I'm here to guide you through a GTD mind sweep. Some of you may have done this once or twice before. Some of you may have done it many, many times before. Either way, this will be a good chance to find out what else is lurking in the corners of your mind that you can get off your mind and so that you can have less stress. So the things to have nearby are a capture tool. And I'll say a little more about that. That could be pen and paper, that could be a digital capture tool. Whether it's a computer or a mobile device. The idea is to have something that you can capture to quickly and easily. So think about what's going to have the least psychological friction for you to capture into and have that nearby. Something that is fast, easy. So we want to support you going for quantity here. We want to support you going for the most, getting the most off your mind that you can. So whether you're most comfortable with paper and pen or a digital device, anything that works for you, but have that ready. As I mentioned, you don't need to have the fundamentals course workbook, but if you do, that's fine. Have access to your lists. That would be your lists of projects, next actions and waiting for someday, maybe the standard GTD lists. Also your calendar, because some of what you capture may go on your calendar. And that's about it for what we're going to need. And here's our session agenda. So we're going to cover the best practices of capturing. We're going to actually do a guided mind sweep. And that's going to be the bulk of our time here. We've got 60 minutes scheduled and about half of that will be the mind sweep itself. The other larger chunk of time is going to be clarifying and organizing what you capture in the mind sweep. And we'll do a quick conclusion and talk about some next steps. And before I go further with this, the reason there's a separate step there for the clarifying and organizing is that what you capture in the mind sweep is not a to do list. I want to make that really clear, and I may say it another hundred times or so, I want to give you the freedom to capture anything that comes to your mind and get it externalized off your mind. And if you're already thinking that everything that comes out of your mind has to go on a to do list, that'll probably cause some psychological resistance. So remind yourself if you, if you need to write it down, put it on a note in front of you and say, the results of the mind sweep will not be a to do list. I can write stuff down without committing to it. We do that so that in the next phase in the clarifying and organizing, you know that you can choose whether or not to commit to doing to something. You may get it off your mind. And when we get to clarifying and organizing, you say, I'm just going to throw that one away. Delete perfectly fine. So the idea is to go for quantity with the mind sweep and then you'll cull what needs to be called during the clarify and organize phase. We have a couple of learning objectives here. The main one is to get practice getting things off your mind and begin to develop that as a habit. This is a structured mind sweep that we do for half an hour or so. But you don't have to do this in a structured way once a week or anything. The idea is for you to have the habit of getting things off your mind the moment something comes to you. Now that could be while you're driving. Maybe you pick up your phone and say hey Siri or whatever into the phone and capture something that way. And here's the quote from David that underpins this entire, this entire step of capture. Your mind is designed for having ideas, not holding them. You're way too creative and brilliant to use your mind for this low level task of holding on to ideas. Much better to get them out of your mind and externalized somewhere so that you can then be more creative in your thinking about them. In the five steps of gtv we have capture, clarify, organize, review and do. Actually that's the, using the old terminology there, it's capture, clarify, organize, reflect and engage. So the mind suite part of this is capture, of course. And the, the next part of that we'll move into with the captured material is to do the clarify and organize steps. So by the end of this, you will have done some of steps one, two and three of the methodology. You're going to capture commitments into a bucket you trust you'll process. We've got a, an image here of a physical in tray, but that could also be an email inbox or paper and pen, could be a notebook you keep. As long as it's a place you trust, you'll look at the captured items and process those in relatively good time, say within 24 to 48 hours. If you wait too long, they just go kind of right back into your head. We want to look at what has your attention personally first we're going to look at professionally in a few minutes. But first, first we're going to look at personally what has your attention. Anything you think of that is of a personal nature that isn't already captured into your system. Actually, I'm going to rephrase that and say even if it is already captured into your system, go ahead and write it down anyway, because there's a good reason your mind has brought it to your attention again. So go ahead and write down anything even if you're positive it's already in your system, because there will be something there that still needs to be clarified. And while you're doing this, I'm going to call out a few personal areas that may help you think of other things to clarify. But for now, just go ahead and get started with thinking of anything personal. Go right ahead. Anything with