Kelly Forrister teaches seminars and provides individual coaching for clients worldwide. She teaches David Allen's "Getting Things Done", and has been working with his methodology for more than 15 years. Listen in as Kelly shares some of her passion... Click here to listen now or click here to download. (mp3, 55:08). For access to all previous podcasts, check out our complete podcast feed. Related Links: Simply GTD with Kelly Coach's Corner Free Articles Organizing Playground

Get a Life! is the title of a feature in the current issue of Fortune Magazine. GTD goes toe-to-toe with other coaching methods, with predictably great results. Business Week has also recently published a feature article about David Allen and GTD, entitled Getting Serious About Getting Things Done. There's sure to be more GTD in the press as we approach the publication of David's new book, Making It All Work, in December, and the GTD Global Summit a few months from now. - The David Allen Company Team Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm. - Robert Louis Stevenson

I recently presented a seminar where a participant brought up the project of getting her daughter into college. Since that was a current project for me as well, I wrote to her about how I applied the Natural Planning Model to this project. For those of you unfamiliar with the Natural Planning Model, it is David Allen's approach to getting projects creatively under control. The specific details of this five-phase approach can be found starting on page 54 of David Allen's book, Getting Things Done. Here is the email I sent to this participant regarding her project: Dear Sara, I wanted to share with you what I did to help my son with his efforts to get into college. Like your daughter, my son is a senior looking at schools. The deadlines for college applications had been approaching, and he had not completed any applications. In response, I took him through the Natural Planning Model. Specifically, here's what I did with him: 1) Purpose I asked him to tell me why he wanted to go to college. At first he started with reasons that seemed to belong to others, but I encouraged him to get real with it — why did he really want to go to college? Was it to learn a trade? Develop strong friendships? Have an adventure? Meet new people? Enhance his education by broadening it or giving it more depth? 2) Guiding Principles I asked my son what was important to him as we went through this process. He said that he wanted the process to be easy and fluid, and it was also important to him that we do it in a spirit of cooperation. 3) Vision Once we got his Purpose and Guiding Principles clear (and I had him write all this down by the way), I asked him what his ideal scene was for college as best as he could describe it in that moment. I used the following cues to stimulate his thinking: - Large or small school? - Metropolitan or rural setting? - East coast? West coast? In between? Or abroad? - Large classes or small intimate learning settings? - Male/Female ratio? - Living on/off campus? - What is his major? - What will he know at the end of four years? - What types of courses will he take? - Athletics? - Drama? - Other extra-curriculars? — he came up with wanting to be close to ski areas (!) - Political/ideological/religious leaning of the school? 4) Brainstorm We skipped this phase because he already had plenty of schools he was interested in. For kids who haven't yet identified schools of interest, I'd encourage them to take a very broad look at every school that holds any appeal to them, using tools like Barron's, etc. 5) Organize I then had my son rank each of the schools on his preliminary list on a scale from 1 to 10, based upon the criteria he himself had established in the Vision section. When we looked at the schools ranked 6 and above, we realized we had too many. When we only looked at schools ranked 7 and above, we came up with 10, which seemed more manageable. I'd also recommend that students apply the idea that most college counselors encourage — to include a few "fall-back" schools, as well as at least one that would be a stretch for them in terms of the average GPA and SAT scores. 6) Next Actions There were a few schools for which my son lacked sufficient information to be able to rank them, so that became a next action for him — to take "virtual tours" and see what number he would assign based on that information. There were only a few, however, so the next actions we identified were to determine the application requirements for each school in his top ten and set them into a grid so that we could see which applications were due when, and what needed to be completed. This process worked very well. Not only did it get my son moving toward getting his applications done, but it also shifted the energy that we all had around it from drudgery to joy and anticipation of the adventure ahead. I would love to hear from any of you who might try this with your high-school student. I can be reached at wayne@davidco.com.

