GTD® for Leaders | Managing Life Transitions with Jenny Costelloe Ep. 80

About Jenny Costelloe: Jenny Costelloe led the Ethical Tea Partnership - the global membership organisation working for social justice and environmental sustainability - until May 2025. Prior to that, Jenny had a number of international roles working on sustainable and responsible business, including as a director for inclusive agriculture with the World Economic Forum. Jenny is passionate about business as a force for good. She has lived in Singapore, UK, Germany and Zambia. In her spare time, she volunteers for Menopause and Cancer and for Age UK, and she can often be found exploring trails in the Forest of Dean where she lives.

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Transcript:

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Todd Brown (00:05)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another Change Your Game with GTD podcast. My name is Todd Brown, and I'm here, as always, with Robert Peake. Hey, Robert. And we are thrilled to have with us today a very special guest, ⁓ Jenny Costello. ⁓ Jenny, I'm going to turn it over to you in just a few seconds and ask you to tell us a little bit about your background with getting things done and how it ⁓ has sort of supported you.

Robert Peake (00:13)
We're done.

Todd Brown (00:32)
and maybe also what some of your challenges are. But before we get to that, just by way of framing, for those of you that might not have heard our podcast before, in this series of podcasts, our goal is really to help you through our own experience, both personally using the methodology, but also working with, up until now, I think it's fair to say, Robert, between you and me, thousands of clients in the Getting Things Done methodology.

and helping you to realize the promise of GTD, which is in essence to help you to get more of the right things done in less time with less stress. And that's what we're trying to do in really all the work that we do. ⁓ And that said, Jenny, I'd very much like to turn to you if you don't mind at this point, if you could tell us a little bit about, you you, your GTD journey as it were, the kinds of roles that you've had and kind of

how you've come to be with us here today. That would be great.

Jenny Costelloe (01:31)
Sure, thank you and thanks for inviting me, it's a real honour. So yeah, I first met Robert and started working with the GTD methodology, I think about three or four years ago when I was working as executive director of a membership organisation in the tea sector called ETP, Ethical Tea Partnership. We can talk a lot about how GTD helped me then.

⁓ And about 15 months ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, which was a sudden change of track. ⁓ And we've discussed how ⁓ that's affected my GTD practice in a strange sort of way. So there's a definite period, the last 15 months have been breast cancer treatment. I'm thankfully emerging from that and I'm now exploring what next and that's looking very different. And I'm dusting down my GTD practice.

And kind of, I need it, I need something slightly different to what I needed in the old executive director job. And I'm hoping we can discuss a little bit about that. So three distinct phases, the running an organization, the breast cancer phase, and emerging from that and looking forward to the future.

Robert Peake (02:45)
Wonderful, well really happy to have you here and we've worked together quite a bit, so always happy to see you. ⁓ And I think it's just really great that I think these are distinct phases and the transitions between phases I think is maybe a topic that a lot of our listeners will resonate with because life has those in case you haven't noticed.

Jenny Costelloe (02:52)
Yeah. Thank you, Robert.

Indeed, indeed,

you can't plan for them.

Robert Peake (03:13)
Yeah, so maybe

just by way of kicking off the exploration of all this, you could talk a little bit about sort of how GTD has helped or what has helped, you know, in the phases you've been in and kind of in the transition. So we can maybe look a little bit about what's working and then talk about what are the challenges specifically that maybe we could help you explore and have a conversation about as well.

Jenny Costelloe (03:41)
Yeah, think, yeah, great. I'll try and I mean, knowing me will meander a bit. But when I was working as executive director of ETP, it's a global organization for the tea sector. There are 50 companies who support us. have activities in, at the time it was eight different countries, you know, and an international team. And Robert, I remember our first conversation, you said,

How do you decide what to do? And my response to it was, look at my inbox and I was being driven by my emails. I was, you know, in, it felt like firefighting mode all of the time, kind of who's asking for something from me now? And that was the first thing I did. And inevitably that approach just meant I wasn't moving things on at a kind of higher level or at a strategic level, or I would, things were slipping and

And between a scribbled notebook from meeting notes and my inbox, I was just about honing things together. And I lived with a constant sense of overwhelm. so that's admitting where I was when we first started working together. And I had read the GTD book years ago, probably in a phase of my life where I wasn't feeling that same sense of overwhelm, the volume of work. And I hadn't brought anything over yet.