your home. Whether you live in a house, an apartment, a tiny home. Anything in your home that has your attention that isn't already exactly the way you want it to be. You might also want to look at the methodology guides to see if anything there triggers you. There's an incompletion trigger list in the methodology guides on pages six and seven, I believe it is. Anything about your finances, clothes, anything with any family members, family members or friends that you haven't talked to in a while. Need to Anything with health When I do this, I have a little bit more specific way I look at that. I just sit there with my capture list and think of my body. I might start with the top of my head and then just scan down my body. Is there anything with my body that is a health concern that I haven't already addressed somehow? For example, I'm just doing that now and I got to right here on my jaw and thought, ah, dentist. I need to schedule a checkup with the dentist. I'm going to capture that right now. How about a vacation getting to be summer, at least in the Northern hemisphere. Do you have a vacation planned already? Another thing to consider is are there things in your world personally and let professionally into if that shows up that aren't exactly how you would like them to be? It could be a relationship you'd like to be slightly different in some way. That's something great to capture. We're going to spend about four more minutes on personal before we switch to professional anything with your community, your neighborhood, your neighbors, any community or civic service work that you do or like to do. And while we're in our last couple of minutes on the personal mine sweep, I'll just remind you Go for quantity. Go for quantity. Quantity is your friend here. Don't worry about what we're going to do with the quantity. We're going to go into that after we do professional, but you'll have time to process this mind sweep. So go for quantity because that's going to provide you the greatest stress relief. All right, we're going to switch over to professional now and you can keep thinking of personal things during this part. We're just going to call out some professional areas for the next ten minutes or so. But as always, feel free to capture anything personal during the professional part. Don't put any limits on yourself. Work projects you've started but don't seem to be moving forward. That's a great thing to capture because it means there's some way that you can clarify more fully what that project is and be able to make progress on it. Projects that need to be started, projects you would like to delegate to others, anything like that. Any kinds of commitments or promises you've made at work that you haven't put into your trusted system somehow, so you're not entirely positive you're going to be able to fulfill that or, or remember it. So ideally, you're not remembering commitments you've made, you're just seeing them on your lists. Upcoming meetings, any upcoming meetings that you need to do something more about or that somehow are nagging at you or have your attention. About staffing. This could be related to your job. It could be people who report to you, people to whom you report there any issues there, any staffing roles you think need to be filled, relationship with your staff, your boss, co workers, anything about that that's not as you would like it to be. Just capture that. It's fine to capture, even if you don't know what you're going to do about it. We'll figure that out in a few minutes. We're in about the last four minutes of this part of it. So now I'm going to challenge you something here. What's still on your mind that you haven't gotten off your mind yet that is somehow bothersome, perhaps has some emotional angle to it that brings up anxiety, fear, anything like that. Where you go, I don't want to even voice that inside my head or write it down because it's too thorny an issue, I don't know what to do with it. I'm just going to encourage you to find this, the stuff that seems like it's too difficult to even be worth capturing and write something down about it because we can put that through the clarify and organize and get you some relief from it, no matter what it is. All right, let's wind up with that, and we're going to go to look at what the result is so far. How. How is this experience going for you? Are you having a sense of grief or relief? Often it's both. In fact, usually when we do this with people, they have some areas where they feel grief, they're even less comfortable than they were, and some areas where they feel relief. Just getting it off their mind, they can see it. It's objectively externalized that way. So it's normal to feel both grief and relief about this. But if you're up for it, just pop into the chat window and let me know what you're doing. Okay, Mark, I see what you mean about work that straddles personal and professional, where you don't feel as though you have control. I hope you captured something enough about that so that you can put it through this sausage grinder of clarify and organize in a few minutes. Yeah, Lisa, that's also something we see a lot here. A lot. After the Minesweep, you. Your lists that were already long, because you're all good GTT practitioners, your lists were already long. Yet now what you're doing is having a whole bunch more to consider whether to add to your list. So I remind you one more time here, what you just captured is not a to do list. You're making no commitment to do anything about any of this. Except ideally, your only commitment here would be to. To process this, to