This past year I have been studying the work of Tiago Forte, a San Francisco based productivity consultant.  Tiago has been building on the work of David Allen to find ways to enhance the ability of knowledge workers to manage projects and build productive workflows.

In an interview on the podcast, This is Product Management, Tiago presents key concepts such as the development of “meta-skills”, finding focus in any environment, and forming new habits.  From the podcast web site:

“Tiago’s approach builds on Allen’s system, applying the latest tools, and accounting for the challenges modern knowledge workers face. Tiago’s approach helps busy people use their brain for thinking instead of storage, break projects into actionable next steps, implement the right tools, and build habits to get work done.”

The interview runs for 35 minutes, but the web page with the podcast provides a handy highlights section if you want to jump to a specific topic.  It is well worth a listen.

Reading David Allen’s book Getting Things Done was a key professional development moment for me.  It transformed my understanding of knowledge work and allowed me to bring organization to my office for the first time.  I would not have achieved my current level of success without the principles outlined in the book.

So who is this man behind the GTD® logo?  The web site, Early To Rise, recently interviewed David Allen to learn more about his background, how he developed the core GTD® concepts and his current personal goals for this work.  Here is an excerpt from the interview where David is asked about how the Getting Things Done philosophy fit into professional training programs that were around twenty years ago.

What was your specialty exactly?

It really became how to create more space in the mind and get rid of distractions. That was just an informal approach, but an HR rep showed up to one of my workshops at one point and flat out said we need more of my methods in society. Not long after, I did a presentation for Lockheed with these methods and it hit a nerve. That’s when I knew I had something unique.

You can find the full interview on the Early To Rise web site.

One of the greatest challenges in setting up a new organizational system is the transition to trusting it.  Yet it is hard to trust a new system until it has proven itself.  This is often a Catch 22 that tends to result in the return to old habits and systems.

In his most recent blog post, David Allen highlights this challenge.

“If you don’t fully trust your personal systems, you are likely to be dedicating inappropriate and unnecessary mental attention to details and content, often with a resultant negative emotional component. You’ll feel pulled, overwhelmed, and often like you’re close to losing control.

“But you can’t trust your system until it’s trust-worthy. When is that? When you know you have captured all your commitments, clarified what you’re intending to do about them, decided the actions you need to take about them, and have parked reminders of those actions in places that you know you’ll look, where and when you need to.”

Read the full blog post at GettingThingsDone.com.