So we worked together and I think what was really helpful for me, I was nervous that this was going to be a software driven approach to productivity. And I was kind of digging my heels in and it wasn't that at all. It was about how are you capturing things? How are you organizing that? How are you prioritizing and how are you deciding? And it was, once I kind of relaxed about

it not being a technology solution, it's actually a thought structuring solution. And I really embraced that sorting my thoughts into different lists that helped me know what to work on and when. The other thing I should say about the role was it was international and I was doing a lot of commuting and by train several times a week. So I had a lot of time where I was offline.

or out of contact and the ability to create lists that were kind of almost my, when you're offline, you can read that document, draft that note and work on those things was just so empowering. The other, mean, I think a couple of my favorite ⁓ features that we developed and built together was the ⁓ agenda list.

which is so simple, but it's so elegant. You're on a flight somewhere and you think, need to speak to someone about something the next time I see them. Inevitably, the trip happens, you return home, you get back into the office and someone else steals your attention and you forget that item. But if you have an agenda list, it's there for you. So the next time you speak to Robert or to Todd, you know what you want to say to them rather than leaving that meeting going.

got to mention XYZ. So that was helpful. And it gave me, I think I became a little bit more reliable with my stakeholders, that I was using the time with people more effectively. And it's not the kind of agenda you necessarily circulate to someone in advance, it was just making sure that the conversations and interactions you have are worthwhile. And the other thing that was

just for me personally transformational was the waiting for list because given the kind of fly in fly out style of working that I was doing I was having conversations with people people were promising me things or I was asking for things and I would leave and move on to the next whatever and I'd forget and weeks would pass by and I'd wonder why that paper hadn't been sent through or

someone hadn't been invited to a meeting or whatever. But if you have a waiting for list, it kind of gives you a timeframe that is really easy to lose track of. But it also helps with my sanity because I was going to think, I'm sure I'd ask someone to do something and I can't remember who and I can't remember when, but there it is and it's captured in that list. it just makes things deadlines a bit tighter. ⁓

it, the dark side of that coin is that I was holding a lot more people to account in terms of what they were promising me and I don't know that that's always welcome when suddenly out of nowhere I appear to have a better memory which I didn't at all, I just had a better list. So those were the things that the GTD immediately helped me with.

The other things that I had was I had a little app on my phone which I could send a voice note to myself if, you know, walking the dog or running for the train, you know, and you suddenly you haven't got your notepad or whatever, you know, just sending these little things that end up on your list somehow, even though you're not at your desk at the time that you think of that. So that was helpful. And I listened to one of your other podcasts recently and if someone was talking about the Someday maybe list.

and how it can feel so almost aspirational, of someday maybe as if list, you know, and that was somewhere that I suppose if I look back at the practice when I was at the ETP, I was chipping away at the someday maybe things, but that's only effective if you're disciplined about your regular review of your system.

So that's the ETP phase. That's the kind of probably most relatable example of my using the GTD model.

Todd Brown (10:14)
That's such a wonderful overview. Thank you so much. I'm just thinking about what you've just gone through and I'm thinking, what are some of the key points that we make with people when they first start to come to us and they first start to work with us? Well, first off, it's not just about the technology and that's absolutely key. know, so many people out there, what they're really looking for is the perfect tool because they believe that if they have the perfect tool, they don't really, know, thinking becomes optional, right? Sort of that. is the thing that we, and by the way,

Jenny Costelloe (10:16)
Okay.

Yeah.

Todd Brown (10:43)
In the age of AI, there's a whole new wave of people who believe that AI will make thinking optional. So there's some really interesting things to dive into there. And the fact that you've mentioned a few lists in particular, I love the examples that you gave around the agendas lists, I think. And as you described, this is, think, for most people, this is such a common experience. It's like, OK.

that something occurs to me, I know that what I need to do is talk this talk with someone about this. And yeah, that's so important. I will trust that I will remember it. Right. That's kind of the mindset that ends up that was the mindset that I had way back in the day before I got involved with all of this work. ⁓ I think, you know, the idea behind that, that thought, I'll remember this because this is so important.