More and more people have been asking me lately about GTD & the iPhone. Since I recently switched from Palm to iPhone (I wrote up a case study on that on GTD Connect), I thought it might be useful to share some direction and tips for those of you looking for a GTD solution with the iPhone (or iTouch.) Because iPhone was not built with any Tasks functionality, it has forced and given developers an opportunity to fill that void. You need to find both an application that runs on the iPhone AND a corresponding app to sync it to on a PC or Mac. Frankly, I was shocked at how few GTD-friendly Tasks solutions there are in the App store. And, if I may be blunt, some of them claiming to be a "GTD" App seem to have no clue as to the best practices of GTD and what makes (and doesn't make) a useful GTD list-manager. So here's my take on that, given my 15+ years of working with this methodology and loads of software tools to manage workflow: * It allows lists to be sorted by context/category * It allows due date, but does not force it * It does not force priority codes (really folks, this is GTD 101) * It does not force or only allow tasks to be sorted by which day your going to do it * It provides a note field for additional details about the project or action * It does not force everything to be listed and assigned to a project (where would "get haircut" fit? Your "Maintain my hair project"??) * It's easily accessible and user-friendly for viewing, adding and editing lists After testing a few of them, the best one for me, as a PC user, is KeyTasks, by Chapura. It's $10 per year and syncs to Outlook 2007. This is not an endorsement, just a suggestion for those of you on Outlook stumped about how to sync it. Check it out if it's of interest. There are also a few decent web-based solutions available, if you have nearly ubiquitous web access, and there are a few that are designed for Mac users that seem to be popular. Since I have not personally used those and don't want to claim to be an expert on them, I am not going to list them out here, but would leave it to you to run them through my list of what makes a good GTD list manager. And if you have a good solution, that meets the criteria of my list above, feel free to post it here as a comment.

Today I had a tele-coaching call that reminded me of what David Allen calls the Threefold Nature of Work. My client recently worked with me for a day-and-a-half setting up his GTD system and practicing the moves of processing and organizing his work and life. In this follow-up call he revealed that one of his biggest difficulties was that, now that he had a trusted system up and running, he felt somewhat obsessed with constantly updating and tweaking the lists. He also felt a bit of a compulsion to instantly processing into the system any new idea, notes or paper he came across in his day, often at the expense of not working on higher priority work that needed to get done. While this may seem like somewhat extreme behavior, I've seen shades of this syndrome occur with many clients. It's almost as if, now that they have this trusted place to manage their agreements, they need to be hyper vigilant about getting new agreements in and keeping the lists pristine. This can become debilitating and can result in a feeling of being a slave to ones list - always in it and never getting any of it done. I think that in some cases this happens at the early stages of taking on the GTD practices. With time, most people learn to self-regulate and recalibrate their practices so that they can have the proper balance between defining their work, doing predefined work, and allowing appropriate energy and time for all of the ad hoc surprises that need attention. I acknowledge that this case is probably the exception to the rule - as most of the time, the real difficulty for most clients is that they aren't giving enough time and energy to processing their in boxes. But if any of what I've written above rings a bell for you, here are some shifts in practice that might help you bring balance back to your practice: Separate the Processing from the Collecting Allow yourself plenty of leeway during your day to just collect a note about the thought or idea you've got your attention on, throw it in your in box, and save the processing for later. In other words, jot down the rough thought and sometime later define exactly what it means to you, what you're really going to do about it, and where your going to organize it. Save the Detailed Refining of the Lists for the Weekly Review If you find that every day you are constantly going back and tweaking a lot of details on your action lists you may be in micro-manager mode. Save that for the your Weekly Review and let yourself do all of that fine-tuning then. That way, in between Weekly Reviews you can have more freedom to DO the things on the list and REACT appropriately to all of the new inputs coming at you. Set Aside Processing Time If you find yourself compulsively processing your in box throughout the day even when your gut tells you that there's a higher priority aching to be done, try committing to a set window of time once a day just for processing. That will allow for more doing time on your important priorities and potentially on those ad-hoc surprises that need your attention. Observe Your Own Patterns We all have patterns of behavior that we continue despite our better intentions. If compulsive email processing is a problem for you, create a daily self-observation exercise: Twice a day, stop what you're doing for two minutes, and reflect for a moment about the following questions: When today have I defaulted to processing my in boxes when there may have been something more pressing or important that needed my attention? What payoff did I get from this? What was the impact on me? On those I work with? Doing this for several weeks is likely to reveal some new patterns and insights about your own motivations and behaviors that you may have been previously blind to. I'm curious if this post struck a chord out there. Please let me know. I'm eager to learn more about this subject.