#569: Your Head is a Crappy Office, and Other GTD Principles for Attorneys, with David Allen

Episode Notes

Transcript

Sara Muender:

Hi, I’m Sara.

Zack Glaser:

And I’m Zack. And this is episode 569 of the Lawyers Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today I interview David Allen, a author, productivity coach, about his new book team, getting Things Done With Others, which is kind of a companion book to the previous book, getting Things Done, or GTD as the kids in the know say,

Sara Muender:

GTD. Zack, I’m going to be honest, I’m kind of jealous that you got to interview David Allen for this one. What a legend.

Zack Glaser:

I know I got to geek out a little bit. I hope you don’t hear too much of that, but I got to fanboy a little bit.

Sara Muender:

What was your biggest takeaway?

Zack Glaser:

Oh man, it really is that the processes that are put in place help you if you’ll just stay with them, they help you stay in front of the wave. I have gotten in kind of the clear mind sort of area many, many, many times in my life in law school and everything. And then just something sideswipes you and you haven’t maintained that order and you don’t have a mechanism for getting back to there. And so now you’ve got to dig out instead of using the processes and just kind of maintaining yourself in front of the wave.

Sara Muender:

Yeah. Oh, you’re so right. And we don’t see it coming. We think we can do this forever. I mean, the slightest thing, you skip a day and it’s like they say, don’t skip two days of doing something. Then you’ve lost it. You’ve lost it. It’s interesting because I was just having a conversation with one of my lab that I coach about this. Kim, shout out to Kim, she’s a lawyer’s podcast listener as well. She’s one of my faves. And we started the call and she asked me, do you have a system for organizing myself? And I was like, there’s lots of systems. And they all work. They work if you work them,

Zack Glaser:

If it works for you. Yeah,

Sara Muender:

They work if you work if you’re consistent. And that’s the key is kind of sounding like what you’re saying there. And so I said before we find a system, she was just coming back from vacation, and so she was feeling really behind everything piled up.

Zack Glaser:

Overwhelmed. Yeah.

Sara Muender:

So I just gave her a framework that I use, which I’m wondering what David Allen would say about this framework. So just real quick, I’ll kind of

Share that what it is. But I told her, before you do anything, let’s just do a brain dump, get out a piece of paper, a blank piece of paper and a pen. First thing, make categories, make buckets of things. It could be personal and business or just business. So she made buckets of, well, personal finance, I have something that need to take care of. And then within her law firm, she’s got urgent client matters that have to be done. They just moved into a new office so there’s random, she needed to get a new mailbox because it wasn’t up to code or something like that. Random things that need to be addressed, but it’s like, when am I going to do that? I have so much to do. We made the buckets. I told her to do the brain dump from there, then go and assign estimated times for each thing, how long it will take. And Then from there, who can you assign out these different things to? And then sort of prioritize from there Is this, I need to do this now thing I’m behind. Is this within a week, within a month, end of quarter, end of year thing? And then take that and literally I just said, open up your calendar and plug the time blocks into your calendar for the things that by urgency and by prioritization, and that’s all you do. Does that sound anything like what you and David Allen talked about?

Zack Glaser:

So it does, and the thing that always gets me with getting things done is how much of it is, I think David Allen refers to it as kind of uncovering these methods as opposed to creating, because it’s how our brains work a lot of times anyway. So it’s the capture everything, brain dump, get clarity on it, figure out is it something I need to take care of? Is it something I can do anything about at all? Get clarity on it and then organize it. And then I think the big thing, and this is the thing that I always miss, is review, come back over it and I put the review and capture in the same thing. So I’m reviewing and I’m capturing new things at the same time. But the key is consistency. It’s doing it over and over. And the book gets into a lot more specifics about how, and that’s one of the things I really like about these books is it’s really easy sometimes to just say, well get organized, but how the hell am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do? Where do I start? Yeah. It really gets into that. And then we also, as you dig further into getting things done, we didn’t talk about this in the episode, there are levels of when you start to be able to pick your head up, you start to be able to look out, they call them horizons, different horizons, and you start to be able to kind of say, Hey, this is coming. This is coming. And this is where we’re going with this intro. We just redid one of our tools called the Small Firm Scorecard.

Sara Muender:

Tm.

Zack Glaser:

It is, yeah, tm. Thank you. Yes.