Jenny Costelloe (11:23)
Yeah.

Todd Brown (11:38)
is that we are expecting that our brains are gonna be as effective at reminding as we would like, but they're not, right? So.

Jenny Costelloe (11:46)
And

there's a really interesting anecdote about that Todd or data point about that, is when we converted to the virtual meetings, largely driven by the pandemic, we lost a physical pause between meetings that allowed the brain to assimilate and park, I must talk to someone about that. And we went from saying, you know,

Same screen, different person, different face. And so you didn't ever have that moment to go, yeah, talk to Robert about that later, talk to Todd about that on Monday. And so the fact that we're doing back to back to back to back meetings on the same screen, often without getting up to get a glass of water or whatever, just doesn't give our brain the time to kind of log all that. So the agenda was an immediate capture and an immediate sort of

what I've just talked about in that meeting and can park it, it's gone and I can focus on my next meeting.

Robert Peake (12:48)
Yeah, that's such a good point about the lack of what I call integration time. know, just the stare out the window moment that, you know, that very much these days cognitive science really supports is a necessary part of sort of taking that more sort of immediate working memory and integrating it back into something more meaningful. So yeah, lots of great nuggets here and all very appropriate, I think, to ⁓ your leadership role.

Jenny Costelloe (12:52)
Yeah, yeah.

Robert Peake (13:15)
right, that you were very much using your system to get things done through people as appropriate, as a leader, using it to review when you had some downtime to review, using it also to rapidly switch context without losing things when, as you said, you were in the back-to-back meetings. And then, of course, there's the second phase you talked about, which is working within the medical system to

Jenny Costelloe (13:15)
Yeah.

Robert Peake (13:44)
get well. And it sounds like there, well, why don't you share, know, what was the system there and the experiment.

Jenny Costelloe (13:49)
Yeah, Sure.

So, kind of just to illustrate how international my career was, I had a trip to West Coast, West Coast America last March. And before before I went on that trip, I found a lump in my breast, didn't have time, didn't think I had time to see a doctor, went to America, came back, landed on the

Monday night did a board meeting on the Tuesday mentioned to a close colleague friend in passing that I had this lump and I had and she kind of said okay I'm canceling your meetings you make that appointment and by the Friday I was diagnosed and so I am at that point you know it's I've described it as you at the top of one of those water slides and somebody pushes you off and there's just no holding on the medical system.

particularly after a cancer diagnosis, just takes you and, you know, I've been spat out the other end of that water slide and still in one piece just about. But no productivity management system can help you in that instance. But we did through conversation, Robert, identify one kind of unexpected benefit of the GTD. So the organization was brilliant and supportive and gave me the time off that I needed.

to have the treatment. But I did, you know, they necessarily had to appoint a successor. And that's very exposing moment in your professional world when you have to hand over at short notice to someone who's kind of your peer. And I was so grateful for my GTD lists at that moment because I could sit down and look at my GTD.

and think, okay, here's my waiting for this. That's lovely because that's, can hand that over to my successor and say, so and so is working on this and this is what you should expect from them. And here, you know, I've got the emails pinned onto it. I've got all the paper trail to support that. So I had a kind of work in progress handover list as well. I shared some of my someday maybe thinking, which was related to the organization, obviously.

⁓ And then the agenda items were, you know there were some things that were just thoughts and musings for me to explore with people, but there were some things that needed to be discussed with important members of the organization. So again, I have a nice little handover list, but what that gave me was when my head was frankly worrying about cancer treatment, I had a ready-made list or a couple of lists that I could just work with.

knowing that it was comprehensive and had covered pretty much everything that I was in mid flow of dealing with and then just handed over and I could switch off on that. I wouldn't ever recommend using GTD just in the anticipation of having a cancer diagnosis but you know look where it helped me and it was very great.

