A Modern Approach to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” with Khe Hy
Khe Hy is the founder of RadReads, a community dedicated to transforming our relationships with time, work, money, and ourselves. His latest courses, "Supercharge Your Productivity" and "The GTD Power-Pack," teach how to use Notion as an interface to elevate and accomplish your most important goals.
Khe joins Chris for a presentation and conversation on how to apply David Allen's classic book Getting Things Done (GTD) in this completely different world in which we find ourselves twenty years later.
See below for the audio recording, resources mentioned, and conversation transcript.
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Links and resources we mentioned during our conversation:
How to GTD in Notion (free for Forcing Function subscribers!)
Forcing Function Hour: Systems for Living the Good Life feat. Khe Hy
Additional Forcing Function links:
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook, free download)
Performance Assessment (quiz to reveal your greatest opportunity for growth)
To check out our previous Forcing Function Hour episodes, click here.
Topics:
(04:58) Khe Hy’s GTD journey
(09:20) Tool agnostic GTD intro
(19:40) Step 1: Capture
(25:56) Step 2: Clarify
(28:54) Step 3: Organize
(54:38) Step 4: Reflect
(01:09:20) Step 5: Engage
Conversation Transcript
Note: transcript is slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:05): Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Lunch Hour. This is the twelfth edition of our conversation series exploring the boundaries of high performance. My name is Chris Sparks. I'm the founder of The Forcing Function, and I'm your host for today.
Now, Khe is my co-host for today, and someone who I admire a great deal. Khe escaped the finance world after fifteen years to write, and to start RadReads, a community exploring our relationships with time, work, money, and ourselves. If you weren't here for Lunch Hour #3, "Systems For Living The Good Life," I gotta say, you really missed out. So I highly recommend checking out that full recording on YouTube. That was an incredible conversation where we asked the deep questions of why we're here, and how can we use the pursuit of productivity to surface and remind ourselves of the things that really matter. That productivity is instrumental, not terminal.
Now, Khe's course, "Supercharge Your Productivity," which, if I'm understanding right, Khe, today is the last day to sign up. So, I'm a proud member of the last cohort. This course has been paying so many dividends to me. We've moved everything off Google Docs and all these other tools to Notion. Using these simple templates for SOPs, for dashboards, for client-facing worksheets. Khe teaches you how to use Notion as an interface to discover and elevate what is truly important in your life. We'll drop that link in the chat. Highly recommend checking it out. It's made a huge impact here at Forcing Function.
And just for being here, as a thank you, everyone who's registered, everyone who's attending, we're going to send you out via email Khe's Notion GTD template which he's going to be going over today. This is a ninety-nine dollar value, and you're going to get access to that for free, just for being here and showing your beautiful face.
Now, enrollment for the next cohort of "Supercharge Your Productivity" closes in a few hours, so you know, really recommend you check that out if you're listening now.
Today's topic: The Modern Approach To Getting Things Done. I'm asked all the time, "What productivity book should I read? I'm looking to improve, what should I read?" The answer is always the same: Getting Things Done, by David Allen. This is the all-time classic. You want to talk about Lindy, this book has been around for twenty years, and every time I pick it up I learn something new. The central philosophy of GTD is a simple yet powerful red pill. Your brain is a poor storage device. Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. Now, while these GTD principles are timeless, like I said, twenty years have passed since this book came out, and obviously, the world of work has changed dramatically. Maybe we still spend too much time at our inboxes, but everything has shifted from local and paper based to remote and fully digitized. So this new world calls for a modern approach using our modern tools.
Now today, Khe is giving us a walkthrough, how to implement these key principles from GTD in a way that fits with our current tools and systems and is also easy to maintain. And Khe calls this "unlocking the cheat codes of productivity." And I really believe that. It's like, if you figure out a way to include these principles in your current way of being, it will feel like you've unlocked these cheat codes.
Today's timeline: Khe is going to be leading the show, which is really nice relief for me. I can kinda sit back, enjoy, and take notes. He's gonna be giving about a forty-minute presentation. There'll be a couple breaks for Q&A. And we're going to be wrapping at fifteen after the hour. And if you'd like to ask a question for myself or to Khe, you can use the Q&A function at the bottom. You can also upvote the questions you want to hear. So when we have those breaks, and at the end, I'll be asking those questions on your behalf.
As always, the chat is open. So, hey, something we say sounds cool, disagree, agree, have a comment, worked for you, use the chat. Hop in there, let us know. If you have to leave early, no worries. We're gonna be recording this, and we're gonna be sending it out along with a transcript and an email on Friday.
Whew. Here we go, guys. Khe, thank you so much for joining us. Always great to see you, honor to have you, really excited to dig in today.
Khe (04:19): Thank you for having me, and thank you Tasha for helping coordinate, and to the lovely thirty-three participants that are here. I have the utmost respect for Chris's work, his ethos, how he glides through the world. And so to be able to spend some time with y'all is a real honor. And I see a lot of friendly, familiar faces here too. So. I've been saying that with all these Zooms and presentations, it's kinda like running into people in the hallways. Like, "Oh, hey, Eric. Arminta. Like, I saw you on Dickie Bush's thing two weeks ago." It's really, really fun.
Chris (04:58): I love that. Yeah, this is a great unconference. Let's say this is the—it feels kinda like the breakfast before everything is started, but no one actually goes to the panel. We kinda stick around and continue the conversation.
So, let's kick things off, for those who are less familiar with GTD, or maybe less successful in implementing, you know, why is GTD so popular? Of all the systems, you know, why is GTD the one you chose to implement yourself?
Khe (05:29): Yeah, it's a great question, and it takes me back to—God, I'm going to date myself. I'm forty-one and a half. My half birthday is MLK day, and in 2003 or 2004 I walked to a Barnes & Noble and paid cash for the hard copy of the book. And right away as I read it I was like, "Oh my god, this is not fair." Right? Because I was just looking around. I was on Wall Street, and I would see people that had like—they would write things on their hands and email themselves messages and put tasks on their calendar and I was like, "That looks really, really stressful." And very dangerous. Right? And so as I read this book I was like, "Wow, there's this really simple but nuanced system, right, that is tool-agnostic, that allows you to really just stop worrying and execute." And then as you got better with the system, then the right tasks would always find you at the right moment. So it was freedom, it was focus, and it was like targeted execution. And I was like, "Wow. In a book."
I think that was what blew me away, was that it wasn't an app, it wasn't a spreadsheet. It was a book and it was a set of principles that were actually—they're not easy, but they weren't difficult. But you're able to internalize them, and that just set me up to really just thrive professionally. Do it in a way with ease, versus struggle, and to really let me focus on the things that really matter.
Chris (07:23): I love it. Should we jump into the presentation?
Khe (07:27): Yeah, let's—
Chris (07:28): I know—I love being able to just kick back and learn today. This is cool.
Khe (07:31): Let's do it. Let's do it. And so there's some natural break points in this presentation. It's meant to be fun, it's meant to be rad. I'm not talking at you, we're learning together. And so let's do this. I'm gonna fire up my screen share and not forget to share the sound.
So, I'm gonna start us off just with a brief little video, and then we'll dive into the presentation. All right, here we go.
So, you will recall Beth Harmon, the chess prodigy. A little bit like Chris, the poker prodigy. And Beth has this special ability to take some pills and hallucinate every permutation of a chess board on top of her ceiling, which makes her—Which turns this shy orphan into a world chess master. And so—What a great show. I'm gonna pause with that. Sorry. I'm gonna pause with that, and then I'm gonna jump into our presentation.
