From a new book to a new car, today David Allen the author of GTD /Getting Things Done shares some of the things he is working on.
(Transcript)
DE:
We’re continuing our series of conversations with David Allen, the author of GTD getting things done, we discuss some things he’s been working on recently, we talked about his upcoming book, plans to buy a new car. And the worldwide impact of GTD, it’s a behind the scenes look at life with David Allen. I’m Dave Edwards, if you don’t want to miss any of my conversations with David, he always fills us in on his thinking about productivity, and the GTD methodology, subscribe, and you won’t miss any of them. But today, we pull back from productivity and GTD to find out what’s been going on with David and his life in Amsterdam.
David Allen:
Mostly working on our book is now in the hand, our new book team, getting things done with others is in the hand of our of our editor at Penguin. So he’s now come back with comments about our sublet final draft. So we’re now making comments on his comments. That will then go back to him. So we can get a final final final draft, but then can go to copywriters, and go to whatever to then create a galley about the book. So that’s got most of my attention. I’m thinking of buying a car, we actually bought the garage floor apartment, so I know how to actually have room to have a car without having to pay for parking. So I’ve been researching cars, I’m going to take a test drive of a Tesla, why on Thursday, a couple of days. So just to see. And so because that’ll give us we haven’t had a car for almost 10 years here in Amsterdam, because having the one, you don’t need it. But now that we have a place to park it a place to hide it a place to keep it clean. It’s like well, why not. And now the you know, these are, it’s like an E SUV. But small. So it has room for our two dogs that we can throw in the back because we can do day trips around the Netherlands or even short overnight trips, in places that take dogs, because then we still haven’t explored all of the Netherlands that we ought to see. Because we can’t get there unless you’re in a car for a lot of the really cool places to be. Right. So that’s, that’s sort of a new creative, fun project or interesting about that. And, you know, just again, managing our network. As I mentioned to you before we even started the broadcast that we have. Now it’s such a, we still have such a great network of fabulous people that are business people that have taken on the GTD methodology. And then, you know, certified as coaches and trainers that distribute this stuff around the world. So anything I’m doing a daily, I get requests and opportunities to be able to support that network. So
DE:
The range of countries that you brought together for this little meeting is very impressive.
David Allen:
China, Thailand, Colombia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, UK. Brunei. Yeah, huge. So even just a small group of people, but these are people from all over the world who just wanted to come. Because we haven’t connected face to face in person with our network of our partners out there since the pandemic. So this was an opportunity to do that again. So we found that useful, and we weren’t, we didn’t know, How useful would this be, and they loved it, they all got juiced, they all got stoked and got inspired about sort of their next chapters. Given this just as networking Come on, when two or more gathered Dave, with the same context, the same values or whatever, something bigger, you know, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and very much so. So the last three days, that’s what we’ve done. And so building and just supporting that network, and responding to all of their requests of how I can help. That’s a lot of what I do.
DE:
I want to go back to one more question here. I want to go back to the book, not so much the book itself, because when it’s out, I’m sure you and I will have plenty of time to talk about it. But I’m always fascinated, I love to talk to authors about the process of writing, particularly when you have a co author. I mean, can you I mean, how does that work? I mean, are you just each writing different chapters or are you sending drafts back to the same chair? How does that work?
David Allen:
Well, I think it’s quite unique to the book. In this particular book, my co author did the heavy lifting because he’s had the most experience recently. We with implementing the principles we talked about with senior teams, so he’s got a lot of the miles on his tires about that. And he’s also a brilliant writer, very smart. So. So I’ve got the GTD brand, I’ve got that. So my contribution has been basically, you know, evaluating what he’s written, and then helping him to gather with him frame the context. One of the hardest things is to frame a context of how you put together a piece of information or something you want to put out as a book. Because it’s one thing to have content, it’s another thing to decide how do you format that? How do you frame it? So, you know, that’s a lot of what I’ve done is thinking through how do we do that. And, you know, I’ve got a good bit of personal input into the book as well. So we just worked together very collaborative. You know, he wrote a crappy first draft, I then looked at it edited, brought thoughts back, then we then we created a not so crappy first draft, or second draft, and then, you know, and then that went back and forth. So we just, we eat our own dog food. So it’s like, okay, what we work, we used our own planning level, what’s the purpose of this chapter? What’s the vision of success for that? How do we organize it or whatever. And we did that with every single part of the book. So we just used our own stuff, to make sure we got the write manuscript out and then at some point, get it to the editor, get to the agent, make sure the agent bought into it, make sure that then they are our potential editor and the publisher bought into it. So all those were back and forth iterations that we just kept flexible. And we kept working and kept course director kept getting better at it. It’s taken two years, pretty much.
DE:
That’s amazing. What’s the is there a target publication date,
David Allen:
they say March or April next year 2024, I think that has to do with their catalog. And when they do that has the we have to kind of leave it up to Penguin, where they go, but it still leaves even when the even when the final and final draft is done, they need to in order to create a appropriate galley. So we can send it out for blurbs and endorsements or whatever, it’s gonna take a while it has to be copyrighted, and then a copy written. Or editor, it’s fabulous. Music, incredibly sharp guy. In terms of languaging, we’ve done pretty good at making the language very universal, and stripping out pretty business buzzwords and technology stuff that would be untimely, you know, five years ago. So to make this more evergreen, but He’s even been better at, here’s a way to phrase that. And I think because it’ll be easier to translate it easier for a larger audience to sort of get it anyway, more than needed to know. But that’s a lot of what’s been going on, you know, in our iterations with, you know, how that’s gonna work. So, and then they have to do proofing a typesetting, and formatting and, you know, finding all of that so that they, they’re, they’re excited about it. You know, my editor and Penguin they’re totally excited about, but they think it might be as big as getting things done. Wow.
DE:
How many years has it been since? Well, you did the revision of getting things done, but even that was a number of years ago.
David Allen:
Mm. 2015 is when that came to wow. Yeah,
DE:
Well, we’re anxiously waiting for it, my friend.
David Allen:
Me too.
DE:
David Allen, thank you, as always, for joining us today. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2
Dave Edwards, thank you for making the conversation. It’s always fun.
Dave Edwards Media 