Yesterday – 4.12.2014 – we had an amazing presentation from David Allen, author of  Getting Things Done (GTD). He had drunk a bit of our famous Hungarian white wine and said, that he would be direct. Indeed he was 🙂

UPDATE DEC 2014:
He also had a keynote on STRECH 2014 conference, titled “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”. You can watch it here.

UPDATE JAN 2015:
There is an excellent course available on this subject on LYNDA.COM.

My primary takeaways

  1. As soon we leave the room, his speech will be “prehistoric”. (Apparently not, I am still writing about it 😉 However this may be true for many very wise speakers.) This statement in itself represents for me decades of teaching experience.
  2. Life will hit us with a fire hose every day. Our management skills are really tested in special situations, like a move, marriage or divorce. In critical situations, we usually have no chance to act in an appropriate way, unless our life is well organized.
  3. If you care about the newest and loudest, you are in a dark tunnel. There is no light at the end of that tunnel.
Tunnel of newest and loudest

Tunnel of newest and loudest (background tunnel picture is from Vladimir Agafonkin)

David spoke about the immense clarity that awaits us after writing down everything from our heads. Our heads are to have ideas, not to hold them. You also cannot do it halfway: either you hold your stuff in your head – humanly impossible – or write everything down. If you have only some stuff left in your mind, it will bog you down. Unload your mind.

“Share anything of value you’ve gleaned from this with someone
else. (It’s the fastest way to learn.)” says the book. Luckily we have a GTD meetup group in Budapest, so everyone, who wants to organize his/her life properly is kindly invited.

GTD workflow

GTD workflow. I got this picture from zendone.com (http://help.zendone.com/images/gtd-workflow.jpg)