All right. Now, so by the way I can't see the panel, so if there's any AV issues, just call me out on audio, Chris or Tasha. So, what is-
Chris (08:58): You're good, we're not seeing the slides, though, if you're—
Khe (09:03): Oh, you're not seeing the slides.
Chris (09:04): Yeah.
Khe (09:05): I think my screen share ended. Hold on. Zoom—Ah. It ended my screen share. Okay.
Chris (09:19): Cool, you're good.
Khe (09:20): How about now? Okay. All right. A modern approach to GTD. So the bad news is, we are not Beth Harmon, we are not Chris Sparks with, you know, the poker skills, and if you think about the game of chess, after three moves there's a hundred twenty-one million board permutations. We can't take a pill and remember all of those, like Beth Harmon does. So what are us mere mortals meant to do? Because we do have a lot of stuff going on in our lives that we want to be able to remember and execute on and strategize on.
So, first I want to thank you all. The reason why the company is called “Rad” is because you know, according to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to be rad is to be effortlessly cool, and every single one of you, including Chris and Tasha and the thirty-four attendees, are effortlessly cool. So I'm just so honored to have you here. I'm the creator of radreads.co and our learning platform, The $10k Institute. And it's all about designing your dream life on your own terms, something that GTD really enabled me to do.
And I love teaching. I love these opportunities to share things that I'm passionate about with people whom I respect, with folks who are eager to learn. So there's just tons of events that we are always doing, learning events that we're always, always doing for free, and the tiny little one, tiny little sliver events that are paid, like our course that's coming up.
So, I wanted to share with you my GTD journey. So, graduated college in 2001 as a nerdy computer science major. Stumbled upon this book in 2003 when I was working on Wall Street. I then went out and required my analyst to read the book, I taught them how to use OmniFocus to implement it, and then went out to do lunch-and-learns like this with other heads of Wall Street groups to teach them how to use GTD. If you know me, once I find something that I'm into, I am the biggest evangelist of that system or tool. That helped me in 2009 become one of the youngest managing directors at BlackRock, and I do believe, you know, because of the ten-thousand-dollar work, the high-leverage strategies of teaching my team how to use GTD, that was a contributor to that career path. And then, those of you who know my story, I walked away with it all with a couple years—eighteen months of savings, and moved to the beach to surf and to run RadReads. So like I say, I went from the board room to the beach. And my shoulder is hurting now, so I haven't surfed in like six days, but I've surfed four hundred days since we moved here two years ago.
So, today we're going to dive into GTD, we're going to use that tool-agnostic example. That's what's so powerful about GTD. You can do it—David Allen talks about it using hanging files and pieces of paper. We can do the bang-out no-code Notion setup, and everything in between. That's what's so cool about it. And as Chris said, we'll give you access to that template after, in email.
So, David Allen's promise to us is "Mind Like Water." Fun fact on David Allen. He takes, I think, a handful of consulting clients a year, and the price is a hundred twenty-five thousand dollars. The first exercise he has you do is he gives you a blank piece of paper, and he says, "Take every open loop in your head, every thought, idea fragment, task, note that is hanging in your head, and just write it down." So a hundred twenty-five thousand grand, and the first couple hours are you just downloading your thoughts onto a piece of paper. Must be nice to be David Allen.
So, his promise to us is, "Mind Like Water." But in my experience, and in Chris's experience, when we work with executives and high performers, we see more like "Mind Like Fire," "Mind Like Spaghetti," or "Mind Like Restless Anxiety That Keeps You Up Tossing and Turning Wondering What You Need To Do In Your Task List." And so what's missing here? Right? We are trying to do the Beth Harmon move without the pills. And GTD is the missing link.
So, I jokingly call this the Rad OS, the $10k Flywheel. And this is why Chris and I really bond in our philosophies, because we actually don't spend so much time on the tools themselves. I remember when I interviewed Chris, or we spoke on some panel, and I was like, "What's your secret tool, your secret app?" And he had to think about it for a little while, and he said, "Google Docs." For anyone who was waiting for some unique insight, the peak productivity coach himself, the best thing he could offer you was Google Docs. Not because he doesn't know what he's talking about. On the contrary, because he knows what he's talking about. And he knows that the tool is not going to solve your problem. It's the last mile, but it's not the thing that gives you that leverage, that clears the Pareto principle, the 80/20. And what's required is self-awareness. Right? That was like our last talk. And required behavior change. And the tool is the gasoline on top of these things.
I love to dwell on this slide, because it's the reason why people buy a Peloton and don't use it. Because they haven't supported their habit to work out, and they're not even sure if they're buying it as a flex, as a motivational tool, or to get fit or to live longer or to reduce their blood pressure, because if they thought about all those things, they might actually get higher leverage from sleeping a little bit more, eating better, and just going on a long walk every day, if that was the desired outcome.
And so when you put these three together, yeah, Peloton's phenomenal, but it doesn't work by itself in isolation without these three components. And this is why most people don't last with GTD, is that they focus just on the tool or the system.
So, here are the five steps to GTD, and in this monitor approach I really want to zoom in on three of the five steps. And I'm going to take natural—there's a natural questions spot after 'Clarify,' and then after 'Organize,' and after 'Reflect.' So we'll take some questions there. We'll try to keep the questions to those sections, and then we'll open it to anything you want to talk about.
So let's start with 'Capture.' We've got our friend here. Her name is Intentional Ingrid, and as she's walking her morning commute, I guess it would be from her bedroom to her living room these days, she's like, "Ah, I've gotta pick up toilet paper, email the client report, and get the oil changed for the car." Okay? She's then in that boring Monday morning all-hands meeting (on Zoom) and she's thinking about the other things she needs to do. Book that flight for a vacation, schedule the one-on-one with her colleague, and wish Grandpa a happy birthday. Takes a little break, goes to the gym, submit the homeschool homework, make IRA contribution, and change the smoke alarm. It is barely 1:00 PM, and she has already nine disparate random thoughts across all dimensions of her life swirling around in her head. And again, she doesn't have the Beth Harmon pills to make them just lock and loaded for when she needs them.
So, what does she do? Where do all these ideas go? Well, before GTD, they would end up here, ranging from a sticky note to an email to yourself to writing it on your arm. I actually googled that picture. I googled "task manager tattoo" and that's what came up on google.
And as Chris said, David Allen famously said, you mind is made for having ideas, not holding them. I mean think about the cognitive load of just those nine tasks. Which we all can relate to. We all gotta change the smoke alarm. Think about that cognitive load and where it's all going to go and live. So in the chat, I'd love for you to just drop in where—How do you deal with a cognitive load? Are you more of a self-emailer? Are you a sticky note guy or gal? Or—hopefully, you don't have the arm tattoo.
So, that's step one. 'Capture.' Right? And so this is a really, really important step. A lot of people know this step, but the point here is that the minute that thought crosses your mind, "Call Grandpa to wish him a happy birthday," as long as you hold it in there you're paying a price. You're paying a price in the form of anxiety, you're paying a price in the form of distraction, you're paying a little price. And you multiply that by the hundred things that are peppering us each day, there's a huge cost to that. And so what GTD does is it uses this inbox concept that just as the second that idea comes, get it out of your head. Don't do anything with it other than get it out of your head and make yourself feel safe.
