getting a coach involved in my swimming practice<\/a> was transformational, even after 50-something years of practicing on my own.<\/p>\nLearning a language is another useful parallel. Have you ever beavered away diligently for years on your own, trying to learn a language with books and cassettes, CDs, or streaming services (perhaps all of them, if you\u2019ve been at it for a while\u2026)? Then you meet a native speaker, trot out your best book-learned sentence,\u2026. and find yourself unable to respond to the first question they ask. Arrrrggh! Then, at some point you finally got some time with a local family in the country where they speak the language all day, every day and \u2013 after a few weeks or months \u2013 you are dramatically more fluent.<\/p>\n
That shift is what we can do for your workflow.<\/p>\n
What it boils down to is this: we earn our living by consistently speeding up and smoothing out the mastery of workflow for our clients. The info provided in the books is 100% complete, but difficult to interpret for your specific circumstances. To bridge that gap, we offer translation services in our seminars and in coaching sessions.<\/p>\n
Full disclosure: I first implemented based on my understanding of reading the GTD book too. I didn\u2019t get it backwards exactly, but certain elements of what I put in place were definitely trending sideways. Still, I got significant benefits from that first implementation. I was working so inefficiently prior to reading the book that even a couple of minor improvements made a big difference. It was a good five years later \u2013 after attending a seminar and getting some coaching \u2013 that I really understood and got the benefits of the simplicity that David Allen was proposing in the book.<\/p>\n
Working on your own and working with us are not mutually exclusive of course. Lots of people who come to us are self-taught. \u00a0But even when they\u2019ve been practicing for years on their own, we can easily find them 10-20% increases in productivity along with significant reductions in their perceived stress. We can do this consistently and easily because there are patterns in the misunderstandings. Sometimes they\u2019ve implemented the system so well that they\u2019ve missed the point of it. Their drive for productivity has them making sacrifices that more perspective would help them avoid. Others get over-focused on what their tools can \u2013 and can\u2019t do \u2013 rather than handling the real challenges of their workflow. Personally, I got stuck for years with way too much attention on the whole \u2018inbox zero\u2019 thing. Not wrong, per se, but also not the point of the exercise.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t regret my first implementation of the methodology, but I sometimes wonder how much more might have been possible if I\u2019d gotten the improvements that came from really understanding what was intended five years earlier. It\u2019s the same for many of my colleagues. But all the mistakes we made were not for nothing. It\u2019s those same mistakes that enable us \u2013 in the space of a couple of days \u2013 to save our clients years<\/em> of wasted effort.<\/p>\nEverything else I can say here is basically under that heading \u2013 we save you time and effort in your process of learning to save time and effort. If you think of it that way, getting the input of an expert in this domain has a certain useful logic to it.<\/p>\n
Beyond learning their own errors, all our coaches and trainers go through a rigorous training programme designed by David Allen, and have years \u2013 sometimes decades \u2013 of experience with coaching and training in the methodology. Between us we\u2019ve seen thousands and thousands of implementations so can help introduce other possibilities when you are stuck.<\/p>\n
We are paid to care more about your success than you sometimes will, and to push you harder than you will yourself in service of your success. Doing it all alone is possible, but also requires a huge amount of discipline. When you are flagging and ready to throw in the towel, we\u2019re there to provide a \u2018backstop\u2019 for supporting you with doing the things you say you want to do. Because given the pressures of everything else you have on, a project like \u2018Master GTD\u2019 can easily turn into a \u2018Someday\/maybe\u2019 in your system.<\/p>\n
Another of my colleagues puts it this way: \u201cDo you want to teach GTD or get the benefits of it? If you want to teach it, go it alone; all of the errors you make will be great anecdotes when you finally get to teaching it. If you prefer to have the benefits now, why wait?\u201d<\/p>\n
One final metaphor: if you are hiking and want to move fast through unknown territory, it will be useful to have a guide. It\u2019s hard enough to do the walking. Figuring out the path and<\/em> walking it is another level of difficulty altogether.<\/p>\nAnd now it gets a bit circular; because knowing about <\/em>all of the above also doesn\u2019t really help you, unless you do<\/em> something different than you have until now.<\/p>\nSee you soon?<\/p>\n
*Big thanks to Adrian, Dan, Spencer, Robert, Amy, Tim, James and Marcus for their contributions to this piece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I thought my last post had settled it. I\u2019d made the point about the value of investing in yourself and your people. Readers would get it, change their behaviour, job done. A few days later some feedback came in: Dear Ed, A great post with little or nothing to challenge. But any potential client […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":144854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_eb_attr":"","gtp_columnspro_styling":"{}","gtp_paragraph_styling":"{}","gtp_heading_styling":"{}","gtp_spacer_styling":"{}","gtp_video_styling":"{}","gtp_group_styling":"{}","gtp_cover_styling":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[21,314,318],"tags":[274,53,79,94,1069],"yst_prominent_words":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144853"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144853"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.next-action.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=144853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}