Interview with David Allen

Today we will share with you the translation of the interview of David Allen - he will tell you how easy it is to achieve your goals in the new year . Previously published translations about personal productivity are available on our blog .

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David Allen is widely known as a significant figure, versed in personal and organizational productivity. He is also the author of the best-selling book and one of my favorite books, “ Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity ). If you want to become more productive and more focused in the new year, this book will come in handy for you.

I recently had the opportunity to ask David Allen about how to become more productive in the new year and achieve their goals. During our interview, many topics were touched upon, but all David's ideas converged on one thing: to achieve your New Year’s goals, you need to be kind and loyal to yourself . David does not write motivational books in the traditional sense. All that he writes about is centered around a person’s respect for himself.

From this interview, I learned four of the most interesting ideas for me: why we should think about and find ways to achieve our goals, how we can do the right things automatically with the power of habits, why we should set short-term goals, and how to cope with all unsolved cases in our of life. All these principles will help you learn to respect yourself more, and they are described below!

Along with the tasks of the New Year come New Year reflections

After I spoke with David, I could not stop thinking about the following fact: 80% of what we say to ourselves is negative.

“I read that almost 80% of what typical adults say to themselves is based on negative:“ I cannot do this, it’s so hard, it will be difficult, ”and so on. It fits with other statistics that I saw several years ago: if you were brought up in a normal family, then 80% of the comments you received were made in a negative and critical way: “don't do this, you are hurt” and the rest of it. It becomes clear why we transfer critical thinking and instructions to the depths of our consciousness. ”

David says that thinking about your goals is much more important than setting them. “All you have to do is tell yourself:“ Hey, I'm great, I can do it. ” These simple self-affirming phrases will be your good helper in life. I think that in order to achieve some goals, develop new habits or change something in life, we need inner strength. ”

Each New Year, David and his wife, Catherine, spend about an hour thinking about what they have achieved, reflecting on the places they have visited and the things they have done.

David believes that people need to pay more attention to their efforts: “I think most people do not realize that we need to get more approval from ourselves. It will help you a lot if you relax and think about all the things that you managed to do. ” And the best thing to think about their success at the end of the year.

Set short-term goals

David also talked about how important it is to set short-term goals: “There have been many studies that show how long-term goals deprive a person of motivation. And all because in the case of long-term goals, we say: “Oh, I still have a whole year. Today, you can do nothing, "so energy and desire burn out."

"Then the researchers found that if instead of long-term goals set short-term goals, the person becomes more motivated on the way to the implementation of their original ideas."

However, goals should not only be short-term, they should also be tied to what you physically need to do to achieve them. David recommended setting “related” goals; that is, those related to what you have to do to solve the main task. For example, if your New Year's goal is a desire to lose 15 pounds, you should set a task to run every day for 15 minutes. As David said, “the motivation will disappear if you don’t engage in a real activity that will bring you closer to your goal, whether you want to run faster, play golf better or lose weight.”

Change your life with habits

When I asked David why so many people cannot achieve their goals, he said that in reality it’s very hard to really change things for a long time in life. “It seems to me that most people do not understand how difficult it is to change habits and behavior. We are really children of habits, and if you do not have a certain habit, then it will appear and be brought to automatism, it will take time ... Many do not realize that the difficulty is that will power and the desire to change behavior or habit will work until , while we consciously hold on to this idea. ”

“The main thing is to realize that most of the day we are moving on autopilot. Therefore, the main goal should be to change this autopilot so that when we turn off our consciousness and willpower, it does not switch us to an unnecessary occupation. ”

In order to understand and change his habits, David insistently recommended the book “The Power of Habit” by Charles Dahigg (translation of Charles Dahigg's article “How the power of habit can help you achieve your goals,” read our blog ). You can spend a lot of energy and willpower to change your life, so automating habits and behaviors is the key to reinforcing these changes.

Get out of your head all the excess

David created a personal productivity enhancement system centered around a key principle: the more unnecessary information you throw out of your head, the freer the short-term memory of useless nonsense that makes it difficult to focus on more serious and important things during the day.

David mentioned that his program works well for one simple reason: the brain is not able to keep a large number of different things in itself at the same time. “As soon as you have more than one idea in your head, your brain is experiencing stress and frustration, because you cannot embody these ideas at the same time, but a part of your psyche still tries. This part will wake you up at 3 am and remind you of something that you cannot do while lying in bed. ”

“We learn to use the mind not to store ideas, but to generate them. People try to use their consciousness as an office and a reminder system, but it does not work, because it was not created for this. ”



David's program directly solves this problem. It is difficult to explain the GTD system in a nutshell (the book speaks of it almost 200 pages), but at the most basic level, the GTD method has two stages: first, collect all the ideas in your head in one place, and second, start gradually solve them.

1. Collect all ideas in one place.

To bring together all the tasks and projects that are floating in your head, according to David, you don’t have to go far. “Fix everything that comes to your mind, except what you are already doing. Take a pen and paper, and just write everything: that you need to buy cat food, draw up a strategic plan, where you will spend your next vacation, that you need to change the oil in the car. Start clearing your brains. I have not yet met people who at a certain stage did not begin to feel frustrated or confused, and after writing the list did not feel unloaded. On the contrary, they became more collected. ”

2. Solve problems.

After you've recorded everything, you need to complete your tasks. “You can't just leave things like this. If you do this, you will become an obsessive lover of lists and drown in them, or these things will crawl back into your head and start bothering you. ”

“You should take one thing from the list and carry it out, thereby disciplining yourself: can I do something about it? If so, what should I do in this case? ”

"This detailing, namely the physical visible embodiment of ideas, is a powerful thing." This is also the basis of the GTD system. The more you free your head, the more space you have for thinking about something more global during the day, instead of filling your “hard drive” with distracting stuff.

When I asked David about one productive advice for those who would set New Year goals, he told me: “unload your head, choose actions that will help lead to the result, and then trust your intuition”. I personally can vouch for the methods of David. The more cases, projects and other things you throw out of your head, the freer the mind for more important things.

Mind like water

In the first chapter of Bringing Business to Completion, David Allen compares reason with water when he thinks about productivity. “Imagine that you threw a pebble into a standing pond. How will water react? It will react depending on the applied force and mass; then it will be calm again. Anything that makes you overreact to a situation, or vice versa, can control you, and often it happens. ”

Many people scold themselves too much when the New Year comes, and swear that they will become completely new people with the help of one will power.

But it does not work. Especially when the shocking 80% of their conversations alone with themselves go in a negative way. In this case, there is no time left for self-esteem. If you are kind to yourself, think about your tasks, change your habits, set short-term goals, write down your ideas and move towards their realization, then you will become more and more productive with each new year.

PS from the translation editor: if you are interested in reading other articles on productivity, we highly recommend studying “How the theory of“ tasks to be done ”can change your approach to understanding your own life . ”