In this episode, Joshua McNary dug into “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.
You can listen to the episode here:
You can find more about Joshua at McNaryMarketing.com, and you can watch Merlin Mann’s classic “Inbox Zero” video here.
Full Transcript:
Mickey Mellen
Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you and often does. So that was just a super quick bit from David Allen’s classic book, Getting Things Done. And here today to discuss it with me is Josh Winknary back for the second time. So Josh, good to have you back.
Joshua McNary (00:15)
I’m back, yes. Back to talk about another great book.
Mickey Mellen (00:17)
You
another great book. This was from a long time ago too. I was looking to see, I first read it I think in like late 2008, so it’s been a minute, but I credit it with a lot of YM today, so I’m anxious to get into some of that, but as always, you picked the book here, so why’d you pick this one, and yeah, why don’t you kick us off?
Joshua McNary (00:36)
It’s a similar story there for me. I it was around that same timeframe. I was in a job at that point. I’d made a move to the mid back to the Midwest. And I remember using my Fragnacovey planner kind of with the seven habits, another old good book, mentality on it. And when I got into the late aughts,
The digital digitization of everything we were doing was really becoming becoming paramount. And it was, this doesn’t work anymore to be writing in a notepad and trying to transfer these tasks and prioritize these tasks every day in the way I had been before. And this book was a eye -opener at the time. And it’s still just amazingly valuable to any knowledge worker, anybody that’s on a computer all day, like we are to be able to, to weed through all of the amazing opportunities and
challenges that we have in our daily life and our modern life.
Mickey Mellen (01:34)
I was looking back, when I used this I was using Noseby. Did ever use Noseby back in day for task stuff? Yeah, way back 20 years ago. It fantastic. It really kind of shaped how I did things. I say my company wouldn’t exist today without this book just because I was trying to build the company while I had a full -time job and a young family and trying to juggle all that stuff just wouldn’t have happened. I remember not long after I got in this book I looked back, I pulled like an old computer out with my old email account and I saw all the emails and clutter and chaos I used to have and I couldn’t have pulled it off with that until this sort of
Joshua McNary (01:38)
I think I tinkered with it, I remember it.
Mickey Mellen (02:02)
kicked my butt and got me in gear and did a great job.
Joshua McNary (02:04)
Well, and in the last 20 years, I mean, it’s only amplified. The inputs are just that much higher. And I mean, think about it, Mickey, back then, I mean, the mobile phone, the smartphone wasn’t really even a thing. We were still using BlackBerrys and stuff back
Mickey Mellen (02:08)
Yes, for sure.
Mm -hmm. Yep, that’s a great point. So yeah, think I’ll start, one of my favorite parts of this book is talking about the week before vacation and how great everyone is the week before vacation if you can make that your daily life. So he says from the book, quote, most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a vacation? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I suggest you do this weekly instead of yearly. And that’s been huge. I do that every Friday. I kind of go through.
Joshua McNary (02:46)
Mm
Mickey Mellen (02:46)
everything makes sure my inbox is clean, makes sure my calendar is set up, makes sure appointments are solidified and it’s just, it’s fantastic. It’s the same idea, almost everyone does this for vacations but not as many do it consistently.
Joshua McNary (02:56)
Well, it’s about expectations, your own expectations. So that’s a theme that comes out through the various tactics that David Allen talks about. Your, those agreements that you’re making with yourself. So I’ve historically been very good about making those agreements with myself in a given day, but it’s hard. It’s hard in the, got to the ceiling again from, Stephen Covey’s, methodologies, the, important, but not urgent matter of reviewing.
Mickey Mellen (03:09)
Mm
Yes.
Joshua McNary (03:26)
what you’re doing is not an easy thing. But when you’re going on vacation, going back to the quote, I mean, you’re going on vacation, that’s the day. You have to figure it out and have to feel good about it before you leave so you can go enjoy your vacation. So if we can allow ourselves to stop and use some time to plan, whether it’s a day, a week, a month, quarter, a year, right before vacation, whatever it might be.