Sara Muender:

Hashtag tm.

Zack Glaser:

The Small Firm Scorecard Trademark is a, well, it’s a scorecard. It’s a little test. It’s a little quiz to let you know how your company is doing. More than that though, to let you know the state of your firm, you could get what one would think would be a really good grade on this thing. But even if you’re getting high marks, you’re giving yourself optimized, optimize, optimize that really just tells you something different to work on. Just tells you you’re in a different place. And so as you pick your head up and look around, you have different big long-term goals or even different short-term goals as you do your quarterly planning retreat. But taking this small firm scorecard to you is a step towards being able to think about, alright, I’ve got all these tasks. Well, how do I figure out what’s important? What are the ones that are priorities? You can go by gut feeling or you can have something that gives you a little bit of an idea. So that’s at lawyerist.com/scorecard. And we’ll obviously put a link to that in the show notes.

Sara Muender:

What a great tool because the listeners know that they have a lot of things to work on in their business to fix in their business, to implement in their business, but this just gets down right down to the heart of it. We are experts in the small firm business space. We know what it takes to run a healthy business law firm, and this is going to tell you exactly what you need to do next. And then you can let go of the rest, keep it on a list somewhere, you’ll prioritize again later. Take the scorecard and it’ll tell you, this is what you need to focus on this next quarter, this next year.

Zack Glaser:

And after you take the scorecard, you can get on a call with Amy and she’ll go over the thing with you because we do, as we’re insinuating here, we do have order of operations, if you will. If this score low on this, you need to get after that. Good point. And so we share that in the scorecard. We share that in the results. So if you haven’t taken the scorecard, take it. If it’s been a minute since you’ve taken the scorecard, take it again and then take it again and then take it again. Just use it as a review. Quarterly review.

Sara Muender:

I love that. On how you, do you recommend they take it every quarter? Is this a yearly thing?

Zack Glaser:

I would say every quarter. I’d Say every quarter. Because A, it doesn’t cost you anything.

Sara Muender:

I was going to say, we should start charging for this man.

Zack Glaser:

Well, it takes some time. It takes about five minutes, which it doesn’t sound like a lot, but five minutes actually takes 15 minutes

Sara Muender:

Of honest, thoughtful responses.

Zack Glaser:

Well, and you had to get started. You had to set down what you were doing. Then you have to pick up the other thing you’re doing. So it takes, you got to do it, but

Sara Muender:

Take inventory of my business in 15 minutes. That’s a no brainer. We really do need to charge for this sec.

Zack Glaser:

Do it before you do your quarterly retreat.

Sara Muender:

Yeah,

Zack Glaser:

Have your team do it.

Sara Muender:

Yeah.

Zack Glaser:

Have everybody on your team do it and see, love that where you align, where you don’t align.

Sara Muender:

Oh, interesting. They might get different

Zack Glaser:

Results you need because they didn’t take it.

Sara Muender:

Yeah, that’s an easy qualifier right there. Absolutely. And I love that you say you can get out on a call with Amy. I think that once you finish the scorecard, it’ll prompt you to book a call with Amy on our team who shout out to Amy. She’s amazing. She’ll be able to explain more about what it means and what you actually need to do, what your next steps look like, and if you need help, and then she’ll be able to recommend that you might need some help from a coach or not. You can do this on your own, but it’s worth it, for sure.

Zack Glaser:

Yep. Well, we won’t beat him to death with it because it is

Sara Muender:

Something worth

Zack Glaser:

Doing. Yeah. Well, yeah, we will tell you again,

Sara Muender:

We’ll tell

Zack Glaser:

Again a little, but before we tell you another time, let’s get into my conversation with David Allen so you can get some more time by using his method of GTD.

Sara Muender:

I’m so excited.

David Allen:

Hi, I’m David Allen. I’m the author of the personal productivity International bestselling book called Getting Things Done, and that got shortened to GTD, which has become sort of an international brand of who people who’ve sort of taken to this work. So that’s who I am, and happy to be here and be invited to share my stuff with you.

Zack Glaser:

David, thank you for being with me. I understand it’s a little bit, it would be a little weird sometimes to say I’m the author of the international bestseller, but it is GTD Getting Things Done. This has been kind of commonplace or certainly something that we’ve had and been talking about in lawyers for a while. But this came out, I hate saying this, early two thousands,

David Allen:

2001, the first edition.