Right? The reason you're on this call is 'cause you all have racing minds, you're creative, you're doing incredible stuff, and you don't want to lose those gems of insight. And so immediately get it out of your head into your capture inbox. Now, what is the capture inbox? We can talk about that. I would recommend that you not do the mish-mosh of nine capture tools, because that's another tax. "Did I put it on the Post-it Note or did I email it to myself? Did I put it on my calendar or is it in my Apple Reminders?" Right? Those are all costs as well. And so I would encourage you, if you're getting started with GTD, to pick two capture tools and stick with them. One will probably be analog and the other will be digital. Right? Digital you always have on you, but the fastest capture tool is a pen and a piece of paper.
And so, think about how you orchestrate your day, what works for you, and pick these two capture tools. Again, this is tool agnostic. I'm not going to sit here and tell you to use OmniFocus over Todoist. That's gonna be based on your preferences and your desired outcomes. And as a bonus, I would say if you want to do ninja stuff, voice is an incredible, incredible capture tool, especially with our wearables. I'm all day, "Siri, remind me this, Siri remind me this, Siri remind me this." That's my capture device, is Siri, through my watch.
So, let's look at it as a spreadsheet, right? 'Cause I love how this is tool agnostic. These were Ingrid's nine tasks, and she just as she's capturing them she's just dropping them into this spreadsheet. Maybe she has it tabbed to the favorite on her browser, it's her homepage, and it's that simple. Right? It's not some crazy Notion banged-up setup. It's a freaking spreadsheet.
So, she's capturing it as a spreadsheet, and this leads to a very natural question, which is where people start to get screwed up with GTD, and this is where the modern approach to GTD comes in, cause when David Allen wrote GTD we didn't get—Twitter didn't exist, the iPhone didn't exist, BlackBerry probably didn't even exist in 2003, ubiquitously. So what about email? Right? And this is really, really important. I'm gonna show you three emails that are really stressful. The first one is from my consultant, my SEO consultant, and he gives this long like email, and there's all these things to do, and there's four tasks that need to happen. You know, define categories, tag this, blah blah blah. Okay?
There's ones even more annoying than this one. It's from my accountant. I need this paystub, this that, this estimated income, this brokerage fund, did you sell any X. These are not emails. They are tasks delivered in the vessel of email. And so what you would do here is—how many of you use email as a form of task management? It might not be your only form of management, but you would probably have this projection email just hanging in there for nine days until you finally had the time to gather that pay stub and scan the stupid 1099 form that's somewhere in your house. Those are not emails. Those are tasks.
So in the spirit of 'Capture,' what you would do is immediately take these tasks into your capture inbox and archive the email. That is a critical step that most people fail to do on GTD, and they immediately get tripped up.
I'm gonna show you one more email. This is the worst. It's the best and the worst. The best of times, the worst of times. "Hey, I'm going to Bali once they lift COVID. You went. Where should I stay? What should I eat? What should I do?" I call this the email from Jim. I love this email 'cause I want to support Jim and I love Bali and I have tons of thoughts on Bali, but I hate Jim because he sent me a five-second email that cost me twenty minutes of work. The asymmetry of that is gnarly. This is not an email. This is a task. By the way, it's a very low-priority task that you could spend working on, delaying to respond to. But if you leave it in your email, every single day it's like, "Hi, I'm annoying, you can't let go of me, I'm fucking with your head right now." And you start to actually resent Jim. For nothing. He didn't do anything wrong, but because that process, you're holding that email, that cognitive load, you start to resent Jim. What a shame. What a travesty. Jim is your homie.
And so this is one of the behavior change. You have to extract tasks out of your email, out of your slack. 'Cause the whole point is to lessen the cognitive load.
So that is the 'Capture' step. I'm gonna fly through the 'Clarify' step, because it's a little bit—it's pretty obvious. But the 'Clarify' step is basically at the end of the day—this is the next behavior change. So you're capturing throughout the day. The end of the day you need to basically clean out your inbox. You need to get to task inbox zero. So we made a trade-off. Right? The trade-off was we would just dump these things in a holding pattern to stop stressing about them, but at some point, you have to pay the piper. And so you pay the piper at the end of the day by organizing your inbox. A lot of people don't like this, because it does add another step to the process. But it is worth it. I promise you, it is worth it, or else you've got these hanging chads like "call grandpa" or "reply to Jim" throughout your life.
So, here's your task list. I added a few more. There's Jim, number seventeen. Again, we're all in Excel and Sheets. So, you triage, you process what you've captured, you define the task, and you identify if it's still relevant. We try to be precise. Start tasks with verbs, not "mom" or "taxes," but "call mom" or "lookup this document for my taxes" or "read this." And try to aim for a twenty-five-minute maximum task length. Again, kind of anchored to a Pomodoro.
So, here is how we triage your tasks. You'll either delete them, you'll defer most of them—and we'll talk about this two-minute rule, another thing that trips people up in GTD. You either defer them, or you delegate them, if you have a team. So, is it still relevant? Right? Ingrid probably just remembered to call Grandpa, pick up toilet paper on her walk home, and so she just crosses them out. Nothing left to do. It was just a holding pattern, and it worked. Two-minute rule. As she's going through these, like, "Is there anything I can do that takes two minutes?" Email a client report, schedule a one-on-one. No need to process those out. Delegate, assign to VA, crosses that out. And is the task well specified? Right? So, book vacation flight is actually, takes longer than twenty-five minutes. So she would split that out into two tasks. Same with "send 2020 tax projections." That's way more than twenty-five minutes, so she would split that out into two tasks as well.
And so that is the end of the 'clarify' stage, where you have a well-specified set of tasks that are still relevant, and they then need to go to their final home, their landing destination.
So, natural breakpoint. Chris, Tasha, any questions, any remarks?
Chris (27:20): Sure, I'll hop in and—everyone's welcome to ask questions via the Q&A feature. So, you know, go ahead and do so. You know, we're talking about relevance and tasks being specified. I would love, even if it's just what comes to mind from the top of your head, you know, how will you know if a task is relevant? How will you know if it's specific enough to be actionable? Do you have any rules of thumb that you like?
Khe (27:53): Hmm. Well, relevant—So, let me start with well-specified. "Well-specified" is always using a verb, because there's an action to center you. "Look up." "Read." "Call." "Think about." That would be the first one. The second is to have some kind of time limit. Right? Like not have these open-ended Parkinson's Law type tasks. So instead of something like, "work on marketing presentation," right, that's so nebulous. It could be "create outline for presentation" or "write section one of marketing presentation." And so that's how I would think about "well-specified."
In terms of relevance, I mean, the good thing about GTD is we're going to get to, is that the relevance in the example that I just did is like, "is it relevant" is like, "did I do it already?" You know, "have I done it yet?" I think the cool thing about GTD is that even if something is like a bucket list item, like you might have just spurred a random thought, you know, seeing you reminded me that you use Google search for OCR. Like, Google searches your handwritten notes. So that just prompted a thought in me that said, you know, think about a process for scanning my paper notes. Right? You prompted that reminder. So I might drop that into my capture inbox. Is it relevant? Not really, in the sense of like I may never actually want to do that, but it is, it does fall into that category of like, "I don't want to not think about it." Right? So I think to answer your question specifically, you have a lot of leeway on relevance in GTD, because you don't need to do the thing in the—you definitely don't need to do it in the moment, and you might never need to do it, but you still know that it's available to you.