Mickey Mellen (03:52)
Right.
Joshua McNary (03:53)
That’s a critical factor to making sure you feel good about what work you’ve laid out for yourself. And that’s what this book is really all about, is figuring out what work you want to do, not just all the inputs that are coming in, what output you choose to do. And this book really launched that whole concept, at least in my mind, coming from studying productivity back in the late 90s in high school and on.
Mickey Mellen (04:10)
Gotcha.
Yeah, think you mentioned the Eisenhower matrix, the important and urgent stuff. I think that’s been around a bit longer, but you raised an interesting point there. You said going on vacation, you’re forced to do this stuff. And I think that might be the problem is on any given week or day, people don’t feel forced to do it. And so we have to force yourself to do it. And that’s where I think a lot of people fall short is they say, I can let it slide. I don’t have to until vacation comes. But if you can get in the habit of forcing yourself to like, have to get this cleaned up on Friday, I have to get this cleaned up before I close my computer. You know, Michael Hyatt, if you ever do the full focus planner.
He’s very big about your workday shutdown ritual and what tasks you need to accomplish before you end your workday. And he got, doesn’t have to tie into this, but often does. Before I end the workday, I’m gonna get my tasks for tomorrow set up. I’m gonna get my inbox cleaned out. I’m gonna kind of just get my ducks in a row and that can make a huge difference. David talks about, a big thing he talks about is having a mind like water, which is such an interesting metaphor, but it works so well. I think this was from the book, maybe from a podcast, but he said, he talks a lot about having a mind like water, meaning we will respond appropriately to new things that come our way.
Just like a pond will provide a small splash when you toss in a small rock and a big splash from a big rock, we should scale our responses appropriately. And I think that’s huge from this. If you have your world in shape, know your inbox is cleaned out, you know what’s coming up, when something comes into your world, you can respond appropriately versus if you’re chaos and something comes in your world, it kind of hits you like you said, it becomes the urgent but not important. But because it’s urgent, you don’t know what your priorities are, you’re just gonna do it. Whereas if you have your stuff together, you can say, okay, that’s urgent, but it’s not important, I need to focus on important things.
because you have things in shape and that mine like water is fantastic.
Joshua McNary (05:48)
Yeah, that mind like water concept to me just says, a system. That’s how you’re able to have a mind like water. I mean, maybe you and I know each other long enough that, you know, type A -ish type personalities, we like those systems and operations and things. And, and this book, in my experience, it’s that type of person that really enjoys this book. Although I think anybody, even free spirits can, you know, find, find their way through this book and get, make, gain some kind of value out of it. But I back, back when I initially read it, he was talking about
Mickey Mellen (05:52)
Mm -hmm, yes. yes, for sure.
Yeah
Joshua McNary (06:18)
having a solid filing system for paper, having inboxes and such like that. And of course, again, that was in that transitional phase at the time from really kind of the more analog world of that time to the digital world that we really live in today. But that was the system. How do you manage this people coming across your desk? Well, now we have systems to manage the emails coming across our desk or the notifications that pop up or whatnot. And then if we have those
Mickey Mellen (06:22)
Yep.
Yeah.
Joshua McNary (06:48)
inboxes, collection places to put all the tasks that are coming and all the inputs. And then we build that review process on whatever, whatever interval we’re talking about in to manage those items. We don’t have to worry about, are we forgetting that one thing that was nagging us in the middle of the night? Well, we won’t be nagging in middle of the night because we won’t be thinking about it because it’ll be in our trusted system building a custom, a trusted system. And that’s really, the,
practical side of the getting things done methodology and the book is getting that system in place. And then that allows you to really have that mind like water and hopefully sleep a little better at night.
