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You Americans…you are soooo lucky that The Dave lives right around the corner and he makes his Roadmap tour across your country. We here in Europe are stuck with the GTD Fast CD’s and blogs about how cool it is to attend a GTD seminar. Well, that got me thinking. Since David Allen is in London on july 20th, why not extend that little trip to The Netherlands? Just across the Northsea! On his Roadmap tour, David talks about implementing GTD in your professional and personal life. As he says himself on this little interview : “More focus on the process of deciding where you are and what part of the models you should do what about, now… e.g. should you do 40k thinking with you spouse right now, or clean your garage —- get a planner or throw it away?” Make sure you check out the contents of the seminar for a more indepth overview If you are serious about getting your projects and your work straight through GTD, this might be The One seminar to attend. So I got in touch with Rachelle from the David Allen Company and she is more than happy to help me get him to come over. But we need to get a room full of people for him to talk to. Otherwise it would be just a waste of time, right? So here is the question, especially for those in the Netherlands, are you interested in attending a GTD seminar by David Allen? I t will not be a free seminar, costs are about 600 dollar per person. Please consider this when replying. I would love to get him to speak in The Netherlands, but I need about 150 people to show up! So let me know in the comments how you feel about this and I will see what I can do!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! It is sunday afternoon right now. And I feel more relaxed than any other sunday afternoon for the past couple of months. Why is that? Because I had not only one, but two Weekly Reviews in a row! And it felt great doing them! Let me explain in this post what I did and how it affected me in my work over just this short period…Perhaps you will get some tips and inspiration from it The last couple of weeks, my role within the organisation has changed. The biggest change is I don’t work on projects whole day long. I am more and more working on strategic papers, thinking out concepts and talking to key accounts. This made me more flexible in how I spend my time. Two weeks ago, my GTD setup was a mess. I lost track of my running projects, work to be done and waiting-for’s. So I planned a thursdaymorning for myself to really clean house at the office (well, you know what I mean…) I made a list of things I wanted to do and need to do during this weekly review. These steps include * Clean Outlook Inbox: This means getting your Inbox to zero. File, delete, or turn them into actions. Or answer them if it is below 2 minutes. One tip: When the reply goes to someone at the office, make sure you set the time to deliver after you are finished with your Weekly Review. Sometimes, a received email makes the recipient come over to your desk and talk some more about it. Not a problem most of the times, but it is when you are doing a WR. So pay attention to that! * Clean out your desk: Make sure all loose papers, notes, mail, and other stuff is taken care of. Make actions of them, file them, defer them. Or just throw it away. * Check drawers: This is one thing I still need to do. My deskdrawers are a mess. Papers and stuff everywhere. This really is a project by itself I need to do on a future WR. Since there is stuff right now I can find in the drawers it is not a really big problem. But it needs to be cleaned, says my anal-retentive brain :-) * Check last week’s calendar: Check the appointments you had with clients or yourself. Did everything went well? Does something need to be re-scheduled? Any actions coming out of it? * Check the upcoming calendar: What are your appointments? Any preparation needs to be done? Make sure you write down the proper actions to do so * Run down your Tasklist: I start at my @Waiting-For list. This can really give some positive influence on the whole WR. I just marked one task after another as done, leaving myself with a more “in-control” feeling than before. After that, I ran down my projectlist, checked the proper actions and made some new ones. * Run down projectlist: After that, I checked the projectlist itself to see if I missed some projects that need to be made. * Check your someday/maybes: Just to see if any of these projects or actions can be done the coming days, does it become a project? * Think: A hard part in the WR. After all this checking and deciding, I wanted to think about new projects, upcoming issues. But all the other steps really took some time so I didn’t have the right time or motivation to really do this. But it is parked for a future WR! * Make a local backup: I use the GTD Add-in so I make an export of the actions, projects and I save the Settings-file on my local machine. Just in case something crashes. After that, I make local backups of my calendar and tasks. I know our Exchange aserver does this every night, but hey, it’s just to be sure… So there you have it. My WR. The first one took me about 5 to 6 hours to complete. Without any big interruptions. Last thursday I had my follow-up WR and it took me somewhere about 2-3 hours to complete. I had a meeting in between which really got me out of the flow, but overall I felt good! h4. Interruptions I found a couple of things really interruptive in my WR. I like to point them out right now and perhaps discuss them more indepth in a follow up article * RSS: I use the Newsgator Inbox for Outlook for some of the more important RSS feeds. Now, since it is a myth to keep up with all your incoming information, it is very hard to not read your RSS feeds while doing a WR. I found it extremely difficult to keep away from these sources of procrastination while doing something tedious as cleaning your desk. * Gmail: I am always online. At work, at home, on the road. For some reason, I need to check my Gmail every 30 minutes or so. That is not a really big problem. It becomes a problem when you actually get mail into that Inbox. Another source of information. I find it hard to keep away from Gmail during my WR. * Newsletters: My Inbox is flooded with newsletters. Because of the nature of my work I need to keep up with what’s happening in the field of online marketing, Consumer Generated Media, interactive advertising and so on. Those newsletters give a lot of insight but also a lot of links to interesting articles. It’s hard to choose between the 2 minute rule and making an action out of it. * Keep emptying your Inbox: When your WR takes about 5 hours, hell, even 1 hour, you are bound to get new email delivered. Since I can’t control the timeframe for delivery, all mail drops in automatically. I already turned off every noise or alert for new mail, but that bold (13) after the Inbox link in my Outlook is so tempting…So I re-clean my Inbox again… * Thinking: One issue I found very hard is to really think about the projects. Everything in the WR is very hands-on and about making decisions. But to think sort of out-of-the-box about projects and about my fields above the Runway level, that’s hard. Perhaps it is something I need to learn in time… This coming thursday I have my third WR in a row. I feel very relaxed and in control already and I know all my running projects and actions are in a system I (almost) trust and I review this system regularly now. So if all goes well, I am well underway to get more things done in a better and more professional way. Hurray for me! What are your experiences with the Weekly Review? It is the hardest part of GTD for me. I feel great knowing I can do it as long as the conditions are in place.