clarify and organize it. You're not making any commitment to do these items, start projects, anything like that. And the reason to make the commitment to clarify these is because if you don't, if you just took all this output that you've got written down and just deleted it, threw it in the trash, a lot of it's just going to go right back up into your head. And that's what we're. We're hoping to avoid, to have these out for the. Out for now and then clarified. So you don't need to have headspace devoted to these any longer. Yep. People are saying, I feel both overwhelmed and good about capturing. Yeah, right. That's. That's normal. And we have a way to handle that. We're going to get to clarify and organize in just a moment. But essentially, here's the. The way you move from grief to relief, there are three things you can do. Say no, complete it, or renegotiate it. There are various ways to do that, and you may be thinking ahead already that some of the things you feel grief about you can't say no to, can't complete right now, you may need to renegotiate some things. So those are all ways to get from grief to relief. Here we go. Quote from David In a way, what we're doing with this entire Mindsweep webinar is helping you get to the point where you can feel good about what you're not doing. It's a great place to be, is to say, okay, I know all the things I'm not doing and I feel fine about them. Another comment here from Mark. I'm reminded that I do not do minesweeps often enough. I was on a webinar with David for one of our global partners last week, and somebody asked him, how often should I do a minesweep? He gave an answer I've never heard him say before, but it makes a lot of sense to me. His answer was, you should never stop doing it. So we have it in these structured ways like these webinars, and it's built into the weekly review. But ideally you would be capturing things and getting them off your mind the moment they occur to you. There are ways to do that. Even if you're in a meeting, you can say, well, something just popped into my head and I want to be present with you in this meeting. I'm going to take five seconds to capture this item. Done. Okay, now I'm back with you again. That way it doesn't need to build up in your mind. And the person you're with would also go, oh, thanks for telling me that. I'm glad you want to have your full attention on me instead of on that thing that you haven't gotten off your mind yet. There we go. So we're going to move on to clarify and organize. Clarify. It's determining the meaning of each and everything that has your attention. Organize is where does it go? Once you've clarified what it means to you, you put it where it goes, organization, where it's going to make the most sense to you. When it's time for you to actually do step five, which is to engage with what's on your lists, we're going to start clarifying and organizing what you wrote down. And that's going to be a matter of asking for each item. What is it? Well, it's some words in digital or paper format there, but ask a little more than that. What is it? And is it actionable? That's a key question. Is it actionable. And that's where we get to whether the results of your mind sweep turn into anything like a to do list or projects list. If you decide it's not actionable, it's not going to go on your to do list. If it's not actionable, say nope. There are three things you can do. Trash it, reference it, or incubate it. Trash it's pretty obvious. You hit the delete key, you cross it off, you throw it away, tear it up, throw it away. Reference would be I don't want to get rid of it. There's no action for me to take on it. So you file it in your reference system somehow. That could be an email folder, maybe Evernote onenote, all kinds of ways of doing reference, paper, reference system. So that reference is another way of saying, no, there's no action and then putting it somewhere where you might need it in the future. Last is incubate. And there are a couple of options for that. Incubate could mean it goes on your someday maybe list. I'm not committing to do anything about it now, but I might want to revisit it later. It could go on your someday maybe list. Another option for incubate is it could be in a tickler file. That could be a physical tickler file or a digital tickler file. And that could even mean putting it on your calendar at some future date to reconsider it. Not because you're going to do anything about it, but you'll want to reconsider it then. So those are your three options. When you take the no road for is it actionable? If the yes, then its three options here are to do it if it's less than two minutes. That's the famous two minute rule. Delegate it. Can you give it to anybody else to do? Or defer it. And defer it means you're going to put it on your lists. Defer means I'm not going to do it now. I want to do it as soon as I can get to it. So it's going to go on your next actions list or your calendar, depending on what it is. So that's our next choice there. And now it's your turn to do some clarifying and organizing. Clarify and organize items from your mind sweep. For each one, go through these 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 steps. The fifth would there would be to ask yourself, is there a project once you've done it, delegated it, deferred it, is there a larger outcome that that's part of and you want to Put that on your projects list. Go right ahead with that. Going to take, take at least five, maybe as many as 10 minutes for this because I want you to get a chance to really plow through a lot of what