Chris (30:12): Cool. Yeah. I like that this is a natural stopping point, because I say often, is "optimizing for capture." The first thing, before you can do anything, is you've gotta get it out of your head. And ideally, like you said, it's only two places, probably one digital one analog. But the second is you have to go through and process those. So, talk about it as a sweep. Be like, "Where are all of these places that these things can be captured?" And needing to make some sort of decision about it. Right? "Is it something I do now, is it something I defer to later, is it something I delegate?" And it strikes me that using the inbox as a task manager, this snoozing of things and keeping getting reminded of them, is just symptomatic of our reluctance to make decisions about what we want to do. Is that in line with your observations?
Khe (31:07): It's—I think it's even more animalistic, if that's a word. Meaning that it's not even making the decision, but it's other people making the decision for us. Right? Like if you run your task out of email, that means that your day is defined by other people's priorities. Full stop. So I think that this like—it's kind of a speed bump, right? Where it kind of slows things down, and then you can, you stop being reactive. Right? The number one reason why people come to me for coaching or for my courses, like, I live my life in react mode. And the reason why is because we're just bombarded with inputs like Jim's email, and our brains are not—like, if you see Jim's email every day, you know it's worthless in terms of like advancing your life dreams, but it still stresses you out every time you see it. And so you're gonna say—you know, productivity is a form of escapism, it's a form of pain management. You're gonna say, "I'm so sick of the stress of Jim's email nagging me, needling me every freaking morning, I'm gonna just respond to it." On a Monday morning, just 'cause you're frustrated. When really what you should have been doing is mapping out the week's game plan for your direct reports.
Fuck Jim in that moment. In that moment. Not for life. Just in that moment. And GTD gives you the apparatus to make those decisions. To honor Jim while reminding yourself that managing your direct reports is infinitely more important.
Chris (33:02): Oh man, I love that so much. I mean, two things I just want to underline. First, yeah. This notion of taking control of being active versus reactive, and that the tendency is just to do whatever is screaming at us the most, and realizing that we are in control of what we get reminded about, of our—we are in control of these inputs. And I often wonder. Something I've observed is the longer I can get someone to put off checking their email, it's like every extra hour that they check it later is like an extra hour of productivity. That that checking email in the morning is negatively correlated with getting things done. And I think you hit the nail on the head, is that email represents other people's priorities, and it's easy to substitute those for our own priorities, which goes along with something else that you said, is the busier that you are, the more things you have coming at you, the less time you should actually spend doing and more time thinking about what should be done. That that becomes higher leverage the more things that are on your menu of options.
Khe (34:16): Absolutely.
Chris (34:17): So well said.
Khe (34:18): And I really encourage all of you. People push back on this idea. So I—I don't have email on my phone. But I think that's a little aggressive, 'cause I work—I'm my own boss. But I encourage every single one of you to close your email windows and your chat and your slack windows and to do work. And the first thing people always say is like, "I can't do that. My boss is gonna email me and gonna expect this or that." And what I always say is like, "Think about a time in your work when you were physically unable to check your phone. You could have been giving a presentation, you could have been in some really important meeting where it would be rude to even have it, you know, guns-drawn-on-the-desk type situation. You just had to keep your email in your pocket. How long was that meeting? Thirty minutes? An hour? Two hours? You went to the dentist in the middle of the day. Did you get in trouble for not responding for an hour? No. Probably not."
Whatever that is. If you're more junior in your career, maybe it's twenty minutes. Five minutes, maybe. If you're more senior, if you're a manager, it's probably more two to three hours. Do that. Close your email for that period, and do work. It's amazing how much work you can get done with your chat windows closed. It's like cheating, actually.
Chris (35:49): And the only way to discover it is through experience. You have to be willing to experiment, and by the nature of experiments sometimes it's going to work and you're gonna change everything and sometimes you're back where you started. But you usually have nothing to lose.
I think—the questions I see, I think you're going to get into as we get into projects versus tasks, so let's continue, and I'll ask those after the next session.
Khe (36:17): Awesome. Awesome. So, 'Organize.' So now we've got this inbox. A nicely triaged and pruned inbox that needs to—The tasks need to end up in their ultimate destination. And this is where GTD differs from traditional task management. Right? Traditional task management, you have a series of lists. Home, work, kids, you know, Project X, and as soon as you have the task you go in and you find the list and you put it on the list and you might add a due date and so on. What GTD does, is it separates those two. Right? We talked about the capture, but then we come, you know, you have to pay the piper. For that mind space that you freed up, you have to do a little bit of delayed work to put the tasks in the right list and assign the right meta-data to them.
So let's see what that looks like. Right? So you have this list of tasks, again, in a Google Sheet. And then we have two sets of concepts. They are areas and projects. And 'areas' is a Tiago terminology, areas of responsibility. Some people call it 'horizons of focus.' I've been calling them 'domains' in my course. August Bradley calls them 'pillars,' I believe. But let's talk about the difference between these two, because again, this is completely tool agnostic. It is around this self-awareness piece, which is "how do you define your project list," or the groups of tasks.
So 'Project and Areas.' You'll have two types of lists. Projects have a deliverable and a due date, and areas have an ongoing and minimum standard. So, a project might be 'launch my Notion course,' and then an area (what has an ongoing and minimum standard), is 'take care of my health.' Right? There's no end date to taking care of my health, but there are a lot of tasks that are related to that, be it scheduling a physical, buying Multivitamins, or completely altering my sleep schedule.
So, that is the starting point. Again, this is a specification question. Right? It's nothing to do with tools. And so, are your project and areas lists well-specified? So the first—if you're new to this all, the first would be to actually cleave off things that end and things that don't end. And the things that don't end are quite familiar to us. Right? Our relationships, our health, our money, our skills, like self-improvement, things that we're trying to better ourselves in.
So, let's give two little examples. 'Projects.' What am I working on? Remember, due date and deliverable. "Plan summer vacation." What is the due date? The due date is the moment you step into the Uber to get you to the airport. Right? What is the deliverable? A series of flights, car rentals, hotel rentals, dinner reservations, packed bags, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. "Train for a 10k." Right? Deliverable is run the race. Due date is the day of the race. Once it's done, it's over. You actually delete the project or you archive the project. So those are projects, and that's the way most of us think about lists.
Then, there's "Areas of Responsibility." What always matters? What requires this maintenance of a standard? So we talked about health, finances, those are some obvious ones. But here's another one, right? Key relationships. I would encourage you to have a list for all of your key relationships. Your life partners, your kids. Maybe you could aggregate your kids into one list. Your direct reports, your boss. Right? Because again they are going to have tasks that are assigned to them. Right? With my kid, on my kid's list, like she wants to learn French and she wants to go rock climbing once the gyms reopen in LA. Right? So those are tasks, and they go under the list 'kids.' And that list 'kids' never ends, because I will always have some standard of responsibility towards my kids. And then there's things, like, things that you own. Like your home, your car. Maybe you could group them together, but 'home' being an obvious one. Changing the fire alarm, fixing the roof, updating my contract with Waste Management, getting a compost set up. Right? These are all tasks that are related to my home, and again, my home will never be something I don't need to maintain.