The blog “Creating Passionate Users” has an excellent write-up on why you will never keep up with all your reading and how you can help yourself reducing the amount of information you want or need to absorb. One of the best

Don’t file it. Don’t store it. What you don’t have piling up you can’t feel guilty about. Some people put little height limits on their “to read” stack. (OK, when it gets as high as that drawer, I must throw out the oldest 50%…)

I am also interested in the GetAbstract service. I will definitely try this one out the coming days…

OpenSubject is an public project to make email correspondence more efficient through the use of simple 3 letter codes. Instead of using your project name as a subject for every message you sent you enter a code which says something about the contents or tha message and the desired action to be taken by the receiver. Example Subject: NRN: Project X Information Means: NO Reply Needed: this message contains information about Project X With their own list of three letter codes they give some good hints to start with this. Big issue: How to remember the codes?

The last couple of weeks have been a rollercoaster ride. Again. It just doesn’t seem to stop and yeah, the first I seem to do is fall back in old habits. I forget I have a Next action list. I haven’t looked in it for a couple of weeks but I just look at the work at hand when I arrive at work and start right away. Weekly review? Nah, forget it. Didn’t do that one in a month of two I think. Is that bad? I don’t know. I still get some projects done and I do feel I have enough balls up in the air to keep some projects going. Okay, i need to look at my mails a few times more than usual (now, where was that answer from Jeff I need for this task…) but since I know I can only have it in a couple of places, it doesn’t take me long to find it. One other thing is my comfortzone and my changing internal standards. I feel it dropping for the stuff around me and how I feel I need to do something to change. Let me explain this in the way The Dave does this in his GTD Fast series (Disc 5 track 4). This CD serie is not for sale any longer. [[image:32579067_fa0f2bb146_m.jpg::left:0]]How many times a day do you brush your teeth? Once? Twice? Ask around in a room of people and you will find a big difference between the groups of people. Some people think that once a day is enough, others need to brush after every meal. That’s a big difference in motivated behaviour. And it all comes down to your internal standards of the level of “scuzz” you allow in your mouth. But motivated behaviour is what it comes down to. How big is your comfortzone? How long does it take for you to not brush your teeth untill you can’t stand the taste in your mouth? Now, no matter how busy you are, you will always find time to brush your teeth. You don’t need to cheerlead yourself into brushing your teeth. You just build in the motivation through life and how you were raised. The same thing is happening with my comfortzone. I don’t feel fine when I have all sorts of thoughts running around in my brain and have a bursting Inbox with emails. I just need to clean it out, have it all filed, delegated or tickled into my trusted system. I feel I have created a new standard for myself on how I want to do my work and how I want to organize my life. But for some reason every now and again I get myself all out of control again and just work whatever comes into vision. I just listened to a bit further on the GTD Fast series and I would like to quote David Allen on the following

The biggest barrier to all of this is your addiction to stress. Addiction not meaning you have to feel stressed. But addiction meaning if you start to get rid of that feeling of stress you are so accustomed to, some part of you will unconsciously will feel uncomfortable and then will go do unconsciously what you need to do get yourself back out of control again and get back into the level of stress you feel yourself so familiair with

There you have it...How true is that. And very true for me at this moment in my life and work. I have planned some time for me to get out of the rollercoaster and try to get some projects back in line again. I hope I can give you some updates on this site along the way!