In our most recent podcast, we had special guest Mark Stephenson on, a senior partner in a big-four professional services firm, and issues such as how to maintain smooth synergy in your workflow between a personal and professional organisational system.
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0:00:05.3 Todd: Hello everyone, and welcome to another Change Your Game with GTD podcast. I am here with my usual partner in crime, as always, Robert Peake.
0:00:13.1 Robert Peake: Hello.
0:00:14.1 Todd: Hello. And I’m thrilled to say that we have as a guest today, someone that is gonna come with his history of GTD and some questions and some challenges that Robert and I are gonna do our best to talk through and to give him some advice based on our experience and based on our knowledge of GTD. And that’s Mark Stephenson. Mark is a partner in one of the big four professional services firms. And Mark, if you don’t mind, could you just tell us a little bit more maybe about yourself and about your journey in this material and getting things done so far?
0:00:51.6 Mark Stephenson: Sure. Happy to Todd. Hello. Yeah, so Mark Stephenson, and I’m as Todd said, partner in a big four professional services firm based in the UK. But a lot of my work is international. I specialize in an area that means a lot of cross border work. I’ve been, I like to say I’ve never had a proper job because I’ve been doing that ever since university. But a little over 30 years now, obviously the roles evolved, but essentially in the same organization. But I’ve been very, very happy with that. In terms of my GTD journey, it’s actually quite a long one. I guess I was 10, eight, nine years into career kind of through a load of professional exams starting to get get going career wise and starting honestly to get a little bit overwhelmed.
0:01:43.7 MS: And email had hit by then, we were about 1999, kind of 2000 time. And so I started looking for something that was gonna help me. I can’t quite remember how, but I basically turned up GTD. So, I think this was before the book was published, ‘Getting Things Done’ turned up David. I think I downloaded a couple of things, ended up having a conversation or two with him by email, but that’s kind of where it started. Bought the book, found it, I don’t know how many times I’ve read it now, but a lot. Most recently, only last year recommended it to a lot of people. And then I met… I had the kind of privilege to be in a position to actually hire David to come and do a whole day with myself and all of my partners, I guess that would’ve been 2007 kind of time.
0:02:38.0 MS: And then David introduced you and I, Todd, I guess now that would’ve been 2015 or something along those lines. But in terms of my own personal journey, I pretty much picked up and adopted GTD from 2000. I think like everybody else, it’s ebbed and flowed as a practice, but it’s always been there. And yeah, every month of those 20 years has taught me the value of the weekly review. But I think we’re… [chuckle] I think we’re gonna come on to that, but that’s my journey.
0:03:11.5 Todd: Excellent. Excellent. That’s great. Thank you very much. And how can we help you today? What is top of your mind in terms of your challenges or your sort of your open loops with GTD at the moment?
0:03:24.7 MS: So, I think that there are probably two things for me. The first is I think something which probably everybody shares, which is just with the number of calls, meetings that get packed into a diary. And if you throw traveling on top of that, it becomes even more challenging. But just the challenge of staying on top of meetings, calls, extracting actions, farming those out appropriately, and tying it all together with the weekly review. And I guess that’s a question about efficiency throughput and best practice. And the inevitable mix of digital and analog in there. That’s potentially a lot of questions, but I guess it’s handling meeting actions effectively when there’s a high volume. The second thing, again, is I think something that probably a lot of people also face, which is being locked into a kind of secure walled garden of data and information for everything, calls, emails, and professionally speaking, they’re inside a system that you are not able to not to use and which you can’t take data out of.
0:04:40.0 MS: And that doesn’t necessarily happen in preferred tools. And then a complex non-professional life outside of it. So, to managing two systems effectively, which is where I find myself. And I find that challenging, being perfectly frank.