Todd Brown (17:03)
wonderful example. Thank you. think that's something that I think a lot of people who have gone through, let me just put a label out and call it major change, right? That a lot of people will have had some experience of where I'm thinking of, know, over the years, clients that I've worked with who are taking time, you know, maybe they're going off on maternity leave, maybe they're switching roles, maybe that, know, but there's a

Jenny Costelloe (17:13)
Yeah.

Todd Brown (17:28)
big, you know, there's sort of a big line drawn that says life is now going to be significantly different than it was previously. And in those moments, ⁓ a lot of people have said, ⁓ yeah, this is where you know, my GTD system sort of came into its own value of it. I think I've got this right. I think I'm using her words, but one client of mine said the value of the system really, really became there was there was a it became clear to me.

that the system was valuable in brand new ways that I had never anticipated in that moment.

Jenny Costelloe (17:58)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah. Your head, whether you've lost a family member or whatever the scenario is, you you don't have good quality time and thoughts about your work. But that list at least gives you something coherent from a different mindset that you can professionally hand over. you know, there's a lot of pride and professional integrity in doing a handover.

⁓ And what your successor does with that is, you know, that's not for you to worry about, but you do want to give them the best handover you can. So it was really useful in that context. I'd never anticipated it, but yeah.

Robert Peake (18:43)
Yeah. Well, that, that the one of David's follow on books is entitled Ready for Anything. Right. And I think that's one of the sometimes unexpected benefits of having a practice that's ongoing and sustaining is suddenly when anything shows up at your doorstep, you realize how ready you are, how ready you really are. Yeah.

Jenny Costelloe (18:50)
Yep. Okay.

Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Peake (19:06)
So

now you're entering kind of this new phase. The medical system was your system for a while. ETP obviously provided various structures as a leader. There's some sense in which an organization runs you a little bit when you're at the top. But now you're moving into a phase where you're very much needing to, as Frank Sinatra said, bring your own crank.

Jenny Costelloe (19:10)
Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

Robert Peake (19:29)
That was when they asked Sinatra, how do you do it? know six shows in three days and da da da. You got to bring your own crank. So you're in that phase and what are your thoughts, considerations and challenges? ⁓

Jenny Costelloe (19:29)
Okay, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. ⁓

Well,

maybe the question I'll answer first is how are my thoughts and they're incoherent at the minute. I'm kind of, it has been a wonderful summer. It has been a great time to have no work to worry about. I know that this is not what I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing and enjoying my garden and being outside. That's just not practical. It doesn't pay the bills either. So what I'm really kind of...

Robert Peake (19:51)
Right. Right.

Jenny Costelloe (20:12)
hoping to use my GTD practice for is the more strategic thinking and you know I could sit in an armchair and think I'd like to do board roles but according to the principles of GTD that's just not my next action is it you know I've got I've got to break that down I also perhaps ⁓ inevitably have a have a new motivation and interest in my well-being and my health so that's a

big priority for me. I very much am aware that when things get busy, that's the stuff that goes to bottom of my list. So I need to, I would like to find a way to make that as important as the revenue generating and the intellectually stimulating stuff that I do. ⁓ And also I have committed to quite a few volunteering opportunities and things. ⁓

mostly related to my illness but also something to do with supporting the elderly in the community and that kind of thing. So, you know, I've got a smorgasbord of activities and opportunities. There is a real risk that I can just sign up to lots of things and do nothing. Real risk that I can think aspirationally about stuff and it doesn't manifest. So I don't really know how to organise this and to use GTD to help me.

get there. just one other thing, which I think is probably one of the starting points is a little bit of housekeeping. I've worked entirely on the Microsoft suite of products in the old job, and I don't have that anymore. So I'm now going to have to set up my list system and my kind of capture tools in a different way. So, you know, where do I start? What's what is my next action?

Robert Peake (22:05)
Go for it. Help her!

Todd Brown (22:05)
Yeah, no.

Jenny Costelloe (22:09)
Yeah.

Todd Brown (22:11)
That's what we do. Here's hoping. Here's hoping. So just generically speaking, one of the things that I encourage you to think of is that this transfer from one technical platform to another, almost always very disruptive. You had your love it or hate it, your old system, at least you were familiar with it and you were familiar with its quirks and you had made it work in a way that sort of worked for you, the transition to a new platform.