Zack Glaser:

Oh, so it’s been around. It’s been kicked around. It’s been tested and tried and many, many

David Allen:

Pirate and all

Zack Glaser:

Kinds of things. I bet. But yeah, anytime you see GTD out there, that’s this methodology of getting things done and it’s a way of being productive. Before we jump into it though, I wanted to say something just real quick because a lot of times people talk about productivity cheats and hacks and using the Pomodoro method or Eat the Frog or something like that. And we’re not talking about that. The thing that really strikes me in reading, getting things Done, and you have a new book called Teams, which is Teams Getting Things Done with Others. You’re reading my mind as I’m going through this, the practicality every time I say yes, but then there’s a follow-up of Rubber meets. Rubber hits the road. So I wanted to say that to our listeners to say, listen in if you’re not familiar with GTD, listen in. If you are familiar with GTD, I’m sure the new teams book how to Get that Done with Teams is out there. But after having said that, could you give us an explanation for our uninitiated of the ideas, the broad scopes of the GTD methodology?

David Allen:

Yeah, it’s not about working harder or working more. It’s about being appropriately engaged with your life, every aspect of your life and work so that you have a very clear head to be totally present with whatever you’re doing, which happens to be the most productive state to operate from. I learned in the martial arts that you need a clear head to really deal with four people who attack you in a dark alley. So I learned that. And then over many, many, many years, I both uncovered, developed and refined a methodology that allows you to do that when your life becomes more complex and busier so that you can surf on top of it instead of feel buried by it. Yeah, that’s a short version of a very long story, but that’s the essence of what I uncovered. It’s not like a foreign language or some new technology, it’s common sense stuff. Most people are doing aspects of this already, so it’s not an unfamiliar practice. What’s unfamiliar is really doing it. Totally. So you have a totally clear head all the time.

Zack Glaser:

Right. I like that you say surfing on that wave, because personally that’s how I think about it is when I get into that, as you call it in the book Mind like Water, when I get into that, I think of myself as being on the front end of the wave. You’re getting out there, but what I’ve never had is methodology for staying on that. I’ve been highly productive. I’ve graduated law school. I theoretically can get some stuff accomplished, but having that methodology for staying in front of the wave is interesting to me. Can you dig into some of what it is to do things in the GTD way?

David Allen:

Well, to your point, a lot of people have tasted what it’s like to be in the flow. Sometimes you’re most in your flow in a crisis because you don’t have the bandwidth or you don’t have the opportunity to think about anything else. You have to think about getting out of the house or surviving or doing whatever. And so that can create, or you can then get yourself into a flow state. But being in that flow state when you’re not in a crisis, I think that’s the essence of what GTD and the methodology is that I created. And to your point, you don’t stay there until you build the habits that build these best practices that you need to implement in order to be able to stay clear. And that’s a lot of what my methodology is, is how to do that.

Zack Glaser:

Can we dig into a little bit of that methodology of how they can keep up with that? And I want to lead with, I’d like to get into the teams aspect of this as well, but lay the foundation. So in reading the book teams, getting things done with others, it’s not necessary to have read or to be currently practicing in the GTD methodology, but it certainly helps. It’s certainly not, it doesn’t hurt to understand the underlying ideas. So yeah, if you don’t mind kind of giving us a little bit of that, that’d be helpful I think.

David Allen:

Sure. Well, first of all, your head’s a very bad office and most people are trying to use their head to remember, remind, prioritize, and manage relationships between tons of things. And that wakes you up at three o’clock in the morning about stuff you can’t do anything about. It’s a methodology that I uncovered about how to capture things that have your attention, decide exactly what you need to do about them, if anything, park the results in their appropriate categories, organize and then build some sort of a review and reflection process where you can see the whole range of your inventory of commitments so that then when you then engage your activity and your focus and your attention, it’s from a very trusted place instead of driven by latest and loudest, which many attorneys are, by the way. Sorry.

Zack Glaser:

Yes, I can say that’s why this really resonates with me, and I’m sure it resonates with a lot of our listeners because when I was practicing and I hadn’t read GTD yet, I actually had to be prescribed Prilosec because I had so much acid reflux or just, but it was run by anxiety. I couldn’t sleep because I would, like you said, wake up at three o’clock in the morning thinking about something that I hadn’t quite gotten to and I hadn’t put in a bucket

David Allen:

Of. And you have a deadline coming in the morning and you haven’t got all the right stuff done yet.