0:05:00.0 Todd: Okay, great. Thanks for that. That’s a really good grist for the mill. So, let’s start with thing one, when it comes to the challenge that you have around, as you say, this kind of the flow of meetings, meeting notes, identifying actions, could you just talk us through your current workflow? I mean, just in terms of the tools, how are you using it? And then how is the problem that you’ve described sort of manifesting itself, so how do you know you’ve got an issue with all of this?
0:05:28.0 MS: So the way I manage it is, I use a notes application. The one that comes with the iPhone. So Apple Notes is very useful. It’s very simple. And that’s kind of where the notes from meetings and calls go. So, that’s stuff that’s not client data, that’s just the kind of triggers, if you like. Sometimes that has to be on… I have to do things on bits of paper because I might be in the back of a cab, or I might be in a situation where I don’t want to have a device in front of me with a client. So, but what I find with notes is you are able to, you can take analog and put it straight in there.
0:06:13.6 MS: And I have a sort of particular way of naming those notes, so they line up in terms of the day and it kind of sorted in day order. So, I kind of go through the day leaving a trail of I guess of artifacts of the calls, the discussions and everything else. The challenge then is picking that up, extracting the actions, posting them into the system, and a little bit of a sort of a look forward to the second problem that if all of the data and the project support material, as we call it in GTD, is sitting in a different system, it’s not simple to tie it together there. But the way the problem manifests itself, to go back to your question is, that volume builds up so quickly. And inevitably notes that feel meaningful when you are making them are not always quite as meaningful four and a half days later when you’re trying to extract what came from it. But that’s how it’s manifesting itself.
0:07:20.6 Todd: That’s great. Great. Robert, you’ve got that glint in your eye that says, “Hey, there’s all kinds of good stuff to dig into here.” Did you have something… Do you have an observation here?
0:07:32.0 RP: Thanks for noticing the glint there, Todd. Yes. I do glint from time to time. What you just said there that it feels meaningful at the time, but when you re-approach it later, that it isn’t necessarily easy to glean out what you might need by way of projects and actions specifically, is I think a really big key or certainly something that I found for myself that’s super important to know and to recognize. So, one of the things I would suggest is that taking notes has a variety of purposes, one of which is to hold your attention and hold your focus and give you another way of externalizing and restating what’s going on. But also, of course, there’s stuff in there that needs to get done. So, meeting notes are this funny mix of stuff that is potentially really actionable and potentially, absolutely not actionable. It’s really just you were doing that in order to keep your attention and focus and get to potentially the actionable stuff. First of all, can you relate to that? Does that that kind of resonate with you.
0:08:42.0 MS: Absolutely yeah. Absolutely.
0:08:43.0 RP: Yeah. So for me, one of the practices I have is… My background is in software. So I think of background processes, little bits of software that run in the background and listen in and do things but aren’t necessarily active and in the forefront and taking your active attention. And one of the little kind of background running processes is have any commitments been made here? And so for me, whenever I hear language that sounds like a commitment either from someone else and I care about it or out my own mouth, that’s a signal to me that I need to capture an action. And in my case, what I find is if that process is running and it doesn’t distract from my attention of listening to the client and listening to what’s going on and still being present, but when that kind of little bell goes off, one of the things I do is just make sure that I’ve flagged what’s actionable or what’s been committed to as separate from the information in the notes that are simply about what’s going on.
0:09:47.5 RP: In my case, in a digital tool I might put ‘NA-‘ and then whatever it is, right at the top ‘NA-‘, be sure to send them the spreadsheet, ‘NA-‘, whatever. And so I roll up to the top, the actionable stuff, and it just makes it so much easier when I re-approach to go, okay, these were the key points. And often, particularly if I’m not scheduling my meetings back to back, I can actually just take a couple minutes, look at those, skim the top of those NA items, get those into my system between meetings or calls. And then I know that I don’t absolutely have to go back and re-skim, skim all those notes. So anyway, that’s one tip just based on what you said and based on my own experience to suggest with all of this, is actually separating wheat from chaff at the time you’re doing that, what do you think about that in terms of cognitive load, in terms of ability to do that, In terms of the practicalities knowing what you’re facing as an environment?