you captured. Liesel comments that seems like a fruitless exercise on the surface, but provided extreme relief in dumping. Yeah, that's often what people say is, but they'll question the value of doing this before they've actually experienced it. Once they experience it, especially if they go all the way through clarifying and organizing to process what they get off their mind, then they usually find, oh, that was very much worth it. Another tip here is that if you're saying, yes, there's a next action, you decide to do it because it looks like a less than 2 minute action. I recommend unless you're really experienced with that and you know your two minutes, time yourself on those where you start a tune, what you think is a two minute next action time yourself and if you get to the end of two minutes, stop what you're doing and put it on your list for later. It's a really great skill to get to be able to know what two minutes really is. Most of us are pretty optimistic about that and we end up thinking, oh, that's less than two minutes. I'll just start it five minutes later. It's turned into a whole lot of rabbit trails that you're running down. Yes, defer it means you're going to put it on one of your lists. Someone's asking, what does defer mean? That means it's going to either go on your next actions lists, which are probably sorted by contexts, or on your calendar. If it's something like oh, I wrote down Call Joe that would go and you realize Call Joe needs to happen on a certain day or at a certain time that would go on your calendar. The items that are on your next actions list and your calendar are by nature deferred to the future projects. After you've clarified whether if something's actionable and you say, yes, it is and you've put you've either done a two minute action, delegated it to someone else, or deferred it, then the final thing to ask yourself is does that really complete it? Or is there any larger outcome, a project that you'd like to put on your projects list and your list of projects is a list of outcomes results that you want to generate that take more than two next actions. Sorry, more than one next action. You may have a lot of projects that only have two next actions Those are still valid projects. Someone's asking if an action relates to a project. Yeah. If you've got something you've added to your list and you know that that's not going to complete it, then that action is related to a larger project. This is a great question here. I have so many that will be impossible for me to go through each one in the time we have right now. Is that normal? Yes, that's normal. It doesn't happen for everybody, but it happens for a lot of people, especially if they haven't been consistently in the habit of getting stuff off their mind by doing this kind of mind sweep. Especially because those of you on this webinar, you tend to be bright, creative, successful already. You're the kind of people who have lots of ambition, lots of ideas. It's very likely that in a session like this, you could generate so many items that in our time remaining, you won't get all of them clarified and organized. So for that, I would say set time on your calendar or right on your next action list, Complete processing my mind sweep items. Ideally, you do that within the next day or so, just so they don't start climbing back up into your head. And Charles is mentioning if an action might be part of a project. Yes. So this, this process we're doing right now, the clarifying and organizing will make sure that if any of these actions has a project, then what you will end up with is at least a project on your projects list and one next action for it. That's the minimum you'll need to be able to, when you're reviewing these lists, move projects forward, you'll see that, oh, I have this outcome in mind. I see. I have one next action for it. That's the minimum you need to make that project move forward. You may also look at that project and go, wow, I should do more planning for that because it's a bigger project. And that's fine. You can just have as the next action, plan more for Project abc. That's perfectly valid. You could put time to plan for that project on your calendar or just on your next action list, say next action to plan more for that project. Because that planning may be. May generate more next actions that will get the more relief for you about that project. And one more word about projects here is if, if any of you are wondering, well, how many next actions should I have for a project and how much planning should I do for a project? The answer is it depends on the project. Some projects need very little planning and they sort of unfold organically. As you do a next action, the next one shows up some to get off your mind. You might need to do more planning. And so what I'm going to recommend here is if you want to see some examples of that, I'm putting in the chat window a link to a webinar called the Anatomy of Projects. And it's one that talks about several different kinds of projects, how you might track each of those kinds of projects, how many, and what kind of next actions you might have, how much planning. It's a terrific one that kind of looks at the nature of projects and acknowledges that you probably have projects that are quite varied in how much planning they need, how many next actions there are, how many not next actions, how many dependent actions they have that come forward as you complete the next action. So highly recommend that we're kind of winding up here. How was this for you? I'm primarily interested in whether this last step