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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:10]
B
Hello everyone, this is John Forrester. We're starting another GTD Office hour discussion where we can talk about anything GTD or productivity related. Really? No, no rules on that. Pretty much your time here. I'd be glad to help as much as I can, but mostly I want to give you all a chance to talk about anything GTD related. Anything that's a productivity win. A productivity challenge. These are the kind of things that show up. Kelly, I don't know anything about what you're using for a system and would you care to tell us?
- [00:48]
A
Sure, I'd be happy to. For my personal, I have two different systems. I keep personal separate from work. I found during the pandemic that everything was getting a little bit mashed up and I honestly didn't know if I lived at work or worked at home. So I had to pull things apart and give myself a chance. And I know there are a lot of folks who have big success with combined systems, but for work, I use Microsoft to do it integrates with Microsoft Planner. I run a bunch of PMOs in my company and everything integrates. So I can see kind of at a glance what do I have an email tag that I haven't processed yet? Do I have a task I've I've got going for. For someone, something for me, something I'm waiting for. And, and it, it's really been terrific for me. At home, I use for personal, I use a product called Everdo. I I don't know if it's one that people have heard much about. I, I feel like it's kind of a niche product, but it's designed to align with the GTD system and I've had a, a lot of good success with that as well. So for me right now they're separate. The good thing for me, I was a paper person for a long, long time. And I would go between paper and frankly, Excel spreadsheet for a long time because I could create filters and categories and sections and that worked for me. But right now I'm a combination of Everdo and Microsoft to do. They have apps that are available across all my devices and if I don't have access to the Internet or any computers, it's probably intentional. So I don't worry that I can't pick up my paper Planner and get more things done. So that's kind of how my system works. Two columns Personal with Everdo and professional with Microsoft to do.
- [02:49]
B
You mentioned Excel. Almost as if you were apologizing for that.
- [02:54]
A
So powerful. It.
- [02:56]
B
It is. I, I'M going to confess I lately I've been thinking of going to Excel as my system for a while just. Just because there are certain things that are easy in Excel and I live in Excel for other things that I do. So I thought, well, why would I switch between apps if I could just switch between worksheets within Excel?
- [03:20]
C
Yes, I think Excel is greatly underestimated and dismissed these days as being something of the past. And, and actually, even on a, on a professional level, there is a lot, there's very little you can't do with a world design spreadsheet really, if you, if you really know what you're doing.
- [03:39]
A
Agree. And I don't know if either of you have explored using co pilot with Excel, but if you can imagine what you want done in an Excel spreadsheet that you can just ask Copilot to do it for you. It's a pretty good performer. Yeah. I mean, you still have to QC their work, but Copilot will really help you get a good head start.
- [04:06]
C
Yeah, right.
- [04:08]
B
I haven't used Copilot in Excel much. You probably saw me posting a little bit of a grapey thing about trying to do something in Outlook and asking Copilot. And Copilot eventually said to me my translation of it was I know this is crazy, but this is how it was designed. But I'll try it with Excel too because I have been tempted lately to go back to using Excel for my lists because of all the sorting abilities there. I could sort instantly and have projects and actions sorted together, actions nested below projects or separated, done by context, due dates. Those are all easy sorts.
- [04:58]
A
Yep. And again, I'm a big fan of the filtering in Excel. I do a lot of work in Excel. It's. It's kind of how my brain works. So I'm a big fan.
- [05:07]
D
Yeah, I was going to say it's really interesting the history of Excel. If you search YouTube for the backstory of Excel, there's some really well done documentaries on what it became and how it prevailed. And it sent me down this rabbit trail discovering. When Steve Jobs came back to the helm of Apple, he was like, we need a product like this. And at the time, Lotus Improv was this solution that I'd never experienced but but was just a better way to experience spreadsheets. And I think it wound up getting bought out by a company today called Quantum Modeler or something like. It still exists in some form, but it's just not user friendly. It only has really top tier data modeling licensing for large companies. But people basically said the pivot table became what improv was. It's just not as, as fancy and as fun as Lotus Improv was. But Steve Jobs was like, we need to bring this, we need to bring that sense of fun to the spreadsheet. Because at the time Excel didn't have the pivot table functionality and today it basically does. So it can do anything. And I was very kind of anti spreadsheet until I really started discovering what it can do with Copilot and Claude and all the other plugins. So it's kind of like we live in a whole new world now to be able to get spreadsheets to do what we need them to do. But for anyone interested, there's a great backstory.