0:10:48.1 MS: No. It’s certainly… So, for a decent subset of the meetings and calls that I’m doing, that works quite well. When there’s a little bit more time either you’ve got, as is sometimes kind of the case now, 25 minute calls or 50 minute calls. So in theory, that time gets built in practice, it doesn’t often work like that. Things will get going late and I’ll overrun, but at least as a theory, that can work sometimes. I think that where the challenge shows up, is when calls go back to back, and you are in a performance role, if I can put it that way, or leading a call where actually the opportunity to do much more than just sort of scribble something under the camera is relatively limited.
0:11:37.4 MS: And that’s, I mean, what is practically an interesting observation on technology here a little bit, but not in a professional context. But what I’m finding is that in practice for meetings where I am not able to take good notes and to do, and have the leisure during the meeting of actually kind of underlining, I don’t have a system particularly for doing this, but underlining, highlighting things so that you can list them straight out, and get them into the task system that that will work relatively well.
0:12:14.6 MS: But what I’m finding for the other calls is that in practice I typically need something like 20% to 30% of the time that I actually took on the call or the meeting to go back over and just put my mind back in there and think through exactly the type of challenges you said there, Robert, what’s a commitment? What have I committed to do? And also think through, okay, what happens next as a result of that? Who needs to know? Do I need to get somebody going on researching something? Or do we need to set a meeting in a couple of weeks time to talk about that, ’cause we’re gonna need to be going back before the summer or something along those lines. But a big revelation for me has been, I remember David always saying you should think in terms of at least an hour a day, just to kind of keep up with where you are and what you’ve gotta do. Either I’m slow or something is different because it’s definitely taking me more time than that often for the type of situation I’m describing.
0:13:14.0 RP: Well, you sound like it’s complicated conversations for sure. So, I would just say great self-awareness that you may need 20 to 30% of whatever that intensive conversation time was to post process. That’s a great… I’m sure others listening to this may relate to the fact that not all meetings are straightforward, Todd.
0:13:36.2 Todd: Yeah, no, I’m with that completely. An interesting… I think the thing you were talking about earlier, Robert, making decisions as the meeting is going on about what your next actions are, I sometimes refer to that as pre-processing. Because again, I’m just trying to make the process of getting things Mark, as you said, into your action list as as efficient as possible. But the other thing I think I would be curious about is you’ve mentioned you’re using this Notes app in iOS, obviously then the content is digital. I’m imagining then you’re doing, when you’re moving those sorts of reminders from the notes into, as, you clarify and organize that you’re moving those things into your list system, is that a copy paste thing? Are you retyping? What does that look like?
0:14:20.8 MS: It’s more or less starting from scratch, actually, because then the notes will tend to go on the little iPad that I’ve got, and I’ll just go through them one by one. And then it’s using Siri to get those into the reminder app.
0:14:37.0 Todd: Okay. So, again…
0:14:38.1 MS: So, yeah, I wish it was cut and paste. I wish there were algorithms or things that could be run that would do that, but A, I haven’t found them, and B, I think my notes are kind of as I was saying before a bit junky anyway, so it does need that post-processing time I think to get things clean anyway.
0:14:58.2 Todd: Well, what’s on my mind about this is it, is that it might be worth exploring and I absolutely hear what you said about the fact that you’re thinking in the moment maybe isn’t as clean as you’d like the reminders to be in your list system, right? I get that, but at the same time, the technology has continued to evolve and there are probably tools which are better integrated with your list system than iOS Notes. So looking at… And just remind me here, Mark, are you in the sort of MS 365 Outlook tool set at work?
0:15:34.0 MS: Yeah. So, yeah, exactly. So, professionally, it’s all Microsoft. Yeah.