Mickey Mellen (07:30)
Yeah, you said one word that I think is enormous there, trusted. Like it’s not a system you think you trust or you say you trust. Like it has to be deep in your soul that you know if you put something in there, you’ll get back to it eventually. It’ll bubble up appropriately. You can’t think you might or hope you will, because then your mind’s gonna sort of keep it in a loop somewhere in the back. And if you can put in a trusted system, it vanishes from your brain. It’s fantastic where you can just kind of put that off to the side and once you have that trusted system, you’ll feel it. It just disappears from your mind because your mind knows like it’s in a safe place I know I’ll get back to. I don’t have to keep it in that loop.
That makes a huge difference. And there’s so many different trusted systems we could get into all the tools and stuff over the years, but even something simple like Apple Notes or something like that, if your body knows like, okay, Apple Notes is secure, I’ve used it for years, it’s great, I’ll see stuff in there, it won’t get buried at the bottom, like, cool, you drop something in there and it’s great.
Joshua McNary (08:13)
It doesn’t matter what tool, it really doesn’t. It’s that it’s trusted. absolutely. mean, and I, again, we don’t need to get into specific tools because if someone watches this in like six months, that’ll probably be different tools by then. But the, for, me having many different tools. So I actually have multiple trusted inboxes. Or as I, when I teach this, I usually talk about that’s like the refrigerator. That’s where all the ingredients wrap. That’s where all the stuff is at. And then I bring them together.
Mickey Mellen (08:16)
No, paper is fine too, yeah.
Right.
Correct, yes.
Mm
Joshua McNary (08:41)
I look at them every day, I go to those refrigerators, I figure out what do I have in those refrigerators? And then I figure out from there, okay, here’s what I’m gonna make today. Here’s what I’m, now I’m not gonna use everything in the refrigerator, because I either can’t, or maybe I need another piece, know, something else is coming tomorrow in the grocery order or whatever, I’m gonna need to do that. But the idea is that I’m going to decide what am I gonna make today? And that’s going back to that expectation, so this agreements component that we were talking about earlier.
Mickey Mellen (08:52)
Right.
Right. Nice.
Mm
Joshua McNary (09:09)
is figuring out what are we trying to do for ourselves, for our own expectations in whatever timeframe we’re talking about. And of course, then it’s skill to also learn what you can fit in a period or a day when you’re planning that. But then you’re saying, okay, when you get to the end of the day, okay, I’ve done these things I said I was going to do today or this week again, or whatever period we’re planning. But you know, back there in the refrigerator, there’s a bunch of other stuff that needs to be made.
Mickey Mellen (09:21)
Right. Yep.
Joshua McNary (09:39)
And then that’s when you start the next cycle. And that’s life. That’s life. And that’s the reality of our work in 2024.
Mickey Mellen (09:39)
Yeah.
Yep, I love that. And organized refrigerator is key though too. So again, you’re not having to think about what’s in there. You can just know that it’s in there and ready for you. Yeah.
Joshua McNary (09:52)
Right. yeah. Having a refrigerator probably is the first thing. But then, yes, you’re right. Having it then organized or getting better dividers in there so you can find what you’re looking for. Absolutely. We want to extend the analogy.
Mickey Mellen (10:03)
Right. Yeah, mother, take it one step further, my mother -in -law’s dream refrigerator is that the back of it is like a garbage disposal. So you add new stuff into the stuff, the back just kind of gets trashed, which would be great, but that also is a sign that you don’t know what’s in there and kind of, that’d be a problem for your analogy pretty badly there, so yeah.
Joshua McNary (10:10)
Thank
Right. Right. Well, I mean, the idea of throwing things away in your tasks or just one more thing on the analogy, going in there and cleaning out the junk, right? The stuff that’s went bad. That is definitely part of the system here too. And David Allen speaks about that as the idea of, of doing, delegating, deferring, or trashing or removing items from your, from your system.
Mickey Mellen (10:28)
Yep, for sure.
Yeah.
Yep.