Robert Peake (22:12)
That's what we do. That's right.

Jenny Costelloe (22:12)
Good, good. I'm relieved.

Mm-hmm.

Todd Brown (22:39)
On the one hand, it is disruptive. On the other hand, what I've found over the years, and this is my own experience as well as the experiences of lot of clients that I've worked with, is that this ability to sort of start over and think about, okay, what do I really need out of this system? You've already been talking about an awful lot of the things that are important to you about GTD, right? The ability to track, for example, agendas, the ability to track waiting for us, the ability to keep track of your someday maybe list, right? And those things, I think,

A really, really interesting question is where will those go in your new system? ⁓ A couple of practical things to think about, okay, as you're making the move into the new technology, one is ⁓ do a little bit of exploring of, you know, is there a way to sort of transfer the data, right? Is there a way to just sort of take all the data out of the old system and put it into the new? I'm not necessarily a fan of doing that, by the way, in all cases, because I think what sometimes happens when you do that

is you bring to a certain extent some of the inefficiencies with you, if you will. ⁓ So another way to do that, is less, ⁓ which is maybe ⁓ not quite so slick, but might be more effective ultimately, is just export the old system to something digital, like an Excel spreadsheet or a big Word document. And then you can just copy and paste stuff into the new system as that's appropriate. ⁓

Jenny Costelloe (24:00)
Okay.

Todd Brown (24:06)
So that's one thing I suppose to think of. The other thing is, getting a handle on in the new tech, ultimately what you're really looking for, as you've already mentioned it, right? How am I capturing? How am I organizing? Those kinds of questions really can boil down to, okay, what does a list look like in this new tech? Where would they go if an email or a social media post or something comes in?

Did I then need to be able to convert into or from one of those incoming messages, create a new reminder? How does that happen? How do I get that onto a list? Those kinds of questions, if it's not something that ⁓ you have enough experience of the new platform to know the answers to those questions, then ⁓ that's one of the reasons we have the setup guides, which are available on our website.

So people can get access to just sort of, in this new world, whether it's Google, whatever the platform is, how should I think about where to put my lists? And what are my options in terms of the tools that I might use? So it can be a brave new world. And that can come with the pain of change, as it were.

⁓ But there's also upside there. And I'd encourage you to think about it in those terms as well. Robert, I know you've done quite a lot of work with folks ⁓ making the transfer to new tech. Anything else come to mind for you?

Robert Peake (25:45)
Well, yeah, no, I just would echo all of that in terms of what an opportunity it is, right, for you to go, you know, okay, well, how do I make this work for me? And the nice thing is you do have a lot more freedom. You don't have any of these corporate constraints. And you have a taste of what it means to capture very slickly and elegantly and quickly. You have a taste of what it means, what that experience is.

you know, of being able to get a really good inventory of your projects and review them once a week and so forth. So your inherent understanding of what you want as an experience from your system should be the guiding, right, of your decisions about what tool to pick and how to integrate it and all those kinds of things. And I would say keep it as simple as you can get away with, ultimately, at least to start. As simple as you can possibly get away with.

Jenny Costelloe (26:38)
Yeah.

Robert Peake (26:43)
to get the experience you know that you're looking for. So that would be my, yeah, my lead out into the tech. And then really this is an exciting time, you know, more generally I think for you in that, you know, you're really being able to forge ahead with, you know, creating more of what you want in your life and having more of an understanding and some perspective from some big life experiences about.

Jenny Costelloe (26:57)
Yeah.

Robert Peake (27:10)
what life's about and what you want to get out of it. mean, that's tremendous. So we talked about things like the areas of focus. We talked about higher horizons in the coaching, but even those to an extent are sort of handed to you in a corporate role and to some extent handed to you when your life is mostly about work or a lot about work in that the personal things is more of an inventory rather than an I would like, right? It's well, I'm a homeowner and I have health and I have this and I have that.

Jenny Costelloe (27:20)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Peake (27:40)
But now you get to kind of pick what those are, what those areas are for you. So I would encourage you, ⁓ while you're doing the bottom up of building out your tech, to also really do some top down work and to really look at ⁓ not only the five year plan, the three year plan, the vision, the goals, the discrete areas of focus that will get you there, but the quality maybe of experiences that you want in your life.