0:15:39.0 Todd: Yeah. So again, just to spin some ideas, you can use OneNote for example, obviously is set up maybe not obviously, but is set up to do exactly the kind of sort of note taking, lightly structured, it’s a lightly structured Notes app. And then from there you can directly create tasks in Outlook. So, it might be worth, and that’s not the only solution. There are others, but it might be worth looking at the tool set. Because if it feels like… It’s sort of as you’re talking about it, it sounds to me like there are two issues. One is the clarity of you thinking in the moment, and the other is the potential sources of friction that you’ve got in getting all of that stuff in, into your system in a format that makes sense. And when it comes to the taking the not so clear thinking and turning that into something that’s clear, then next action thinking, outcome thinking, potentially the natural planning model if it’s a bigger project are all valuable tools. But again, I think it’s probably worth considering whether there’s a little bit of friction that can be taken just out of the process of, okay, from the note taking app into the list making or the project support side of your world.
0:17:01.4 MS: Oh, indeed. I mean, I mentioned on the way through that, it’s on the personal side, I’m very fascinated by AI and the potential that that’s got to make an impact and done a little bit of experimenting with transcription direct from calls and then running AI on that to kind of try and pull out actions and so on. The problem is that outside of a professional context, I don’t really have very complicated stuff going on. And so the opportunity to trial that has been limited, but I guess it’s gonna be not more than a few months away before those tools are fully integrated into the systems. And actually, you could have a very wide ranging discussion, but the AI will be able to take the transcript and pick up what the key points that were hit were, probably quite effectively. So, once that won’t generate your actions for you and tell you what you should be thinking about, you can I suspect it’ll be possible to look at a digest of what was discussed and actually kickstart that thinking process more effectively. And kind of reassure you that you haven’t missed anything important if you’ve got kind of rambling or wider ranging discussions. So, I’m quite excited about that.
0:18:20.1 Todd: Yeah, and we are too. And Next Action Associates we’re using those tools, beginning to use those tools. I have to say, when it comes to meeting summarization and Robert, pack me up here, but I think our experience so far has been mixed. Sometimes it comes up with reasonable things, and sometimes it just seems like it’s hallucinating a meeting that we weren’t part of, but I’m sure the tools will get better over time. And of course, just now as just thinking about your tool set, as Microsoft has released Copilot to the sort of broader world over the last little while, that seems quite promising as well. And again, I think most of the world is just getting started with that. Okay. Well, look, just in the interest of maybe talking to your second issue, we’re not gonna have a huge amount of time to do this, but I don’t wanna leave that hanging there. So, as I’ve understood it, the other tension that you’ve got is between the fact that you’ve got sort of two systems and you have to have two systems. In other words, you can’t use your work system for your personal stuff and vice versa. Do I have that right?
0:19:23.4 MS: Yes. In essence…
0:19:24.4 Todd: Okay…
0:19:25.0 MS: Exactly that.
0:19:25.9 Todd: And how best to think about that. Robert, what’s your take on that topic?
0:19:28.9 RP: Well yeah, I’m curious to hear a little more first about the nuance because sometimes things, sometimes the devil is in the details in terms of what you’re doing, what you’re experiencing, and you’re the best judge of usually where the friction is, where the challenges are, where you’re getting frustrated with the maintenance of those two systems. So, if you reflect on the model, the five different phases on your weekly review, on getting things into the system on engaging with the system where are the pain points for you?
0:20:07.1 MS: So, the system I have effectively is the… I described the notes, I described the task system those sit on outside of the walled garden because they’re essentially triggers. It’s not data, there’s kind of code names on everything. So, if I left all of that on the street nothing would happen because they’re just triggers and reminders effectively. But all of the data and all of the emails, all of the rich information that you need in order to be able to and certainly all of the project support material is sitting inside the Microsoft walled garden that we’re operating within. And so the pain point comes when I guess with personal projects it’s really straightforward because I can link to everything and I’m a mixture of I like analog for thinking, digital for records and so the dynamic records. So, I’m a mix between the two but on the personal side it’s easy to have the project support material organized, linked and in a way that is sort of coherent from the point of view of the system.