Zack Glaser:

And then there’s something else that I have a deadline for something else, and I don’t know when. My brain doesn’t know when it’s going to take care of that. And one of the first things that you had suggested in this book is capturing that. Just capture it. Just write. So I sleep with a notebook next to my bed now, so if I do, because I am not going to not wake up at three o’clock in the morning and think about something that I missed or I’m concerned about, but writing it down helps and then having a process to deal with that helps.

David Allen:

And so there’s several stages that I uncovered over all these years about how you get control of a situation that may feel a little out of control or overwhelming. And the first, there are five steps. Step one, you capture what’s got your attention. Oh, I need to, oh, oh, that’s right. And I could, but we ought to dah, dah, dah. You just need to capture those, not in any prioritized or organized form. You need to just unload, do a data dump, I need cat food, I need a vice president, I need to go get a checkup on God. All that stuff. And most people have a lot more of those things going on than they realize. So that’s the first step though, is just to acknowledge and to objectify capture

In some form, all of my capturing, or 98% of my capturing is low tech pen and paper. That’s always with me. It’s always by my side. It’s always near wherever I am. So I capture first. Then the second step is clarify. I need to decide what exactly does that mean and what I’m going to do about it, if anything. And the clarified process is a pretty simple algorithm. Look, is it something that is actionable or not? Yes or no? And we get a lot of things into our life and our thoughts that are not actionable. You have no action on there. Three types. One is just trash. What a dumb idea or recycle this email or not recycle this piece of mail, or let me just delete this email that I got. I don’t need it. I was CC’d on something. I don’t need to be CC’d on delete. Most of the audience listed to this needs to know that there’s a key on their computer with a DEL on it.

Zack Glaser:

Well, storage space is cheap now, so we just fill it up with crap.

David Allen:

Yeah, one non-actionable item are trash. Things you don’t need now or you don’t need now that you’ve seen it. Second thing is reference. Oh, that email, I need to keep that about a client. It’s about a project, it’s about a thing. Nothing I need to do about it right now, but I need to be able to refer to it again. So second category of non-action is referenced, third is incubate. Maybe later I need to do something this not now, or I need to contact this client after their next quarter when they might need this report that I need to assess for them, et cetera. So that’s the incubate or the waiting for, it’s the parking lot, essentially. The Things you still might need to do something about, you’re not sure yet, or if you need to or at that time I need to and not before. So there’s an incubate on hold parking lot. Then you have actionable things in your email or in your mind that I need to do something about that

Zack Glaser:

Needs to be solved.

David Allen:

If you say, okay, what do you need to do about that? First key question is, what’s the next step you would need to take? What action do you need to take? If I said, okay, where would you go to do the first step you need to do to resolve that, finish that handle that, or move that forward email to send website to serve conversation to have with partner, whatever. But it needs to be that specific. And then once you decide that, then there’s some things to do with that. First of all, if you can finish that action you came up with in less than two minutes, you should do it right then. It’s the two minute rule, brilliant and stuff. I’ve had so many executives tell me that saved their life, just the two minute rule. Yeah, Teflon in and out. I could handle that email in less than two minutes, respond, gone.

Zack Glaser:

Then you don’t have to spend the 30 seconds spinning up what was the process again? And then you wind up spending more than two minutes. It

David Allen:

Would take you longer to keep track of it and review it than it would be to do it, right? Right. So if it is actionable and you’ve figured out the next action, finish it in two minutes or less. If it takes longer than two minutes, ask yourself, am I the right person to do this action? If not, you need to delegate it, hand it off. Okay, third option would be no longer than two minutes to do this thing, and I’m the one who has to do this. I don’t have anybody else I can hand it off to. Then that’s what you defer. That does not translate to procrastinate, that that translates to inventory with all the other next actions I need to do around my calendar and whatever open space I have to be able to do that action. And so yes or no action, either trash reference material or on hold, or yes, there is a next action, I can finish it right now. Or I need to delegate it or I need to defer it and park it in my inventory of actions to take when I can. So that’s the clarify step. Oh, one more step on that, will one action, finish this?