So that's the first bifurcation. And so, once you've specified these projects and these areas, then what you do is you clear your inbox by moving tasks out of your inbox and assigning them to a specific area or a specific project. Right? Again, this is the differentiated step between traditional task management, where it would go straight to the ending destination, which is just time-consuming. And when your mind's rattling at the gym, you don't have the time to say, "Okay, download the K1 goes to the project on taxes." You're just like, "Get it out, and let me keep working out."
And then there's this concept, a little bit more inside baseball, but it's kind of like a catch-all single action. They're kinda like one-off things that don't fit neatly into any of these, but don't over-use that list, because it's very tempting. And then there's this concept in GTD called "Someday/Maybe," which is—you could think of it as a lightweight bucket list, where you wanna remember it, but there's no real actionability in the near-term future for it. Right? Your mind's made for having ideas, not holding them.
So, we've moved things out of our capture inbox now, and they're gone. Right? Once you assign it to one of those lists it's gone. Here's where GTD becomes really powerful, and again I really need to emphasize that there's a trade-off. Right? There's a trade-off for adding that capture step. It's more time to take things in. But it's worth it. I promise you, it's worth it. Now, with meta-data, there's a trade-off as well. You can add all the meta-data in the world to every task (and I'll explain exactly what I mean by meta-data), but there is a cost to adding meta-data. But there's a benefit from adding meta-data, because the more meta-data you add the more possibility you have for the right task to resurface at the right moment. And I'll explain that with some very, very specific examples.
The first obvious piece of meta-data is due dates. And here, GTD (and I feel very strongly about this as well) is very strict policy. No fake due dates. Fake due dates do not work. What do I mean by fake due date, is let's say that you want to book the French lessons for your daughter, you assign it for two weeks from today. You use a fake due date as a forcing function, no pun intended, to do something. They don't work. Our brains are way too clever for that shit. It can immediately spot a fake due date. Real due date? Pay your rent. Pay your mortgage. File your taxes. Real due dates, submit that RFP. There is a significant penalty for not doing the thing by the date. Real due date required. Only time.
So you're gonna see, I'll probably have like hundreds of tasks, I think five percent have due dates. D-U-E dates. Next, 'Context.' I'm not gonna spend a lot of time here. Person, place, or thing. This basically—the best example for a context, you can think of a context as a tag that sits above all of your projects. So, person, place, or thing. Let's use two examples. 'Person' could be 'boss.' That's a tag. And you might have like five projects that work, and within those projects a few tasks are sprinkled that require your boss's sign-off. So you might tag those items, those tasks, as 'boss.' They live in the project. But here's the beauty of it: when your boss calls unexpectedly, you just hit that tag and you're like, "Hey, I need to talk to you about this, this, this, and this." It cuts across everything.
Another great example of context? "Phone." Person, place or thing? Let's say you've got a two-hour car ride. You have time to make phone calls. So you might call Grandpa for happy birthday, call your accountant, and call Chris to plan the next lunch-and-learn. Those are all three tasks spread across various dimensions of your life, but unified by the fact that you have a two-hour car drive, so you better—well. You shouldn't 'better.' But if you want to use that time productively and make phone calls, you know exactly where to go. You're not thumbing through every list that's like, "Which one requires a phone call? Who do I need to call?" It's like, no. You push a button, and it says "phone."
So those are 'Context.' That's a very GTD-specific thing, but most task managers—Todoist has a great tagging feature. It's just a tag, right? It's using the tag appropriately.
So now, I want to talk about energy and task value, because those are some really, again, they're a modern approach to GTD. These are not in the book. So in this graph on the right is my energy map. I'm a morning person with young kids. So if there's something that requires some mental horsepower, if it doesn't get done by the yellow line, it's not happening. And so the first exercise that I want you to think about is, have you actually ever defined your own energy map? I know you talk a lot about energy, Chris, in your book. So just write out, just play with this energy map. And again, if you work in a structured corporate environment, you're going to have less flexibility on this, but you should still have the awareness of how you roll, how your mind operates, so that you can try to control this to the extent that's possible.
So, again, once you've mapped out your energy map, you could use another tag. High energy/low energy. Right? So for the people who interact with me regularly, you will never get an email from me before 3:00 PM, because I don't write emails until I'm in the red zone, unless it's like a quick scheduling thing, like dial-ins and stuff like that. So I write like fifty emails in the red zone during my low-energy phase, often with a drink in hand, often when I'm paying my utility bills, often while I'm, you know, responding to YouTube comments. Those are all red zone tasks. Blue zone tasks? Creating the outline of this presentation. Right? I need to be fresh, I need to have my cup of coffee, I need to have just exercised. And I don't have infinite supply of that. You know, by definition.
I'd actually be curious. Like I've read—I've heard anecdotes that we have like two to four productive hours where we can really focus per day, across like, mankind. And so, you know, use that, make sure you use your high-energy tasks in that. Don't respond to email when you're in that zone.
So that's energy level. And then there's my favorite. This is my own—I guess I can call it 'proprietary' framework. But there's this $10k framework, which is around leverage. Right? And so I assign every task $100, $1,000, $10k task value. And that doesn't mean that the task itself is a $10k task, but sending an email to Chris about getting on this show is a $10,000 email, because there is leverage in it. Right? I can use something that I've already created to tap into a group of people that I don't have regular access to and to do it with someone who's my spirit animal.
So that is a $10k task. And we probably should do another one just on this, Chris. But you know, $10 work is kind of process-oriented. I joke you could do it hungover. $100 is—Actually, like implementing GTD is $100 hour work. It brings leverage into your workflow, but you can't build a successful company by mastering GTD. $1,000 work is kind of the land of specialized knowledge. I always say it's the bankruptcy lawyer that charges $1,000 an hour, because he or she has unique insights that they've developed over, you know, many, many years.
And that's where most people stop, and this is not a knock on getting to $1,000 an hour work. $1,000 work is a great, great, great life. You are—you have a defensible career that you are monetizing, you know, excess market rents through your expertise. And then there's this magical category of leverage. Right? You know, I was emailing someone else, like, when I go on Ali Abdaal's YouTube channel, up to 1.3 million people can see me. So, developing a relationship with Ali Abdaal—not a transactional one, that's not how we roll here, a genuine friendship of collaboration, of elevating each other—is $10,000 work. For me, pitching journalists. Getting into the Wall Street Journal. Chris and I were in the Wall Street Journal. That's $10,000 work. Like, not many productivity writers can say they were featured in the Wall Street Journal. But that didn't just happen. That's been the cultivation of a long-term relationship with journalists.
So I assign my tasks these values. I don't assign $10, because if it doesn't have a tag then it's by definition $10. And we all have to do all of these buckets. It's like a portfolio, right? If you only do $10k work, you're a dreamer who can't execute, and if you only do $10 work you're the world's best execution machine with no ideas and no vision. So you need to find that portfolio that mixes appropriately for you based on phase of career, life ambition, skillset, work constraints or opportunities. And again, it's gonna be different for everyone. There's no criticism. If you're early in your career, you are doing $10 and $100 work, but you should be doing $10k work by cultivating some interesting mentoring relationships. Right? You could be a twenty-one year old doing $10k work.
Now, they say $10 is the field mouse and $10k work is the svelte antelope that could feed the entire pride of lions.
So, that's probably a natural stopping point. The next two sections are quite quick, so let's stop there because there was a lot there.
Chris (52:22): Yeah, I just want to bow and clap for how much knowledge was compressed in a couple of slides. I mean, that's productivity in a couple of slides right there. It's like getting away from the tools and the hacks, it's how do you decide what is worth doing. That's what it all comes back to, that's the way that you become more productive, is doing the right things that are higher-leverage, that are more in line with your energy, more in line with your values.
