💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 5130.gmi captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
David G Allan
The new hot trend in Silicon Valley office culture is a Buddh-ish encouragement
of workplace mindfulness. Guided meditation is the new free cafeteria meals.
But David Allen, the author of the international bestselling productivity
bible, Getting Things Done, has been teaching people how to reach higher levels
of cognitive thinking for almost two decades. Like Eastern mindfulness, his
solution is simple but challenging to fully implement.
Clear your mind. Yes, that s it.
Weigh In
Quora readers on how they reduce stress at work
Always do the hardest thing first. (Jessica Abelson)
about anything work related. Play pool or table tennis or foos ball. Or simply
take a stroll around the office compound. (Farhad Tarapore)
open up pathways that you weren't considering when you were banging your head
against a wall. Time away allows you to relax, and your brain to deal with
options in the foreground. (Joshua Hime)
If that doesn t raise any follow-up questions you can stop reading and get to
it. But the truth is most people don t know how to clear their mind.
Buddhism encourages you to focus on the breath or a single thought to calm the
mad monkey screeching in your skull. Such practice has been empirically shown
to strengthen emotional resilience and increase happiness. But then the nagging
thoughts start to creep in. You know the ones. Not big thoughts, but the
mundane, seemingly benign nagging mental memos. Did I send that email? I
need to tell my boss something before the meeting. What was that idea I had
this morning in the shower? I know I m forgetting something.
We have to shut the mundane up, Allen said to me in a phone interview a few
months after we met on a stage in Austin, Texas, in the US at the South by
Southwest (SXSW) festival to discuss his well-known productivity method. Allen
s route to freeing the mind of its detritus is a more practical one than
prescribed by most religions.
The strange paradox is you actually have to use your mind to shut your mind
up, he said. But not by meditation or mantras. You can t shut it up by trying
to shut it off. What you have to do is [ask yourself] Why is this on my mind?
Our brain is a poor and unreliable repository of all the little (and big)
things we try to cram into it. These thoughts clutter our headspace. And those
marvelous, convenient and addictive mobile phones and social networks are
making the problem worse. By living a life of quiet distraction (with apologies
to Thoreau), we are crowding out the deeper and creative thoughts, along with
any hope of real quiet.
To extricate the things that don t belong in your brain, you need a systematic
approach, Allen contends. His book and its concept, abbreviated among the
lifehacker-ati as GTD, is a detailed prescription to fix this problem that I
will over-simplify into four steps:
1) Adopt a reliable capture method (Evernote, voice memos, a Moleskin notebook,
etc) to get thoughts out of your head.
2) Distill them to actionable items and next steps ( send receipts to Finance ,
call a kick-off meeting for an office-wide re-org ) on your daily to-do list.
3) Dedicate yourself to multiple reviews in which you put these action items
into the right buckets ( must be done today , phone calls when I m on the
train ).
4) Do the things on the list, when you have time, prioritising as you go.
GTD offers many hacks and habit-starters to help facilitate this method, but
they all come down to one thing: effectively dealing with everything that
modern life throws at you in a way that doesn t stress you out or bury you.
[You can listen to most of the conversation Allen and I had at SXSW here:]
What does a clutter-free mind feel like? I read GTD in February and began
adopting and adapting it to my life. In the span of four months, I have enjoyed
occasional, fleeting moments in which I realise, I don t have anything I need
to think about! When it happens, a more creative or big picture idea often
enters to fill the void. I also experience increased focus on a project (such
as this column) when I m unfettered by mental loops reminding me to act on
something else. To be fair, other things didn t work for me. Keeping up with
the weekly long-term-goals reviews fell off and I still procrastinate when a
task is emotionally unpleasant (that is, I don t like talking to a certain
person because they are unpleasant).
Getting things done as an aspiration is deceptively practical because
mastering it can be personally liberating.
Allen likens a pre-GTD mind to a car stuck in first gear slow and taxing on
the engine. His method aims to facilitate higher gear thinking. Some uphill
tasks require lower gears, but they will slow you down for more creative or big
picture ones. So the aim is not to shut out thought, but give you the mental
agility to accurately assess any given situation. That, in turn leads to
informed judgments about how to act. Allen often asks himself if he s
appropriately engaged with what s on his mind without attaching worry and
stress which tend to cloud judgment. The military calls this situational
awareness and in combat being proficient at it can save your life. In the
office, it can save your sanity.
The ability to know I can get control is a certain level of Zen-like freedom,
said Allen. Because I know I can get control, then I don t need to be in
control all the time.
Allen s path to personal productivity guru status was as meandering and seeking
as any dharma bum s. I had 35 professions before age 35 , Allen said,
referring to his own Wikipedia entry. But more consistently, he s practiced
personal spiritual meditation since 1968, which has netted him fairly
significant experiences . He has also studied and taught martial arts and found
a lifelong spiritual mentor.
GTD is not spiritual work nor a substitute for it, Allen said, even though its
method to clear space in the mind can certainly make it easier if you re on
that path. That distinction also has a practical, career implication. They re
not handing out paychecks to people with rice bowls in caves, he said, and I
didn t particularly feel interested in going that route.
Yet GTD, as Western and real-world as paradigms can get, is having a positive
and meaningful impact. According to Allen and client testimonials, his work has
unlocked adherents creative flow, increased their effectiveness at work and
given them space to reprioritise career and life goals. Radio personality
Howard Stern is Allen s number one fanboy. And I was struck by the zealous
young man who approached Allen at SXSW, interrupting our conversation, to
earnestly tell his guide: You have changed my life!