Zack Glaser:

No.

David Allen:

Then you have a project, You Have some outcome that’s going to take more than one action to complete, and that’s a project. Finalize this with client X, hire this person, get tires of my car, et cetera. And most people have a lot more of those than they realize in terms of those kinds of commitments. So once you’ve done that, you’ve clarified the action, you’ve clarified the outcome, you’re committed to complete about it, then you go to organize. And step three, which is, okay, where do I park reminders of stuff I need to do and reminders of the projects I need to complete and the reference material. And that’s where organized comes in. Once you’ve decided what these things mean, then you need to park them where those things go.

Zack Glaser:

This is one of the things that I was talking about where the rubber hits the road. Because as I go through clarify and I think of defer, I’m like, okay, well how do I defer that? What am I going to do with deferring that? Do I just kick the can down the road? And then I kept reading and we go to, oh, we do the organized step. Got it. Alright.

David Allen:

Yeah. So I have in my own personal system, I have a list called errands. I need to run websites. I need to serve creative writing documents that I need to edit or create and everything I’m waiting for waiting on to come back from somebody else, from a client, for anybody, anything I’ve ordered hasn’t come yet. Goes on a waiting for list. So there’s a simple organization system of all the next actions that are part of the things that I’m committed to do, and I just keep that in the organization system. Mostly it’s a list system. Any kind of a list manager can do that. I have a list called Aaron. So I use Outlook and the to-dos in Outlook, and I just create some simple lists of both a list of my projects as well as a list of the actions I need to take about them categorized appropriately. And then you have review. I need to make sure I look at those lists. When I go out for errands, I need to look at my errands list. If I don’t, I go, oh God, I should have picked up. How come whatever the review process of reviewing down at the tactical level, all the immediate actions that I could take right now or need to take. Or it could be, have I caught up with all the projects that have shown up in the last week? So we found a great practice is what we call the weekly review.

Once a week you step back, lift up your balloon a little bit higher horizon so you can locate yourself in space and time and then take a look, okay, what’s happened? What have I completed, done, checked off? What have I not completed? Okay, do I still have a next step on that appropriately organized and whatever? And what new things have shown up this week. Most people listening are watching this right now have probably had stuff show up in the last four or five days that they need to do something about. They haven’t taken the time to decide exactly what that is or exactly what the outcome is, but they’ve got it.

Zack Glaser:

Yes.

David Allen:

That then needs to be both clarified and then organized. Go, okay, finalize this, research this, put this situation on cruise controlled, whatever that might be as the project, they make sure they catch that up and then review all of those and bring them to current time. And then if you’ve captured, clarified, organized, and reviewed as I’ve just described, you’re going to make choices about where to put your attention and your activity in a much more confident, trusted place than driven by latest and lattice. That’s the truth. And I’ve practiced that over in the last 40 plus years. Implementing this methodology was some of the best, brightest, sharpest people you’d ever know who had not yet gotten this set of best practices, and they were making more money than I’d ever see in my life. So these were not dumb people. These were great folks, but they were up to here. They’d run out. They were at the edge of what people might call burnout, though they were sharp enough not to burn out themselves. They would either just change jobs or change careers or take drugs. Sorry, if you don’t mind me being

Zack Glaser:

Direct. No, no, no. I think that’s the thing. Well, I mean, our profession has a major, major issue with alcoholism and things like that. So that is something that our readers or our listeners are certainly familiar with is that there are other ways and less healthy ways to deal with that sort of burnout. But this process to me specifically, and I think this is exactly what the book is getting at, is when we’re able to organize and set those things that are in our brain, our brain is only able to hold a certain amount of stuff when we’re able to set that outside and let a list or the, I have a list that I’m capturing and I’m not going to clarify or organize or I’m not going to process that until later. Okay, well, it’s on the list now. I don’t have to think about it now when it pops up into my head, I don’t have to think, oh crap, I haven’t gotten to that yet. No, it’s there. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ve gotten to it. I’ve dealt with it. And I think having that clarity, which is exactly what you’re talking about, having that clarity allows you to exist in the moment for the big projects, the rocks, the things that you really need to do and focus on those

David Allen:

Or have a beer or walk the dog or just be present with your kids when you tuck ’em into bed. That’s the reason really for implementing all this is to be clear. Whatever you’re doing, and there’s no sort of regulated template other than what I just described, is what people do when they actually do have a clear head, actually do what I just described. They just didn’t do it probably consciously, but that’s the process.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Well, so in the book, in the original, the GTD book, you go into a little bit more specificity, kind of some chapters of coaching, if you will, because what you do is coach people on how to do this a lot of times. So if people want to dig in further, they can certainly jump into that book. But over the course of you and some other people coaching people on how to do this, and like you said, you’ve had a lot of very capable people that you’ve helped implement this. It looks like y’all ran into the very obvious idea that people don’t work in a vacuum, they don’t work by themselves. And so what I imagine is that the book team getting things done with others came out of that idea. What kind of drove this, drove this new book that’s come out?

David Allen:

Well, Zack, it was the gap over the years. I started to help people implement this for themselves, and they became much more productive, much more relaxed, much more stress-free. Then they walked back into a very dysfunctional environment where they had to use all that to play defense. They walk into not necessarily toxic, some of ’em, but dysfunctional teams, dysfunctional relationships. My co-author Ed Lamont and Ed’s been a partner of mine in the uk and he’s done a lot of coaching and training with senior teams, with very big corporations. And he saw once they learned the GTD process episodes personally, how it affected positively the environments they walked back into and the people they work with or who work for them. As I said, David, we need to fill this gap. People would show up with me 40 years ago ago, God, David, I got this, but wow could be so much nicer if people around me understood these best practices.

It would make licensing work so much easier. I I was so busy doing the other stuff I was doing and never had the bandwidth or the framework to say, okay, here’s a template or here’s a next set of how we could frame or objectify this set of best practices about how you work with other people, this model or with these principles. Ed and I had lunch five years ago here in Amsterdam, and he said, David, we need to fill this gap. I’m training people that are highly high performers. They’re going back into dysfunctional environments and having to play defense. And wouldn’t it be great if we had a way kind of a manual about what’s the mechanics, the best mechanics essentially, of how a team, groups of people work together to get things done. Because in order to get things done, you have to collaborate, cooperate with other people, how small it is or how big it is you’re going to need to implement with some sort of engagement with somebody else. And so we decided, let’s write the book. And so Ed and I, we combined our 65, 70 years of consulting and practice with teams with GTD and put it into a manual.

Here are the principles that, believe it or not, it’s the same principles for personal productivity. A team needs to capture, clarify, organize, reflect, so it engages appropriately. But all those principles have been applied in a very different context. And personally,

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that struck me is that it would be one thing to say, okay, everybody on our team individually operates using the GTD methodology, but there’s something more there, like you’re saying, oh, quite a bit. And it seems to me like what we’re saying is this team, this group of people have to almost say, okay, well this group in and of itself is an entity and that entity has to use the GDT method. If you don’t mind expand upon that a little bit of what the kind of differences between that personal productivity and that group productivity

David Allen:

Are. Well, very simple. If you like soccer,

Zack Glaser:

I do, I do.

David Allen:

Then you could have soccer players that are brilliant at their personal game, but if they don’t know how to work together, they’re going to lose all your soccer players. Could be brilliant, but if they have not had some confluence about how they’re going to cooperate as a group of people, because that means what are the things as a team that have our attention, what are the things as a team that we might need to clarify that we need to create a project About Organized? What is a team do we need to organize in terms of, okay, here are the things we’ve all committed to before the game. Let’s go through these four or five things we’ve just discovered, whatever. And so a team needs to do all these best practices or they’re going to lose, or they’re going to be suboptimal in terms of how high performing a team they are. So it’s not about just the personal, if the personal abilities weren’t there, they’re going to lose too. So you kind of need both. In order to have a high performing team, you need to have individuals who know how to manage their piece of it. And then you need to have a team that is clear itself with all these processes.

Zack Glaser:

I think there are a lot of attorneys that if they really look inwardly at their team themselves and the individuals and then the team collectively, they’ve got, as I imagine pieces of that, yes, we have processes for doing all these things, but our individuals really don’t know how to get something done. And I think that’s the important part here with this

David Allen:

Book. What that’s going to create is more meetings, which my God, you don’t need anything more than more meetings. Oh my God, because some thing fell at the cracks. I don’t know. Let’s have another meeting. Oh God, that’s like endemic.