And increasingly, for me, as I come back to what's the quality, what am I wanting to experience in my life? And what are the different avenues to get there? Very often, unexpected things will show up, unexpected opportunities, new ways of achieving the essential experience I've been looking for that don't necessarily have to go down a prescribed path that I thought they had to.

So I like to do an exercise called kind of an ideal scene, like, you know, in my life, and we've done these, we've done sort of mind maps and spider diagrams. So you sort of whip out one of those and go, well, look, what are the branches and what are the things I wanna be doing? What do I wanna be experiencing? And then, of course, you know how to bring that right down into what are my desired outcomes. And now some of your desired outcomes may be clarify projects, right? The verb there may be, you know, clarify, you know, exactly what I want here.

And that's okay, that is a legitimate project. If there is a deliverable at the end of that called, okay, I've clarified and defined and I know I want, is it three board roles or one board role or what kind of boards and what kind of companies and whatever. If there's a deliverable of me telling me what I want at the end of that, that is a project. Just the clarification of what that is, maybe the move horizon you have right now, right? And so just acknowledge that, that you don't have to see.

Jenny Costelloe (29:10)
Yeah.

Robert Peake (29:26)
the ultimate step, you just have to see, what do want to be true next to then be able to kind of make the next move.

Jenny Costelloe (29:33)
Yeah, that's, it's a really interesting way of thinking about it. mean, again, I slip into this kind of mindset that GTD is just to help me get things done. And rather than make directional decisions, which are bigger than the next action. you know, I wouldn't have sort of using GTD necessarily to make those decisions about.

types of board roles or the, you know, if I do pursue another form of education, you know, maybe, but those are all my someday maybes and there's a whole lot of capture to do and then to kind of organise it and that's where GTD will help.

Todd Brown (30:18)
We're, I tell you what, for me anyway, the time has just flown, but we've come up on just about 30 minutes. Before we go though, Jenny, is there anything else that was on your mind that you want to make sure that we've addressed today? Any sort of final thoughts or questions or anything else just to make sure that you've cleared the decks?

Jenny Costelloe (30:22)
Well.

I think we've covered a lot of what we wanted to talk about. There was one thing that was a real surprise for me and Robert helped me with this a lot in the old organization was people management through GTD is a really interesting practice because I was reluctant to treat individual members of my team as a productivity.

thing, know, my productivity and actually thinking about it, you know, the desired outcome, the what do you want to be true, you know, the question that you kind of ask yourself and how do you get there and breaking it down into those conversations and the next steps and the activities was made it much less emotional for me and made it a much more structured and hopefully equitable process.

And again, you know, that was one of the unexpected benefits of the practice that I just, I was resisting putting people management into the system. And once I did, I felt it was much more structured and less emotionally draining for me. that was a good takeaway for me as well.

Robert Peake (31:53)
That's great, yeah. And now in this phase, in a way, you can also still bring all of your humanity and grace and humor and creativity to this new phase of, in a sense, sort of managing you and figuring out, you know, what is Jenny's, you know, potential and what does she want?

Jenny Costelloe (32:02)
Yeah.

My pro dog has never been so well managed, He's my only subject.

Robert Peake (32:16)
So bad, so bad, so bad.

Time to turn the focus on to you. But as you said, you can also still use that structured approach to then really achieving things that are inspirational and meaningful to you. So, yeah, it's great.

Jenny Costelloe (32:23)
Okay.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Nice.

Todd Brown (32:34)
I'm very sorry to have to say this, I'm afraid we're going to have to draw a line onto things today. Jenny, can't thank you enough for being with us. Thank you so much. And for those of you out there who've been listening in on this and watching some of you, please do like and subscribe if you want to hear more from us about the things that we're talking about in these podcast series. Also,

Jenny Costelloe (32:41)
My pleasure, thank you.

Todd Brown (33:01)
Please be aware that we, as we sometimes say, we do take requests. So if there's anything in particular you'd like us to be talking about, please do let us know. But for now, from Jenny, from Robert, from me, thank you very much for being with us and we'll look forward to seeing you next time.

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