of clarifying and organizing brought you more of the relief. I would rather not leave you just with grief. I would like you to at least know how you can move from grief to relief, and hopefully you've started feeling more relief. So let me know in the chat if you're starting to feel some more relief or at least feel like you know how you can get there. The other thing was, any questions you have, feel free to put those in there or discoveries. I'd love to hear it. If you learned something here that will be helpful in the future, something you didn't realize about the mind sweep or your process. Aha. Someone saying, I think I need a bigger Someday maybe list. Great idea. I have a pretty long Someday maybe list, and I know a guy. You've probably heard him on some of our webinars. His name is Eric Mack. Last I heard, he had a couple of thousand things on his Someday maybe list. He generates a lot of ideas, and so he's just very comfortable having a very long Someday maybe listen. And all you need to do with that is realize you don't have to do any of those things. You just review the list on some regular basis. You've got a thousand items. You may not be reviewing that every single week, but maybe once a month, often enough so that you know whether you need to delete any of those or just leave them there for now or maybe turn them into projects. And on that note, we're having a webinar coming up in June on the relationship between your projects list and your Someday maybe list and why that's a close relationship. Can you talk trash, I trash something and then it resurfaces. My criteria are probably off. I would, I would just say look at your criteria and see whether what makes you decide that it's trash? Is there any hesitation to, instead of trashing it, add it to a list. Add it to someday, maybe something like that. I'd probably look at Are there any commonalities between the things that you trash and what resurfaces? Is there anything about your thought process when you decided to trash it that is in common when those things resurface? Good. If this is helping you get to where you're looking forward to your weekly review, that's a plus. More projects than I thought. Good to separate out from to do's and put some small actionable steps in place. You said it. That is brilliant. That's the great understanding here of projects and next actions. Almost everybody has more projects than they really think they do, and people tend to think that if I declare it's a project, all of a sudden it's bigger. So I'm just going to put something on my next actions list. I guarantee you you'll feel better about all of your next actions. If you go through and question those and say, is this really a project or is it just an action? You may find that your projects list grows, but it'll also make your next actions list more manageable and more attractive to you to do the next actions. I have a lot more clarifying to do. Yep, I understand that. Good for you. Next we're going to look at your next implementation steps. Especially if you've discovered or learned something in this about yourself and about how you've been relating to your trusted system. I would encourage you to translate that into any kind of an implementation. Next Step Step do you think it would be useful for you to do a quick mind sweep before you go to sleep at night? Just so that you can say, at least I got it off my mind and I'm not going to be waking up at three in the morning thinking about something that I didn't have written down somewhere. So that could be something to do is get in the habit of doing a mind sweep at particular times. Maybe before you go to sleep. Also maybe before you start work in the morning, you may find that if you do something like this before you start work in the morning, you're clearer and you are more easily able to see what you should focus your attention on. We have recorded Mine Sweep webinars in GTD Connect. You may want to go through this and just take yourself through a Minesweep again with that kind of structured help that you get by listening and watching a recorded webinar. And we also schedule these live Minesweep webinars every couple of months or so just to give people a live version of it. Part of why we do that is that almost always somebody asks a question, brings something up in the chat, and this has happened several times today that helps other people to understand this better, helps us explain it better. So I really appreciate that you participate in the live chat here. All right. Well, that's it. You did it. Congratulations. If you got through everything that you got off your mind and clarified it, either no or yes, congratulations to you. And for many of you, it's likely that you didn't do that. So still, congratulations to you because you have all that off your mind and you have a manageable next step to take to go through those items and clarify them. Strongly encourage you to do that. And that's about it. Thank you all so much for being here with this webinar. And be sure to check the webinars panel on the right side of most GTD Connect pages. It'll show you the next two live webinars we have. We've got a weekly review coming up. And then toward the end of June, Ana Maria Gonzalez, our senior master trainer, she's the one who trains the coaches and the trainers. She's going to do a webinar on the relationship between the Someday maybe list and projects list. So you can get in there and register for both of those live webinars. Thanks so much for being here, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of the day and a good weekend coming up.