#873: David Allen — The Art of Getting Things Done (GTD) (Repost)

**Tim Ferriss** (0:24)
Well, hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. Good day, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you may be. My gorgeous little magwai.
My guest today is David Allen. You may know of him, the man, the legend. You may worship his systems or you may not know who he is. So I will tell you who David is. One of the world's most influential thinkers on productivity, David's 35 years experience as a management consultant and executive coach, have earned him the titles of Personal Productivity Guru by Fast Company Magazine and one of America's top five executive coaches by Forbes Magazine. The American Management Association has ranked him among the top 10 business leaders full stop. His best-selling book, Getting Things Done, subtitled The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, has been published in 30 languages and the GTD methodology, as it's known, that it describes has become a global phenomenon, being taught by training companies in 60 countries, probably more at the time of this reading. David, his company, and his partners are dedicated to teaching people how to stay relaxed and productive in our fast-paced world. You can find him on Twitter at GTDGuy, G-T-D-Guy, G-U-Y, and at gettingthingsdone.com.
And without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging, very unexpected in some aspects conversation with David Allen. David, welcome to the show.

**David Allen** (1:54)
Yeah, I'm delighted to be here thanks to the invitation.

**Tim Ferriss** (1:56)
My pleasure. And it has been a very, very long time since we've had any contact. I know we were chatting before we pressed record. It was probably just a few weeks, maybe a month after The 4-Hour Workweek came out in 2007, that I found myself being interviewed by someone alongside you virtually on the phone. And I was a nervous mess. I was very intimidated because I felt like I was stepping into the arena with the literal and metaphorical black belt in the productivity space. Because also at that time in 2007, GTD, Getting Things Done, was ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. I mean, it was the talk of the town and 43 folders, Merlin Man and all of these other outlets, Lifehacker seemed to talk about GTD every day. It's nice to have a conversation where I feel more comfortable asking questions.

**David Allen** (2:57)
Catching up, well, you know, folks like you and me, time is somewhat irrelevant.
That's what good friends are for, you know? It's like you show up and go, hey, what's new? I don't know, two years, ten years, doesn't matter.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:10)
Yeah, exactly. And I was thinking back to that timeframe. 2007 was a very important inflection point for me, if I want to look at it that way. And around the same time, somewhere between 2007 and 2009, a friend of mine actually interviewed you at South by Southwest in a format that is very difficult, I think in some cases for both sides, inside a car. His name is Chase Jarvis.

**David Allen** (3:37)
Oh, I remember that. That was such fun.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:40)
He's a phenomenal guy, brilliant photographer. And he was trying to do his best to squeeze out. And of course, you're very good at providing this, but some type of nugget that he could extract in, say, a minute or two minutes or however many minutes it was. And I thought we'd begin there because the answer, as I remember it, was your mind is made for having ideas, not for holding ideas. And I think this is so important.
I would love to hear you just expand on what that means.

**David Allen** (4:16)
Well, your head is a crappy office.
And most people are still using their head as their office. And your brain did not evolve to remember, remind, prioritize, or manage relationships with more than four things. That's new cognitive science data, by the way.
So how many people are trying to keep track of more than four things and manage the relationship between them and prioritize between them? It's like, excuse me, how about 10,000 or 1,200 or so? God knows how many. And I just sort of uncovered years ago, more practically and just on the street, how critical it was to empty your head. And in the early days of the new cognitive science field, they call distributed cognition, called get it out of your head. So I discovered that and then discovered, you can not just get it out of your head, but there are other things you need to do to clarify. Dr. Peter Drucker defined what the work is that getting out of your head and what your case is to it. So I spent 30, the last 35 years trying to figure out what that algorithm is and then spending thousands of hours, as you probably know, desk side with some of the best and brightest and busiest folks on the planet, actually implementing that process and watching this transformational stuff happen. You've done a ton of coaching and advising, I'm sure. And the best advice is not to tell people what to do, but ask them the right questions.