(Editorial note: You and your company need to get things done – lots of things, and the right things. Are you maximizing your output? Are you getting critical things done with the least amount of effort and stress? Do you have a sustainable work style that supports your commitment to the organization and yourself? Are your activities, moment to moment, lined up with the strategic focus for viable expansion? In this series of questions, we ask David Allen to talk about the strategic value of personal productivity and supply to answers to a few things on our minds.)
Q: How do you keep from taking the “easy way out” by answering calls and responding to emails etc., and avoiding high level work?
A: It’s usually because of lack of sufficient reason to be doing the thing or lack of a sense of contol in the initial engagement–physically, mentally, or emotionally. If the life of someone dear to you was dependent on you finishing the writing project in the next 24 hours (an outcome meaningful enough, I would guess), I think you’d find yourself breaking through some resistances to getting started. Or if you absolutely knew what the first four paragraphs were (control) you’d find it easy to get started.
At the deepest level, our own sense of self (self-image, self esteem) is probably the ultimate driver or inhibitor of our actions, and that’s another seminar! But given whatever that self-image is, clarifying the value of the purpose of something and getting a clear next action about how to get started will at least give you the best ammunition, given whatever energy of confidence you start with as internal resource.
David Allen is an international author, lecturer, and founder and Chairman of the David Allen Company, a management consulting, coaching and training company. He is the author of three books, including, the international best-selling book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (2001), Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done (2003), and Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life (2008). In the past 20 years, David has developed and implemented revolutionary productivity improvement programs for over a million professionals in hundreds of organizations worldwide.