Joshua McNary (10:44)
And again, once you have the assistant in place, it’s a lot easier to do and then you’re doing it on a regular review basis. And you’re able to actually make sure that you’re not wasting your time with things that maybe at one moment seemed like a good idea. But either you don’t have the capacity to do right now, or maybe it’s a situation where you add that to a someday maybe list, a place that you’re going to look at only on a more irregular interval, maybe quarterly or annually or something to bring back.
Mickey Mellen (11:04)
Mm
Joshua McNary (11:11)
in the future because right now in this season of life you can’t do that.
Mickey Mellen (11:16)
Yeah, you mentioned so with that and you mentioned a few times as inboxes and back when the book came out the inboxes were like your email inbox and your voicemail inbox and the inbox on your desk with papers and now we have like our email inbox and then other Digital inboxes that’s probably the biggest tactical thing this book taught me very quickly was inbox zero Just keeping your inbox cleaned out and again zero is almost a misnomer I usually have one or two that hang out for a day like it’s rarely at zero but it’s almost never more than three, know I keep it pretty much it empty and that made just such a massive difference because
Joshua McNary (11:41)
Mm -hmm.
Mickey Mellen (11:44)
Otherwise, every time you open your email inbox, you’re to re -prioritize things and see what’s in there. And again, if a new rock hits, you don’t know how to respond to it because you’re not quite sure what you have there. But if you put things on your calendar and put them in your task list and have things together, you can take care of that. Merlin Mann had a great video that came out around the time of this book. I think it was like 2007 he came out with this book at Google, but it’s fantastic. But he says, yeah, for any email you get, you should delete, delegate, respond, defer, or do. And as David says in the book, there’s the two minute rule. If you can do it in under two minutes,
Joshua McNary (12:01)
Mm
Mickey Mellen (12:13)
Just do it now. Don’t save it for later and figure out what to do later and let it sit there and pile up. Like, if you get an email that says, Josh wants to meet with me, let me say yes or no and put it on the calendar and then get rid of it. And people get scared of that, like, I don’t want to clean, I need to keep my emails. Like, there’s an archive function in there that you can, that every email system has it. I actually talked to a guy a couple weeks ago, he didn’t realize that. He thought archive meant it was gone. He thought archive was trash to me. No, no, just try it. Let’s go with me. Let’s archive that email. Now search for it. and it comes back up. So I have, I don’t know, 800 ,000 emails or something between my two main inboxes, but none.
in the inbox itself. I still keep them just in case, which is kind of silly almost. We all need them from time to time. You don’t know what you’ll need. But yeah.
Joshua McNary (12:47)
Well, I storage, but this is a practical manner from a standpoint of where this methodology is when and maybe where we’re going, you know, because there’s technologies on this, steady march, but back in that period, when, when you’re, when the book came out and you mentioned, man, his, his, his contributions to these ideas. Email wasn’t even as easy as it is now. It’s not really old now making when we’re talking like this, but email email, email was more difficult to manage.
Mickey Mellen (12:58)
Mm
Right, yeah.
Yeah, for real.
Mm
Joshua McNary (13:16)
And that archive button wasn’t as common back then. was just delete or put it in some folder or something. And so that’s all gotten much easier, cheaper, cheaper storage. It’s much easier to search your email and find things. Just this week, I had to find an email from about five years ago for a receipt I was looking for. And I had no idea when I actually, when that receipt happened, but I was easily able to find it because of the search functionalities of Gmail. So that’s all changed quite a bit and only will continue to change.
Mickey Mellen (13:32)
Mm
Joshua McNary (13:45)
there’s, there’s the idea though of, of you were talking about the different, the do delegate, defer and delete concepts. That’s become more complicated though too, because, there are different tools and, ways of, kind of maybe, automating elements of that within the tool, the tool set that we currently have. And furthermore, the, I was speaking to earlier, the inputs are just so astronomically higher. that idea of.
Mickey Mellen (14:13)
Yes.