- [06:40]
B
Thank you for that.
- [06:42]
C
I've also discovered the, the joys of OneNote just recently staying on the Microsoft theme that, that all of these. I now use OneNote for my meeting notes because I can have one workbook with one page per meeting. And because of the way I number them, they're. They're always in date order and I'll never lose anything. Whereas I did find with my paper notes that I tended to lose them. They got in the bottom of the bag. They, they went all sorts of places that they shouldn't go, whereas with OneNote they don't. I'm looking, I'm looking at a way of getting, getting co pilot transcripts and meeting analyses ported into that, but that I, I lack the technical ability to do that sort of thing. But if I can find someone else who's done it, then I will.
- [07:37]
B
You could probably ask Copilot to help you with that.
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C
I mean, I probably can. I just, It's. There's so much that Copilot can do if you, if you ask it nicely that, you know, it just, it's unbelievable really.
- [07:53]
B
Yeah. Speaking of asking it nicely, I was talking with Chat GPT yesterday and toward the end of the chat I said, is there any way that I can get you to stop being so nice to me?
- [08:07]
C
Oh, what was the answer?
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B
We had a great conversation. Said that's sort of my default, but if you would like me to be more, less nice about it, not mean it said if you want me to just stick to the facts, I can do that. And I said, okay, yes, please, that would be great. Because it kept saying. It kept trying to make me feel better about the answers it was giving. It was as though it was trying to be empathetic with me around my. What it was projecting. My emotional reaction was going to be. I said stop, I don't need that.
- [08:44]
C
My wife's deliberately trying to be nice to it because she takes a view that if it does decide to destroy the human race, she'd like to be on its, on its good side. So be nice, be nice to AI. You may end up on the keeping list rather than the getting rid of list. That's her theory anyway.
- [09:05]
B
That, that's very good.
- [09:07]
E
I read a great discussion about using AI for meeting minutes and it was there. The thesis was basically you don't capture the hesitation in answers for people and the, the, the whole nuance of how it, how the meeting happened. And so he captures those things and the AI gives him everything that actually was spoken so he can has a full reference to all of that. He doesn't need to capture any of that, but it's how he felt about what was happening. So it freed him to capture that. So you could look at that later and say who needs to be closer aligned to make this and who needs, you know, etc. So it was interesting. Interesting, yeah. Speaking of, speaking of transcribing meeting notes and things using AI, I found that once it takes like the raw data with you know, all your filler words and ums and, and all of that and you know, lack of punctuation, you can then just, you can ask it to clean it up, take out the filler words, add all the punctuation and you know, it can make any meeting note, any meetings transcribed to look, you know, fairly presentable.
- [10:34]
C
Once, you know, once has started presenting me with a list of action points at the end of a meeting, it'll transcribe the meeting and then send me a summary and a list of action points. And again, although it needs checking obviously because it's AI is generally gets it more or less right. So yeah, that, that's a bit of a win really. But the danger is I think that you start relying on it too much and then you get lazy. You think, oh, AI is going to take care of that for me. And then it does something stupid, which it will eventually and you get every five minutes. The day you stop checking everything is the day it will do something stupid.
- [11:24]
B
Exactly. I remember the early versions of so called smart inboxes that would try to filter on, on our behalf. And I kept getting these emails from the developers of them saying, well, why won't David Allen promote this? It's as though they just really didn't understand GTD or they weren't using their own product because I found that it would classify as spam or unimportant, something that was important. And just the opposite. It really wasn't very good yet, and it wasn't all that teachable in the early forms. And does anybody have better experience recently with AI doing their. least a preliminary sort on their inputs?