0:21:28.4 MS: On the professional side not so easy. And the best I can do is kind of take PDFs of really important emails and other files and organize them into a directory system which feels ever so clunky then to try to… Difficult to reference and that’s where the pain comes is just the disconnect between those two things. And I can see on the personal side how much more smoothly it integrates but bridging that gap professionally is tough.
0:22:01.1 RP: Got it. Okay. So, it’s really you’ve seen how easy it can be when you have complete control over supporting yourself the way you think about things, the way that you naturally want to structure things in your system. That’s great. You can live in the utopia personally but professionally there’s these constraints around I heard privacy and code names and that kind of thing as well as structuring data largely it sounds like in folder structures on hard drives or shared drives or that kind of thing. Is that… I heard that right?
0:22:33.9 MS: Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly it. Yeah.
0:22:34.1 RP: Yeah. Okay. Well, so some principles I’ll just kind of throw out and you sort of grab or run with whatever might be useful. One is I like to generally in terms of reference information, keep it in whatever native format it comes in as. So, with email that’s having an alphabetized structure for folders for email. If they’re documents then I want to attach them onto the hard drive having likewise a structure that’s mostly about alphabetization and labeling on the hard drive as well. But then in order to be able to effectively reference that stuff, one of the things you want to think about and I’m sure as a long time GTD you do this and know this but I’ll explain the concept is the difference between general reference which is I’ll go to it whenever I need it. And the principle there is put it in however you’re going to be thinking when you want to get it out. So, A for automobile and I for insurance and whatever and then project support. And it sounds like probably you’re able to link things like project support or action support; Support for a particular action that you need to do in a really more elegant way in your personal system but not in your professional system. Is that right?
0:23:51.0 MS: Yeah, that’s exactly it. Project support material in a professional context is a container with things thrown into it that are organized by date because of the way I’ll name things, it’s a little clunky. But it’s effectively a bin of stuff that I have to sift through with no linking.
0:24:10.1 RP: Got it. Okay. So yeah, so that can be a challenge. I mean, the first fundamental thing is what you always have control over is the way that you say things on your list, the way that you actually type them for your future self to see. And for me, the magic linker that universally is applicable whether it’s physical or digital or anything, is just the word see. See this, see that, so that you’re pointing yourself from the project. I think you’ve got really strong instincts here that you want to be able to go from the project to the appropriate information. And of course if that’s a permalink or that’s kind of something, anything you can click and get straight through it that’s ideal. But you might consider potentially enumerating what some of the key things are in and amongst all the things. It sounds like there may be a superset here of information you absolutely need for executing on the particular project that is client information in general or things that are going to flow more to general reference when the project is closed out. Is that true? Because you mentioned this kind of bin or sea of stuff, I’m wondering if you can point yourself at a specific subset that’s truly the right stuff using the good old fashioned, see here or see there descriptors.
0:25:32.1 MS: It is literally description, is that I’ll write see email of see… And there’s always a tension here between the volume of information that comes and the half-life of most of it, is very, very short. So, the truly important documents are relatively few and far between but it’s not always obvious what those are on the way through. I mean, one saving grace is that at least I don’t any more have to be responsible for making sure things get filed appropriately. That’s a whole new world in itself and that’s something that I don’t really have to worry about because the CCs on the emails will recall that. But if that was part of the challenge I think it would be. Yeah, ever so much tougher. But it’s interesting what you said there, because the see email of see this other because I’m organizing by date in those bins that I talked about in the way that I’ll just put a reversed year, month, day and actually time sometimes. Then they organize themselves very neatly from that point of view. So, that does help. You’ve just got to reference a spreadsheet of X, Y, Z date. But it’s all manual and therefore it falls down and doesn’t get done properly as much as I’d like.