Zack Glaser:

And I’m thinking of the times that nobody knew who was supposed to keep track of this thing. And so six people kept track of it.

David Allen:

So role clarity, as you have read in the book team is one of the biggest gaps out there in terms of team productivity. Is this yours or is this mine? Zack? See, you could be clear. I could be clear. We get together and say, now we need to do this together. Is this yours? Is this mine? What’s next? And that just increased exponentially. The complexity of staying on top of your game Is How many people you need to then have collaborative and conscious and agreed upon agreements about who’s doing what is the old adage, whatever, two or more responsible, nobody is.

Zack Glaser:

Yes.

David Allen:

So to your point, with six people who are supposed to do something about it, nothing happens

Zack Glaser:

And that you don’t, excuse me, you don’t get efficiencies from that. And again, I think one of the things that attorneys or law offices that I see happen is that we throw more people at it. We throw assistants, we throw virtual assistants, we put more people onto that number as opposed to,

David Allen:

And now we have ai. Yes, you talk about a new technology. Oh, well, let’s throw AI at this, that we don’t have to hire so many people because it’ll figure stuff out.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, good luck. It is my experience and other people may have a different experience, but it’s my experience that artificial intelligence exacerbates what’s going on already. If you have a wonderfully working team, it’ll help work better, but if you have issues, it’s going to make those issues really stand out.

David Allen:

Yeah, garbage in, garbage in, garbage out.

Zack Glaser:

Absolutely. So one of the things that really struck me as we wrap up a little bit in the teams book, and this one, it got me, I go through and I look at the chapters and table of contents and books before I even read them. And I skipped ahead because it said, and I’m going to paraphrase it here, if you can’t say no, then your yes means nothing that got me in the heart. That stabbed me, man. Can you expand upon that a little bit for us?

David Allen:

Don’t need to. You just said it. No, and the problem is if you don’t know how much you’re committed to or your team is already committed to, You’ll Always overcommit because you like approval, you like to whatever the, oh, yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll take that on. Thank you very much. You think that’s either going to improve your career or your relationships and you’re screwed if you do that. And so the whole idea is, wait a minute, once I know what all of our projects are on our team, oh, thank you, Zack. That’s such a great idea. I just don’t right now, given our priorities, have the bandwidth to put the attention that probably deserves, why don’t you check with Jose about that? I think he’d be better. Take a look at that. So you could be politically correct and polite about that, but no is our biggest chapter in the new book.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, I saw that. I really liked that. And that one struck me really well, as you can tell, because I have a tendency even now to just say, yeah, I want to do the thing. But for me personally, having those lists of what I want to get to when I have time, I can get to this thing. Well, now I can put the cool things in that bucket instead of telling you that I’m going to do it right now, bring it through that capture, clarify, organize, review, and put it in the proper bucket. Even if you do say maybe to it instead of yes, but that got me, because one of our values, I can’t even think of our values that got me because of one of our values is integrity, act with integrity. And if you’re saying yes to everything and you’re no means nothing, that actually isn’t acting with integrity, even though you’re trying your best.

David Allen:

And you could even modify that a little bit politically go, God, that’s a really cool idea. I might be able to get that after the next quarter. Can you ping me then about that? And I’ll reassess if you don’t have anybody else you might be able to give it to right now. But right now, just given our priorities, I would not give it the attention it deserves.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, I love that. So obviously if people want to dig in further into this, they’ve got two books they can go to. They’ve got getting things done. And then I guess at this point, if you’re running an office, if you’re running the law office, I’d say it’s companion team getting things done with others so they can dig into that. But before we go, David, if you will, and I’m sure you get this a lot, if you gave somebody advice today, right now, what’s one thing that they could do? What’s their next step to kind of get themselves going towards organization and organizing their teams? What would you tell ’em to do?

David Allen:

Your head’s a crappy office, your head’s for having ideas, but not for holding them. Get something and write down everything that has your attention and get it out of your head and then decide what to do about it.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, that resonates. That absolutely resonates with me. Well, I really appreciate your time on this. This was enlightening. This was exciting for me to talk with you because I’ve read both these books and they’ve had a positive effect on me. So thank you, David. I appreciate it.

David Allen:

Yeah, thank you for the invitations, Zack, and good luck to everybody out there. Yay.

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