- [12:12]
C
I haven't tried it, but. But I remember David saying a long time ago that you could have this fantastic algorithm which would scan all of your, all of your next actions and all of the potential payoffs and, and work it all out and then email you and say the next thing you need to do is call Fred. But at that point you can still say, I don't want to call Fred. I'm watching the football. So, you know, I'd rather watch football than call Fred. So at the end of the day, an algorithm's not going to do it unless the algorithm actually calls Fred. And that to me is quite a scary thought that the algorithm is going to call Fred. I don't know what the algorithm would do at that point.
- [12:57]
B
Yeah, because at that point it would, it would be deciding that calling Fred is more important than anything else. And it may not know that you have a terrible night's sleep and, and you're not really in your best place to be calling Fred about the important topic that the call is about or
- [13:15]
C
that you'd rather be having a beer.
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B
Exactly.
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C
Right.
- [13:19]
B
Yeah. Hey, Josh, you raised your hand a minute ago.
- [13:22]
D
Yeah, I was just going to say I've been experimenting with the Claude Max cowork subscription, which is, it's like 200amonth or something. And what's interesting is that it is great at generating a whole package of documents. So I took about two hours and just spoke into a voice memo because I'm a verbal processor. So I just did a mind dump verbally and then I uploaded the transcript and kind of collaborated with AI for about 20 minutes. And the output was about six Excel workbooks, perfectly formatted with all of the data that I, that I had thrown into it, as well as a proposal for the client that outlined my background, what the cost of the project would be, what the timeline would look like, etc. And I have to say it was, it was spot on. Like the results because it used this two hour, like very big, you know, transcript. So I'm finding I'm now able to generate a lot more documentation more quickly. So the volume of what, what I'm able to do with Copilot and Claude and Chat GPT is actually creating more for my GTD practice To actually go through and say, you know what, I actually need to fix the, the few type, the quality control Kelly that you talked about, you got to go in and then check it because it did get some spelling mistakes wrong. But it's, it got me pretty much 90% there. So it's interesting. It's, it's the illusion of how much is done because it's not done yet. It's not client ready yet. I have to do that last 10%. But I'm now able to generate so many more more things more quickly which then is like, oh, now I gotta go clarify, organize, decide if I actually want to take this on as a project or not. So I'm finding that it's like, it's wonderful at these more advanced models that know you have to pay a little bit more for than the, the kind of introductory subscription are great at producing volume. But now I have even more work to do to now go finalize that and get it pushed up over the, the hill so that it's moving forward. So it's just an interesting paradox of this is all great, but it's like, okay, GTD still is that I think
- [15:45]
C
we're all, we're all going to find out that AI does not create less work. It creates more work of a different kind.
- [15:56]
A
It accelerates work.
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C
It accelerates work which means the chaos can break out even more quickly if you're not careful.
- [16:06]
A
Those discernment skills become real critical.
- [16:09]
B
Absolutely. That's the whole thing that people have always pushed, they've in a way criticized GTD for is they say it doesn't do this, that it was never meant to do, which is decide what your values are in your life, what meet what's meaningful to you. This input that comes in, whether it's by email or a phone call or any other method, you are ultimately going to have to decide whether that's meaningful to you and whether it's something you want to take action on and nobody else, including AI can tell you what's meaningful to you. David, I noticed you posted. The problem here is you're in a Google workspace environment and you feel as if Microsoft have got their claws in to you and are dragging you backward. 365.
- [16:56]
C
I can't, I can't fault one note really. And I, I just think that, you know, it's, it's a very powerful argument for getting into a Microsoft environment. But then some of the other bits I, we like Google, you know, we like, we like the Google workspace environment. So it's kind of having to sit in two camps really. But yeah, I can't fault one note.
- [17:25]
B
Claudia, we haven't heard anything from you. Any thoughts you'd like to share? Any agenda you brought for this meeting?