The meta-data. I think this is a place that maybe some people will say, "Oh man, now this sounds like work. This is like not really something I want to add." I mean, GTD is kind of notoriously heavy if you try to do everything. A lot of people get really excited. You know, the heavy lift upfront. First two weeks of the year, I'm gonna work out for an hour a day, and it falls off. And implicit to this is there's a maintenance cost in order to get the most out of this system. That the value of the meta-data (and again, use what is most useful to you) is that it allows you to decide very clearly what to do next. A new pocket of time opens. You find yourself in an unfamiliar context, it's very obvious "what I should do now."
And so, you know, my question is a broad one. What recommendations do you give your clients, to your students, on how to minimize this maintenance cost, to get the maximum out of this without this continual lift?
Khe (53:49): Yeah. No, it's a great question. And, but let's distill it really simply, right? You're going to use very few due dates, so you're actually not adding a lot of due date meta-data. I would say the biggest bang for your buck is low energy/high energy. Because to some extent it ropes in kind of high-leverage strategic work, and you don't have to get too caught up in the technicalities of it. And by the way, here's a—I think this is a little inside basebally, but if you have something binary, like high energy and low energy, you don't have to tag the things that are low energy. Right? If you just tag things as high energy, which is probably a sliver of your tasks, by definition everything else is low energy. So think about the non-tag as a powerful tag. Right? It's a little subtle, but you don't have to tag a hundred percent of things.
Right? So low energy/high energy has tremendous bang for your buck. Because I think—let's go back to the $10k flywheel, right? It enforces behavior change. In the behavior changes, I will know when I'm in a high-energy mode and when I'm in a low-energy mode, and once I know that then I can start to restructure my day and to capitalize on those two to three hours of productive work. That's a big shift for people. And Tasha, if you could drop in, there's a book called The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schartz. That's a great, great, very unheralded book that really exposed me to this very simple idea that very few people talk about.
So I would say those are the two, to give you good bang for your buck. If you work at an organization where you have a lot of different stakeholders, I would consider adding a few key people, like your direct reports, and maybe your boss, because there is some power to just cutting across you know, lots of lists and being like, "Hey, I need to talk to you about these six things."
Chris (56:15): The thing that I love, and thank you Khe, the thing I love about this $10k framework of yours is once you internalize this red pill of "I could spend a few minutes working today (if I'm doing the right thing) and get more done in terms of the expected value than a day that I just totally redline and work for twelve hours." And so I think it's just so important that it's worth thinking about a little bit more. How does someone go and identify what is that $10k work for them? How do they choose?
Khe (56:56): Yeah. Yep, yep. Again, it comes back to the self-awareness. Right? That is—the $10k work is a little bit like the four-hour workweek, right? You know it's a thing, but I can't spell it out for you, because it's dependent on your circumstances, your industry, what you want. But lemme give you some ways to try. The cool thing about—one of the commonalities of $10k work is it's—$1,000 dollar work? The bankruptcy lawyer? That's one-to-one work. Right? The bankruptcy lawyer works for their client. $10k work is one-to-many. Right? So instead of being the bankruptcy lawyer, what if you taught five of your associates the secret sauce that made you the best bankruptcy lawyer? Right?
So a very obvious one, if you work in teams, the most obvious $10k activities are investing in your people. Recruiting, training, retention. Full stop. Now a lot of people, we're in a world now where a lot of business owners don't really have big teams. And so what are some other ones, right, where you can—where can you leverage your audience? Right? We talked about the Ali example of this. Right? And I don't think that that's just content creators like myself. I think it's establishing yourself as a thought leader in whatever sliver of your industry where you can communicate in a one-to-many perspective. Right? You and I, Chris, know so many people that just hunkered down into some quirky niche that they were passionate about and became a VC or you know, started working for Patrick O'Shaughnessy. Right? Like that, there is—if you can disseminate unique knowledge in a one-to-many fashion, that's a form of leverage.
I think about iconic colors. Tiffany. UPS. Home Depot. Christian Louboutin. Starbucks. Brand design is a form of leverage. Right? I read those company names to you. You saw those colors so vividly. Think about that leverage. Again, not for everyone. But it's something I try to incorporate in RadReads. There's a consistency to my colors, and once you see that consistency you develop a sense of familiarity, and the familiarity makes you want to engage with it more, if I'm doing it right. Again, that's not $10k work for me, but you can see the ethos behind it.
Press. One-to-many. Interviews, journalists. Huge, huge $10k leverage.
Naval has a definition: "Products that have a zero cost of replication." Ebooks. My online course, for example. The marginal cost for me to run—it's not zero for me to run an additional person, but a hundred to two hundred students is not double the resources. The resource increases probably ten percent.
Chris (01:00:31): Those are some great examples. Thanks. And yeah, if there's one thing to take away from today it's knowing, it's that self-awareness, being able to recognize these opportunities when they emerge and having the confidence to prioritize them. I think one more question before we move on to 'Reflection.' This one comes from Michael Lipsky. So I think the—
Khe (01:00:57): What's up, Michael? Former peer from the hedge fund industry. We reconnected through the world of productivity about a year ago, and we did a lot of business together six or seven—eight years ago. It's just funny, again—
Chris (01:01:15): Oh, man.
Khe (01:01:17):—running into people in the hallways.
Chris (01:01:19): I love it. And yeah, I love how you're able to bring together people from all these worlds in search of the same North Star, living a good life. Michael's question is about areas and projects. And essentially it's like, when do you create a new project? You have these tasks that come up. Some of them could be grouped together, but you know, a project adds a weight to it.
Khe (01:01:50): Yeah.
Chris (01:01:51): And there's a—you have to process it, you have to add it into your planner. Do you have a threshold for when something reaches project status?
Khe (01:01:59): Yeah. It's a good question. You know, the alternative would be to just kind of start overloading what David Allen calls your single items list. Right? 'Cause that's kind of the catch-all list. And so you never want the single actions list to become a source of—I mean, the whole point of this is to reduce cognitive load. And so if your single action list starts having fifteen items in it, and some of 'em are loosely grouped together, you start to get a little leakage on the single action list. So one would be to try to—you don't want your catch-all to catch too much, because then that becomes taxing. So that's one indicator. And then you might see logical groupings emerge from there.
Another would be, again, I think Michael knows this, but like to really be clear, is there a deliverable? There's not always a deliverable on an end date, and in that case there might be some things that are single actions, some things that might live in domains and areas that kind of could be kind of split across those. And then the third thing is, I think a good rule of thumb for a project would be like, I dunno, like four or five tasks. Because if there's four or five tasks, they're using five slots of your single action list, and if you want to keep that under fifteen, that's a third of the list already. So you know, three, four, five. Probably three is a little bit small, but probably four or five would be a good rule of thumb.
Chris (01:03:48): Yeah. And I think it ties back to awareness, where, hey. If your system isn't serving you, if it feels broken, you know, address that part first. And that's where—I like that portfolio metaphor that you use, is you can rebalance tasks, projects across these different buckets in a way that fits in with your lifestyle.
Khe (01:04:12): Yeah.
Chris (01:04:13) : Cool. I think let's continue with reflecting.
