How David Allen stumbled into "getting things done"
Tidbits from my conversation with the world's best-known and best-loved productivity expert (a.k.a. "Mr. Lazy")
Dear readers,
First off, you’ll be pleased to know I’m high-minded enough to forgive you for showering Matt’s cringe-inducing puff piece about me with the most “likes” and views of any Psychology of Ambition post to date. It’s ok, two can play this game: just wait ‘till you read the dedication in my forthcoming book.
Second, a heads-up that I’ll be in SF from April 16-24, so reach out if you’re in the Bay Area and want to grab coffee. And if you’re a founder, VC, or founder-adjacent person, I invite you to join my fireside chat on founder psychology with two seasoned founder/VCs on Thursday, April 17.
Lastly, while I stumble through the dense, overgrown thickets of verbiage that somehow need to get shaped into a complete book draft by June 1, I hope you’ll enjoy this story of a fellow Penguin author (hah!) who did his own share of stumbling before his first manuscript took shape. You may recognize this spotlight from the inaugural installment of the Fantastic Builders series, where it was originally featured.
Builder spotlight: David Allen
Principle on display: Building yourself by building; why builders need self-trust (and how to build it)
Many people have positively shaped my life, but there’s only a handful—maybe 3 or 4 among those still living—whose ideas have fundamentally transformed my life for the better. David Allen, the creator of the Getting Things Done (GTD) system I was lucky enough to discover back in college, is among that handful. Beyond the many well-documented wellbeing and productivity benefits of GTD, its most personally meaningful benefit was its role in helping me build and maintain self-trust. By providing a reliable method for capturing and tracking our intentions and choosing whether, when, and how we want to act on them, GTD makes it both harder and less necessary to BS ourselves about what we intend to do.
And so you can imagine my barely-containable delight when I got to spend 30 minutes picking David’s brain in a 1:1 Zoom call the other day. (Thanks for making the intro,
!)David spoke—and listened—with the calm, easy manner of someone who’s living his best life and knows it, and so feels no need to prove anything to anyone. You’d never guess from his mental spryness and casual demeanor that he’s either a day over 60 (he’s 78) nor the same guy whose work has transformed how millions of people and organizations around the world relate to their work.
Here are some tidbits he shared about his backstory and how he went from being penniless and hospitalized for heroin addiction (a story you can read more about in this Wired piece) to becoming the world’s most sought-after productivity expert and executive coach:
For all the immense success David has enjoyed as a result of Getting Things Done, he never actually set out with any sort of “grand plan” of transforming how people work or achieving any sort of large-scale influence. “I’ve never been that entrepreneurial,” he said; rather he’s always experienced himself as “just putting one foot in front of the other.” For instance, after the “self-exploration” journey that led him to drop out of his UC Berkeley PhD program, take up heroin, and eventually hit rock bottom, David needed to pay the bills somehow. So he started taking odd jobs wherever he could find them. One of his first jobs, he recalled, was driving a delivery truck for a company making small industrial tools for some of the first “startups” in what eventually became Silicon Valley.
Some of David’s friends at the time were starting their own small businesses, and they needed help “managing their systems”—i.e., getting themselves organized. David was always “Mr. Lazy” (his words) and liked the idea of making things more efficient. So he’d spend some time helping one friend get organized, then he’d “get bored, move on, and find another job,” and so on. At some point he learned that the types of jobs he was doing were called “consulting” (not a category he’d ever encountered growing up in Louisiana), and that he could get hired to do more of them. Then “some corporate guy saw” what David was doing for these small business executives and said “we need this for our whole team,” so he asked David to do a training for his company, which then got picked up by other companies, including Lockheed, where it became “one of their most popular trainings.”
“Who’d have thought I’d end up in the corporate world?”, David mused. Consulting eventually turned into coaching for top executives, who would hire him to come to their office, sit desk-side with them, and help them implement the system he had come up with. It was 20 years later that someone said to him, “David, you’ve gotta write the book.” And it was another 4 years before he’d gotten the book written and “out of his head,” with little expectation as to how it would sell.
The rest, as they say, is history.
If you need a free and easy GTD start guide, by the way, Tyler DeVries has written a good one.