- [17:33]
F
Not really, but I just came off of a four day thing that I do a lot with Evernote and I belong to this academy run by Stacy Harmon and she did a starting fresh with Evernote. So every day we met for an hour and I really cleaned up my account and I have it working now. So well, like all my GTD stuff is in there, you know, from projects to tasks to project support and reference. And I felt really, I've really wrestled with it a lot, you know, trying to get it, especially with tasks. But I think I've think it's working. So anyway, that that's a win. I've tried. You know, I thought now I want to have tasks, I want to pull them out and I want to use Omnifocus or I'll try to do it but I always come back that I love having it all in one place. It's just really streamlined.
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C
So yeah, I've seriously fallen out of love with Evernote. Canceled my subscription, gone away.
- [18:37]
F
Yeah, they've made a ton of changes.
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C
Not everyone keep trying to get more money off me and Nicole. Like it's not just once a year. Hey, we're putting our prices up. Okay, that's fine. But every couple of months they're going, oh, we're transit transferring this to use this fantastic new subscription. Oh, and by the way, it's another, it's another £10amonth buy. And I just got fed up with it. In the end I, I think they're new owners, not that they're new anymore, are so acquisitive that it's also the quality of the product has gone from being a very nice, very simple, very effective note taking thing to something that wants to do your tasks, take your meeting notes. I just wanted a list manager. Thank you. You know, so yeah, it's definitely not
- [19:27]
B
for everyone not doing that anymore.
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C
Yeah.
- [19:33]
B
And I have, I found that over the years almost everything that starts out as a really good product decides to that they need to be more complex to stay competitive because the developers want
- [19:44]
C
it to do everything because it, once they've made it do one thing really well, they haven't got anything else to develop. So they go, well we could make it juggle, you know, we could, we could make it make you a cup of coffee while you're waiting. You don't need it. You just need something that's a list manager and manages lists. How different?
- [20:07]
B
Well, I don't know if it's just the developers. I suspect that the sales folks and the marketing folks are also saying, but our customers want something new. It doesn't matter whether we need something new, they want something new. So what can you add that looks new? We all like shiny new.
- [20:27]
F
I think it's true of, like, a lot of the task managers. You see new features coming all the time. Todoist has certainly added a ton. I really think Omnifocus, they're. They're one of the better ones, I think, out there. And things. I think things works great, but I think with Evernote, for that, you just have to know what you're looking for and make, you know, if it works for you, fine. If it doesn't, don't use those features. I mean, there's.
- [20:56]
C
I would, I would probably still be using if it wasn't for the constant quest for more money that has really irritated me. So.
- [21:04]
F
Yeah, yeah, the pricing thing has been a big thing.
- [21:08]
C
I got upset a lot of people.
- [21:12]
F
Yes, it really has.
- [21:13]
C
I.
- [21:14]
F
Before the new owners, before Bending Spoons took over, they had a program where you could become an Evernote certified expert. And it was a really simple process. I mean, it really was just going through some, like, courses and I mean, it wasn't. It was easy. And because of that, it's like I got grandfathered in. And so for right now, they're keeping us ECE's and we, you know, I'm grateful for that, but I've learned a lot and I think it's whatever works. You know, the, the main question is, what is your workflow and is GTD working? And where's the. Where are you getting friction that you can't, you know, that you're not. And you're playing too much with the system and not really doing and all that. Anyway, so that's my little update. I. I feel like the main point is not Evernote. It's really my GTD system feels good right now. And that's, you know.
- [22:12]
C
Yeah, I'll email with you, with you a bit about it afterwards and.
- [22:17]
B
Sure. Yeah. And Claudia, good for you for investing the time to, to do a few days of just updating, cleaning up, refreshing the system. It's that. Well, it's springtime. So you did a spring cleaning.
- [22:30]
F
There you go. Yeah.
- [22:31]
B
Good for you.
- [22:32]
C
I have to do a cleanup about once every three months, I find. I mean, not, not like a weekly review. But like serious digging out of stuff. But I. I find that works for me.