Khe (01:04: 17): Yeah. Let's blaze through 'Reflect.' So, I said "no due dates." Right? And so how do you ensure that things don't fall through the cracks? Right? That's kind of a scary thought, where you know, ninety percent of your tasks don't have due dates. Doesn't mean they're less important. So here's where the weekly review comes in. And like I joke, loved by many, executed by few. Fun fact, I did a pop-up weekly review workshop on Sunday. Just kind of like a lightweight event for the course promotion. I'll be honest, I was a little lazy. I was like, "Eh, I could just talk about this instead of writing about it." A hundred eighty-five people RSVPed for a Sunday morning, 8:00 AM Pacific, of which seventy-five people showed. The second-highest Zoom call I've ever hosted. And so clearly the weekly review is something that people care about.
So, the weekly review is not a journaling exercise, getting to inbox email zero, time audits, or fixing your existential angst. In the GTD sense of the word, it is really just fine-tuning the machine that we have spent the past hour building together, and that means reviewing every project list, checking due dates, identifying next actions (we kind of glazed over that one), and updating the meta-data when relevant.
So, I present you with another handy two-by-two matrix, where there's execution and reflection on one end and backwards-looking and forwards-looking on the other end. Talking just a little bit fast to respect everyone's time.
The weekly review in the GTD sense of the term is not those three categories. It is really a planning and prioritization exercise. So what do you do to ensure that it sticks? The biggest mistake with a weekly review is people jam things like, you know, "What worked for me? What didn't work for me?" You know, "Did I love well?" Like, "How are my dreams going?" Those are all really, really, really important questions. But they're not—the weekly review in the GTD sense is fine-tuning the car, it is not deciding to buy an entirely new car in that moment. So max it out at twenty-five minutes. The great thing is it really catches all—you go through every project list. So that's how you could say, like, okay. Not relevant. That's how you can gut-check yourself. Like, Spanish lessons with my daughter? Okay. We're getting closer to that moment. I've seen this on two reviews. Like, you know, shit or get off the pot. Right? You start to really—you start to really—you have to do that kind of—it's another layer of triage, right, that takes place on a weekly basis.
I'm not gonna spend some time here. You can rewatch it. This looks like a lot, but this takes like five or seven minutes. It's very functional. We're just kind of going through lists, assigning things. Very, very pragmatic. And like I said, don't ignore these questions. What worked? Did I advance my big, hairy, audacious goal? Was I effective in how I spent my time? Don't ignore those questions. But they're not all part of this one mega omnibus weekly review, because you will never do it. You will never do it. So, again, find other moments to inject these. Some of these questions don't need to be answered weekly.
So, we'll do 'Engage' really quickly, but basically the way 'Engage' works is that you have a bunch of different tags now and you can create all these different views. You could create your low energy view, you could do your call list, you could look at the next action to it, advance every tag. Again, it's going to depend on what system you use. Some GTD dedicated systems, OmniFocus things, really lend themselves to this, because the languages are already kind of codified in the software. And others, you might require a little bit more manual labor in kind of looking through your lists and being like, "This is the next action" or "These are my low-energy tasks."
So that's—and we got one last step. So if you are new to all this, follow the turtle. Commit to two capture inboxes, use some simple list, do that inbox clearing, and do a weekly review of your lists. If you're on the rocket ship, you're familiar with a lot of this but you're still struggling to implement, consider migrating to a dedicated app. Add some more context, energy, $10k, create more filters, incorporate voice capture. And again, if I go back to the flywheel, right, here's the tool. Here's the behavioral change. And here's the self-awareness. Specification of projects and areas.
So lastly, this is where people get stuck. They fail—if you don't clear out your inbox, the whole system immediately breaks down, because then you have to manage your inbox and your different task list.
Infrequent reviews, we talked about that.
GTD bankruptcy, I think because 'Capture' is so easy, you can just add add add add add. Like, part of the review is triaging. Right? Turns out my daughter doesn't want to learn Spanish lessons. Why has this lingered on for five weeks? It's not a thing. Let's just cut it, maybe it will come back later. Capture overload. We have a lot of capture devices. Podcast capture, YouTube capture, Slack message capture. Not an easy one to fix. I mean that is definitely symbolic of our times. And again, this is not a personal knowledge management system. Right? When you're collecting a list of restaurants you want to go to, that's not—that wouldn't stay. It would temporarily come into GTD, but it's eventually more of a resource. And there is a blurry line between what's a resource and what's a task, and I think that, you know, you can skew too much and have like a hundred book reading list in your GTD task manager. Like, that's not the point of GTD. But again, that line becomes blurry.
So with that, I thank you all. If you wanna dig in deeper, that middle bullet point needs to be updated, but this—What we did today is like one ninth of the course. So imagine this for eight live sessions, building it in real time with a staff of ten people to support you, office hours, Notion templates, and an incredible community. I think we have a hundred fourteen students that are already going through, chatting in the Slack community. So we would love to have you all. And I will stop my screen share.
Chris (01:11:30): Welcome back. Man, that was awesome. That was awesome.
Khe (01:11:34): Thank you.
Chris (01:11:35): I can't wait to dig into the full course. And yeah, I like that there—it can meet you where you are. Looking at your turtle versus rocket ship, I'm probably much more in the turtle camp. I'm always thinking about 80/20, and I think that there's so much value if you can stay consistent with those basic principles. You don't need to implement it all. And I think the approach with any system is, "What is working the most for me? Can I double down on that? Can I dig deeper? And what are the things that are not useful? Can I strip those away so I can stay consistent, so I'm investing less time but getting more output?" And so that's what I love about this principles-based approach is it meets you where you are, it's very adaptable.
Khe (01:12:31): Yeah. And totally agnostic, right? Like you don't get stuck in the system, right, it's actually—that's why I love, I'm so passionate about this, is cause you realize that it's, you know, we just jump into these tools like Notion and we're like, "My tasks aren't happening" or "I'm stressed out!" It's like, no, let's zoom out and really think about what's fundamentally happening at every level. Where do we need those questions, right? Quality of your life is measured by the quality of your questions. And then, then use the tool as the jet fuel. Not start with the tool. That's the mistake with all this. We start with the tool, and really we should be starting with the questions.
Chris (01:13:17): Do you have time? I have a couple more questions from the Q&A.
Khe (01:13:22): Yeah, let's do it.
Chris (01:13:23): Yeah. So these are a little more tactical, but I think things that are very worth covering, cause they seem like common pitfalls that I've seen.
Khe (01:13:29): Yeah.
Chris (01:13:32): So this question comes from Whitney. "I find things get very chaotic in my inbox tasks, but as soon as I put things in appropriate categories, the tasks have a tendency to get lost. I feel like I need to prioritize tasks within their categories or projects, but then the tasks are spread out. Do you have any recommendations or advice for how to surface these next actions?"