Joshua McNary (14:14)
in two minutes to do a thing. Yes, that is the rule that David Allen talks about, and that is still true for many instances, but there’s a lot of two minute things in your inbox every day. And if you aren’t careful, then it becomes a situation where you start just doing the things, you never get to the planning part, and then you end up, the whole day is gone. But in a similar way, I wanted to bring up the idea of the opposite, which is something that maybe is a critique of the beginning thing.
Mickey Mellen (14:26)
Yeah.
Joshua McNary (14:43)
things done method, which is if you start planning, you start manipulating your tasks, you have that you put everything into this inbox into the refrigerator and you’re and then you’re you’re organizing the refrigerator or if you’re talking about earlier and you’re and then you’re you’re doing that for a good chunk of the day and kind of messing with your system and never getting to the doing well then you’re not doing right well mean it’s a very common thing so
Mickey Mellen (15:04)
You’re calling me out directly here. Yeah.
Joshua McNary (15:09)
So the idea of, okay, putting a time box on how much we’re going to do, particularly the date and the date, daytime set, whereas maybe doing the weekly or monthly or quarterly or annual planning is the important, but not urgent work that we avoid for that reason. It’s also very easy to procrastinate by saying, I’m planning. And so that’s kind of flipping this all the way around. Going from the discussion of the email, practicality elements.
but then going into talking about, let’s make sure we’re not over planning either. And again, I do it too. So that’s why I’m saying it. Maybe I’ll be better about it tomorrow because I said it on this.
Mickey Mellen (15:40)
Yeah.
There you go. Yeah, it reminds me of that Merlin Mann video. I’ll put it in the show notes just for people that haven’t seen it since we’re bringing it up again. But one thing he talks about is great. At beginning of the video he says, pretend you’re working in a sandwich shop and you get an order in for a new sandwich. A ham sandwich. Cool, you got a ham sandwich. Then another order comes in, ham and cheese. All right, cool, you got a ham and cheese. And then a turkey and cheese comes in here. Okay, cool, I’m gonna put the ones with meat together. I’ll organize that and I’ll put the cheese ones over to this side. How am gonna get to the orders? then, just a grilled cheese. Cool, that goes in the cheese pile. Like, no, your job is not to organize this stuff. Your job is to make sandwiches. Just make the sandwiches move on. And that’s what you’re kind of saying. People like,
Joshua McNary (16:13)
Mm
Mickey Mellen (16:14)
I can sort my email this way and I can have these folders for this. Like, no. You got an email from Josh, he wants an answer, give him the answer, archive it and move on. Don’t get too cute with your systems, which again, I say that as the guy that gets way too cute with all of his systems, but in theory, just knock stuff out, yeah.
Joshua McNary (16:25)
Ha ha!
Well, and you can end up since you’re going back to the book advice is that you could very quickly send say that two minute or five minute email that you could have just done in the inbox into your system. And then it would have taken you to as at least that long to manage it in the system before you come back and do it. So that’s what we’re trying to avoid. Now there could be a benefit to my, my point is that there could be a benefit. Okay. There are three or four messages that are all similar, that you could bundle and get those into your system and connect them somehow in your system.
Mickey Mellen (16:39)
Mm
Right. Yeah.
Joshua McNary (16:56)
I use digital tools, so mean, that’s pretty easy to do. But connect them in your system in a way that, now I’m going to do all of those together in a 15 -minute block. I’m going to do later in the day because that’s a low -energy thing, and I don’t want to waste my good energy this morning. So when you start getting more advanced in these ideas, that’s the way you can start thinking. And by practice, you get better about what you know you can actually pull off versus not in your systems and in your own energy and all those things.
Mickey Mellen (17:08)
Yep. Mm -hmm. I like that.
I like that. It’s kind of an extension of what he taught in the original Getting Things Done book where said, have things for when you’re in the car, things for when on the phone. Like, we’re just on the computer most of the time now, but you’re saying inside of that on the computer time, I can bundle these similar emails. You can still bundle like tasks together. So, yeah, love that.