- [22:46]
B
Yep. Always a good thing to do. Various people have said that one of the best things that's happened to them is when somehow they're. They lose their system. If it's a paper system, it just disappears somehow, or their computer crashes or the cloud crashes or whatever, and they have to start from scratch. And there's a certain freedom and cleanliness about that. As distressing as it is, you can
- [23:12]
C
always declare bankruptcy and just start again.
- [23:17]
E
Yep.
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C
If you want to. Although that probably is quite a scary prospect for a lot of people, I don't find it that scary. Personally. I think I could.
- [23:26]
B
You know, I've heard of people doing that with email, particularly back when more people had volume problems with email, but I've never heard anybody who was willing to take it all the way to throwing away their calendar.
- [23:42]
C
I've done it.
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B
There you go, Clayton. I saw you raise your hand, but you might have raised your hand before you got to. I got to calendar. What did you say?
- [23:49]
E
Calendar. Yeah.
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B
Okay.
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E
Everything else. Everything else I just throw in as a. As a reference.
- [23:54]
D
Yeah.
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C
Not the calendar, just everything else. Yeah.
- [23:57]
E
Yeah, I just throw it all in reference and start over.
- [24:00]
B
Yeah.
- [24:01]
E
That's very three to me.
- [24:03]
B
That's very telling about. Or about what we all consider to be our most baseline trusted list. We've all figured that the calendar is something we know how to use and we trust it, but. So you rarely find somebody who's willing to throw away their calendar and take a chance that next month they're missing an important meeting or can't. Can't get into the dentist when they have something they need done or anything like that.
- [24:31]
E
The other thing I would say is tickler.
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B
Tickler.
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E
I wouldn't throw away a tickler because that's there and it's lightweight, and no matter how much is in it, you'll miss something if you throw the tickler away.
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B
Right.
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E
And I think there's one other that I wouldn't throw away.
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B
Oh, well, you mentioned reference.
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C
Yeah, Reference would be tricky to throw away, because there could be some quite. Quite important stuff in reference, but you
- [25:02]
F
could always, you know, name it, like, put it in a particular notebook or a folder and just say, you know, archive, and then come back to it. You know, see how much you miss
- [25:16]
C
wills, insurance policies, things that you don't want to lose. Questions. You could find them anyway. But there we are.
- [25:26]
D
I'm curious in your cleanup process. So I'm. I'm doing GTD Coaching right now with Meg.
- [25:33]
F
Oh, nice.
- [25:34]
D
And going through the, the vision and refocus because I'm at kind of in a transition phase again and going through reference and naming. It has been like, wow, I've never done this before. Like, I hate doing this, but I love doing this. And I think, I don't know if it was a recent video from David where he said, you know, you don't need. Or was it the last office hours. You don't need new New Year's resolutions. You just need to clean up. When you clean up, it generates all these new ideas and all this new creative momentum. But I was curious, my question for you is, when you did your cleanup, were there any takeaways or new edges that you found in your naming process of like, what are some of your reflections on, on that cleanup process and what you learned? Just about, you know, yourself and, and your system?
- [26:25]
F
Yeah. That's good. That's a great question. I, I think, I think it was just today, this was the last hour of it. Stacy was saying, you know, that the search, search has gotten so sophisticated that no matter not only in Evernote, but, you know, anywhere that you almost don't have to have. It doesn't matter. You can just search for stuff, but we tend to like things more orderly and, and it helps, you know, to have some. One thing that I have really gotten from working with Stacy is the whole importance of naming conventions and really thinking through how you're going to name something so that you can find it. So I, I'm not great. I won't say that mine is perfect or anything, but, you know, I do try to like all my clients that are in my project support. I start with my business name and then the client name and so I can easily jump to that. Another thing is I don't know if you use tags. I don't use tags. I have more of a notebook based system. But people that use tags often have like receipt receipts, business receipts, you know, there's all kinds of multiple tags and then they can't. And I think that could be the same in notebooks. So. Yeah, I just think it's important to have consistency. I guess that's the biggest takeaway.
- [27:53]
C
Sam.