Khe (01:14:02): Yeah. It's a great question, Whitney. I would say that a few—there's a few approaches. One, I don't think this is the answer you are looking for, but one of it is like that's where the weekly review does come in, because it provides the setup for the upcoming week. And just the gut check of like, "Okay, did I move the ball forward on this, this, this? This has been here for a while." So that's one element. But the other way is what I would—I mean I like the prioritization. David Allen is actually against prioritization. So we disagree on that component. We've never met, but we can disagree in my head. But he—but that's why I like—whether you do high energy or whether you do $10k, if you do your weekly review on Sunday or over the weekend, just map out five, like, "On Monday I will do this high-leverage task, on Tuesday I'll do this." So just like, there's a little of just like designing your week, right? Which is, again, the tool can help you a little bit to get all the right tasks in the right places, but at the end of the day, right, if you have two to three good productive hours a day, you could probably do it from a piece of paper and memory of like what needs to happen. Making that happen is much more challenging. Right? That's where the behavior change, the willpower, fighting the distraction, fighting Jim's email, like that's where all of those fires come in. But I would say if you just lightly map out your week. Look, the $10 and the $100 tasks will find you during the week. So fuck those, they'll find you. The $10k task is not going to find you. You have to find it. And you have to make it a priority, whether it's by eating that frog, defending that time zone violently, and then executing on it and keeping yourself accountable that you did it. Again, behavior change.
Chris (01:16:05) : Yeah. That was, I just wanted to underline, this is something that I have seen, is that the most important thing we could be doing is not something that anyone else is asking us for. It completely lives in our head, it's completely optional, no one will know if we do it, and that's why it's so important to have this time where we step outside and think about what could move us closer to our goal the fastest. Because if we depend on other people's priorities to push our own forward, we're gonna have a bad time.
This question comes from Farzana. So, watching your presentation, you see you have personal tasks in there, you have hobbies, you have kids, areas of responsibility, you have professional career. Farzana's question is, "Would you have multiple GTD lists for these different hats, or if not, how do you stop yourself from getting overwhelmed when you have personal, professional, home areas all in one place?”
Khe (01:17:11): Yeah. It's a good question, because GTD overwhelm, which leads to GTD bankruptcy, is one of the most common kind of critiques. It's too easy to add stuff. That's the problem with this system. And if you don't prune, you just end up with a messy, messy garden. So I would say that the good thing, I believe it's Farzana, the good thing about this is that once a task is out of your inbox and into a project list, you don't ever really see it unless you go look for it. Right? And so what do I mean by that, right? Let's say that you have a series of things that you want to accomplish related to a new product launch. You would see them by either going to the new product launch project or on your weekly review when you review the new product launch list or when you create filters. Right? And so this is where the tool starts to add jet fuel, because the right tool can then say, "Okay, I'm in work mode. Show me all work tasks that have an upcoming due date (a real one) or that require high energy or that are a $10k."
And so that might be the list that you start every workday with. On Saturday morning you might say, "You know, I want to get some stuff done across the house." You could just pull up your home areas, right? Similar example. The call list, right? Like, in your red zone your job might be to make phone calls when you're low energy. So you again pull up that perspective, that tag that says only show me all the phone calls I need to make. And it can be more specific. Only show me all the phone calls I need to make that live in a project that's related to my work. And again, that's gonna depend—most true task managers, like you can do that to an extent with Todoist, you can definitely do it with Things 3 and OmniFocus, some of the more built out, and you can build the mechanism itself in Notion. You know, you can build any of that customization.
So again, it's really then gonna depend on your level of, like, how much do you want to build or how much do you want turnkey off the shelf. But I always, even though I teach the system in Notion, I always say that for most people Todoist is fantastic. It's simple, it works, it's fast, it's cheap, it's well-designed. You could clear the 80/20 with ample room to spare on anything we talked about today using Todoist.
Chris (01:20:24): Last question. Khe, our last Lunch Hour conversation, "Systems For Living the Good Life," something you said has really, really stuck with me, and selfishly I want to ask it again in this GTD context. So you said that your definition of wealth was to never be rushed. To always feel like you have an abundance of time, to always be intentional about what you do, that you're not stressed, you're not creating deadlines for the sake of creating deadlines, that this was something, your continual North Star. And so we talked a little bit at the outset about getting away from reactivity. You have your $10k framework, recognizing the few things that actually do matter and prioritizing those. How does your "Getting Things Done" system create wealth for you?
Khe (01:21:16): Hmm. Well, I'm in launch mode so I've been feeling a little bit more rushed, so even though my bank account is slightly higher my net wealth is lower. But that's just a blip. So how does it—you know, one of my favorite definitions of love is "the fullness of presence." Right? Like Chris. Like, I love you, man, and I want to give you, we are here together for an hour and a half and I want to give you and everyone else my unwavering presence. And when I am with my girls or my wife I want to give them my unwavering presence, my love. When I am sitting in the ocean just chilling, I don't want to be "Mind Like Fire." Right? I want to be "Mind Like Water" in the water. I don't wanna be like, "Oh, did I send Chris the dial-in? Did we do this link thing correctly?" No. I want my love for nature and my love for Ocean to be fully reflected in presence in the moment. And GTD, to me, is—it doesn't fully give me the gift of presence, but it removes so many of the obstacles of presence.
And I think, and so to answer your question, that presence—which by definition, if you're fully present you're not rushed, right, because you're not thinking about the future or the past, you're actually in that moment. And again, please don't take away from this that I am living in that state continuously. I am not. My blood pressure readings and my heart rate would be very clear to you that I am not fully living in that state. But it's aspirational and it gets, I get a little closer to it every day.
I'll give you an example. In this launch—which has been my most successful launch—the biggest, the proudest thing I did was I shut down my laptop at 7:30 every night. The last launch, I was up 'til like, midnight. So that is a sign of wealth. That, much more than whatever marginal dollar comes in, the fact that I was able to shut my laptop at 7:00 and go back to just being a dad, somewhat distracted, but you know, I was there. That was, that, the systems that I've built that are heavily, heavily inspired by David Allen have enabled me to do things like that.
Chris (01:24:27): Oh, man. I love that. I love that. Yeah. If I could riff, these things already live within us. We already embody them. Happiness, fulfillment, presence, love. And all we're trying to do is remove the barriers from realizing the perfection which is already there. Relaxing into it. Removing the friction, removing the sources that pull us away from that. Oh, that's so beautiful.
Khe, thank you so much for being here.
Khe (01:25:10): Oh, my pleasure.
Chris (01:25:11): Thanks for sticking around. I mean, like I said, I don't think I've seen a couple of PowerPoint slides that had more wisdom compacted into it.
So thank you so much for preparing a wonderful presentation, for sharing your brain and your heart with us today. And for you guys, for attending live, for watching this. You know, you're the reason that we're here, why we do it. So you know, thank you so much for your great questions and for your presence. Just to, you know, quick wrap-up here, just to recap. So if you're interested in what Forcing Function does, you can download our workbook for free, "Experiment Without Limits." That's forcingfunction.com/workbook. Our group coaching class where we accelerate a select group of executives, that kicks off on the 17th. You can learn more at teamperformancetraining.com. Applications for that are open until Tuesday, the 9th. We'd love to have you be a part of our second cohort. And Khe's course, "Supercharge Your Productivity," is closing today, so if you're watching this, you know, time is ticking. Highly recommend you get in there. And this presentation we did today on "Getting Things Done," this is just the tip of the iceberg. So Khe has a course online, "The Cheat Codes of Productivity," where if you like what you've seen today this is your opportunity to see how far the rabbit hole goes and really implement these principles into your own life.
So we'll put both those links on the YouTube, on the website, and in the email. So keep an eye on the newsletter for future Lunch Hours. We'd love to have you back on here at some point, Khe, to dig into the $10k stuff. And until next time, guys. Thanks for being here.
Khe (01:25:35): Yeah. Thanks, everyone. Thank you Chris and Tasha. This was so fun.
Chris (01:25:38): See you guys.
Tasha (01:25:40): Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.