Joshua McNary (17:40)
Right, yeah, that’s something that I’ve done.
Mickey Mellen (17:42)
Yeah, so we’re getting near the end of time. There’s one more thing I want to hit and then I’ll give you a moment for anything else. But one thing I love, I heard him say in a podcast, I probably repeated more than anything else that ties to the book. I don’t think this was in the book, but I’ll read what he said on the show. He said, the whole idea of GTD, getting things done, about being present is that you can’t really focus your reflective brain fully on being present if you’re distracted. If you need cat food and thought, gee, I need cat food and it pops up more than once, you’re inappropriately engaged with your cat and you need cat food could pop up and take brain bandwidth when you’re trying to focus. So my whole thought is,
Only think about cat food once. If you think you need cat food, great. Put it in your trusted system on your shopping lists in Apple Notes or Google Keep or whatever and get it out of your brain. If you keep thinking, don’t forget the cat food, don’t forget the cat I gotta remember to get like, what are you doing man? Like you’re wasting so much brain power on cat food when you can put it there and that applies to anything. If you have something that just keeps tickling around in your mind, it’s either because you haven’t put it in your trusted system or you don’t fully trust your system. You put it there but your brain won’t let it go because it doesn’t really trust it and so, yeah. Only think about cat food once is kind of my mantra to describe.
the entire book. What kind of closing thoughts would you have for this to kind put a bow on it?
Joshua McNary (18:42)
Hahaha
Well, I would say that any of you that might be listening to this, that have used or have approached getting things done methodology, whether formally or informally, know that it’s an ongoing battle. We’re battling our own minds in the way we think, and we’re kind of trying to hack our own mindsets of how we think and our own expectations around ourselves. And if you haven’t tried these things before, a few of the cost fairy tales that Mickey and I have talked about here probably could help.
Mickey Mellen (18:59)
Yes.
You
Joshua McNary (19:16)
but also realize that you can get great gains out of an imperfect system. And that’s where not over planning the system can be wise. So I would encourage you to read the book. I had fun kind of going back and revisiting it a bit here, because I hadn’t done that for a little while. And perhaps put it on a cycle of coming back to it regularly, which I used to do on some of these great books back in the old days when I was first starting my career. And using it right. Yeah. Yeah.
Mickey Mellen (19:40)
Mm -hmm, yep. Well, that’s kind of what I try to do with this podcast is, is this cycle, yeah.
Joshua McNary (19:46)
It’s fun, right? Because you’ve read these books and now we can come back to them. anyways, take it, learn from it, evolve with it, and getting things done can certainly allow you to do that if you apply even part of the techniques that are described in that book.
Mickey Mellen (19:49)
Mm
I love that, and I don’t want to extend this too much here, but I love when you said imperfect systems can be great. I’m bad about that too. I’ll say, how are you still using Evernote? Evernote’s so old, Obsidian’s better, there’s backlinks, there’s all this stuff, but if it works for you, it works for you. I tend to play with tools, again, to a bad degree. So if you have a system that’s imperfect but does the job, cool, it does the job. If you trust it, if it has things in there for you, you don’t think you need to tweak and be perfect. Just have a trusted system of some sort and it’ll do remarkable things. And keep your inbox empty. That’s my other big push. I get people on, easier said than done.
Joshua McNary (20:22)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Of course, of course.
Mickey Mellen (20:31)
Joshua, this is fantastic as always. How can people find and learn more about you?
Joshua McNary (20:35)
Sure, so it’s mcnarymarketing .com is my website. have a regular tech newsletter I send out. That’s mcnarymarketing .com slash subscribe if you want to keep up on business technology and all things happening in the tech space.
Mickey Mellen (20:50)
Cool, I’ll have a link to that in the show notes along with that video from Merlin and yeah, go check it out. And if you haven’t read this book, you’re 15 years late, but it’s never too late, so go check it out now. awesome, appreciate you, thanks man. See ya.
Joshua McNary (21:00)
Thank you.
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