0:26:55.1 RP: Sounds like a lot and it sounds like you’re someone for whom the project review component of your weekly review is especially important. In particular the part where you actually go into project support, you actually drill into those projects and potentially give yourself the opportunity to call out what may be client specific but not project specific or what as you said has a half-life that’s already expired in terms of its relevance and those kinds of things. So yeah, it sounds like a lot. Todd, what are you thinking?
0:27:29.2 Todd: Yeah. I mean, I think what I’m reminded of is just sort of the core and just going right up to the top level of reference material, whether it’s project specific or whether it’s just general reference. And there are kind of two interesting questions. One is, when you’ve got something that you want to file for reference can you file it quickly? And when you need it then later can you find it quickly? And I hear where you are Mark. It kind of again and I don’t know that this is the right answer but it’d be something I’d be interested to sort of explore would be is there something that I can do, something else that I can do from a technical point of view, maybe there’s some AI involved here. Just as we were talking about earlier it might be something about that, so once your AI has access to more and more of your data as it were it might be that that’s made easier and that’s sort of cross-referencing can lead to you getting your hands on things quicker which is ultimately going to help.
0:28:27.7 Todd: But the other thing that came to mind, Robert, just as you were sort of summing up there was I wonder whether part… And this relates to your first issue, part of what might be interesting to explore would be having more time, more dedicated time around project review, right? I’m wondering whether you are… Just because of the nature as you’ve expressed it of kind of the pace of your life and lots of meetings and lots of notes and that sort of thing, and what’s going through my mind is that it might be what you’re trying to do is force your brain in a sense to do that kind of project level thinking when in fact you would better be able to do that kind of thinking let’s say in a quiet time end of week, whatever, a big block of time. I don’t know whether that resonates but that did occur to me as well…
0:29:17.7 MS: No, it resonates massively. And I was thinking you can’t have any remotely sensible discussion about GTD without paying homage to the weekly review which when done even remotely well, is just so critical. And that for me is when I do it completely varies and it sometimes gets done in bits because there’s an element of I don’t consider processing those notes to be weekly review. It’s not that’s just part one of those routines that Robert talked about that you just kind of work on in the same way you’d hack through an email inbox. But the weekly review and of going through one thing I have had nailed reasonably well for a long time is a fairly complete project list. It never has quite everything on it particularly personally but it’s almost complete most of the time. And the weekly review discipline of looking forward over the next two, three, four weeks back over the last week or so.
0:30:25.3 MS: And then just for me it’s moving quickly through the projects and just thinking about I rarely go back to project support material or thinking about anything at a detail level of the project. It’s normally just about is it where it needs to be? Do I need to talk to person X? Do I need to put something in the… It’s that level but it’s still… I mean, I didn’t look as of this morning but the professional project number tends to be the sort of 60 to 90 range and the personal significantly less than half of that, the kind of 20 to 30 range and even just the maths of it, even one minute on each of those. And it does tend to be that. It tends to be a two hour weekly review for me but going into it, it’s with a bit of caffeine and I’m a little bit excited. It’s usually quite a nice two hours actually. A good feeling afterwards for sure.
0:31:24.3 Todd: Great. You remind me of a quote that came from one of the folks that’s been through our trainer certification process who said if I don’t get to do my weekly review, I feel cheated, she said. It sounds like you feel the same way. Mark, we’re going to have to draw alignment to this I’m afraid. I want to say one more time, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on the program.
0:31:39.0 MS: It’s been fascinating. Thank you.
0:31:42.2 Todd: No, no, our pleasure. And for those of you out there, as always, please do let us know if anything that we’ve been talking about today has sort of touched a nerve with you. Please do get in touch, like and subscribe of course, so you’ll hear about these in the future and you can find us at www.next-action.co.uk. Thanks for being with us this time. We’ll see you next time. Bye for now.
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