Ep. 335: Context-based Lists

Hi everyone, this is John Forrester. We're here for another GTD Office Hour. And this is a time when you can bring up any GTD topic you want. And that could be including any wider productivity topic, which opens it up quite a bit. So feel free to bring up anything related to your GTD practice or... theory about GTD even if it doesn't directly apply to you.

That's wide-ranging. It can be tools. It can be concepts. It can be questions you've had, challenges you've had. We love a good challenge here. If there's something where you go, ah, this is still hanging me up. or i'm frustrated or want to get better at this great the other thing that's shown up recently a couple of times on our office hours is wins

What's working really well for you? What's been a success? What has been something that you wanted to do that you were able to do? How has GTD helped you with doing something more or better than you used to be able to. Any of that is fair game. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to you. Feel free to ask questions or bring answers.

That's part of what we're here for is to enjoy each other's community and the learning and sharing with each other. This is Julianne. Hi, Julianne. Thanks for joining.

Well, for me, I just recently switched over to as my platform. And I was going through a... a partial job change and I had a little bit of free time. So I thought, well, this is the perfect time to do it. Previous job was using all of the Google platforms. New job was using all of the Microsoft Outlook. And it just seemed like it was a time that I needed to switch anyway. I missed the name of the new one you're on now. Nirvana. Oh, okay. Great. Okay. Yeah.

I had time ago, but never researched it. And then I got back on the GTT connect and found all the users set up guides and set them all up. So I've been blown away how much, well I should say, how long I've been trying to follow GTT. And not realizing I wasn't really following it until I truly switched to this context-based engagement. Up until now, I've been using things like Google, and everything always had a due date. Everything always kind of populated what I need to do today.

And I always thought I was doing it right until I switched everything over to context. And I'm like, wait, there's nothing in my to-do list. I have to decide what to do, you know, so that's been fascinating. So really, the main reason I wanted to get on this call was what else am I missing? Like, what else do I think I'm doing? the gtd way but i i haven't i read the book probably

I don't know, maybe seven years ago, eight years ago? I know I've seen your name for years, so I know you've been here for a while. Oh, okay. Well, thank you. I'm just off in the sidelines. Never joined any one of these, but I've joined many of the webinars.

Yeah, so I think I'm just fascinated that you can still continue to master this program for a lifetime. Well, David Allen at some point a few years ago used the term path of GTD mastery, not a destination, but he'd be the first to tell you, yes, now you're really on it if you realize it's a path of learning and you're not... It's not something you get one time and that's it forever. So hooray for you. Well, thank you.

Thank you. Having gotten there. And it doesn't mean you weren't doing it well before. This is just if you're looking now at contexts and kind of losing that idea that where's my to-do list? And now working off of other lists where you're making a decision in the moment about what is the best thing to do, then good for you. That's a major, major step forward. Fascinating. Well, thank you.

Yeah, so if there's any other suggestions on, I can see Chuck made the comment that he uses Nirvana as well. Yeah. So if anything, it's just ignited this sense in me of like, oh, I want to like dive in deeper. and, you know, make sure I'm utilizing it to its fullest from the very beginning, you know, not waste another, I shouldn't say waste, but, you know, not wait another eight years to, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

get the benefits out of something well let's see i um i'll just let uh anybody else jump in at any point here um one thing i uh went one little bit of good news you said what else what else is there well we just scheduled another live webinar for about two weeks from now on calling it something like super lists, like how to make your lists even better. Yes, working from contexts is a big...

big improvement opportunity for most people versus having just what they call a to-do list. And then there are opportunities beyond that where you have your basic GTD lists, but... There are improvements available for most people in how they word those lists, how they what they how they. It comes down to the wording of how you put the words on the list in ways that will attract you to the list and have you look at the list and go, I can do that. And by the end of the day, I did.

seven things that I wanted to accomplish that I hadn't moved forward on before. And it can be just little changes in how they're worded that make quite a bit of difference. Well, good. I will sign up for that one. That's great.

coming up in in two weeks and uh you'll find the registration link in the webinars panel on the right side of gtd connect pages and my question back to you is since you've discovered contexts what sorts of contexts did you come up with those are very flexible they're they're very adaptable so what if you're willing to share what kind of text did you come up with I have my at agendas I have my at anywhere I have one that's called I lump them all together at calls emails texts at church

At commutes, because I tend to be in the car a lot as I'm commuting back and forth to a few locations in the Houston area. Right. I have at computer, at errands, at work, and then I have at my sister's house. I'm helping her a lot with her kids. Yeah, yeah. Those sound like great contacts, partly based on where you're spending a good amount of your time. And that's how they should be, right? It's not, there's no other...

It's like where you physically are or what support you have around you. Yeah. In the beginning, when David was first doing this, it was even... pre-internet. And so a lot of people, gosh, I'm going to go back to before a lot of people even had their own.

So Dave has been doing this since the 80s, and if you go back to those early seminars, some of the people he was presenting to didn't even have their own computer terminals at work. They were using paper files and... sending paper memos and they probably had typewriters and we're starting to get word processors and things so at computer wasn't

early version of the list lots of the contacts were very place-based meaning i'm at the office that's where my office files are or i'm at home that's where my home files are and there was more of a division there and the context changed for most people over the years. Let's see, do you work at home? On occasion. So I have like my work, I have my home office set up and then I have my work office set up.

And then I even have, well, I'm in a graduate school program, so I even have my graduate studies, you know, desk set up. So I kind of have three different work locations. Yeah. Yeah, well, so you're kind of lazy and don't have much ambition, of course. Your life sounded busy enough before you added graduate school, and then I'm, oh my goodness, what?

Good for you. You definitely need GTD to manage all of this stuff in your life. It certainly has brought almost a sense of comfort in the last couple days, just almost calming down a bit. Yeah. So yes to what you were saying about the context being kind of place-based, say, at commute, you're in your car. So what can you do when you're in your car? Yeah. And usually it's the different audiobooks I'm trying to listen to.

Yeah. Make sure they're queued up and stuff like that. Right. You may have a learning project where you're learning by listening to some course during a drive or something like that. Excellent way to look at context. And the other one that lots of people have gotten to as home and office have blurred more and as devices have made. Mobile devices have made it more possible to do more things, say, on a phone in addition to on a computer. So...

At computer could also mean at phone or at tablet, depending on what you're doing. Personally, I don't like to be working on a spreadsheet. on my phone. Just because I can do it doesn't mean I like to do it. And that's a quick way to put me in kind of a grumpy mood is make me work on something tiny and detail oriented. Yeah. Like a spreadsheet instead of on a big screen. So your contexts may evolve to where you divide at computer into more specific.

contexts there. So meaning like on a particular device or whatever device I have available to me at the time? Could be on a particular device. That's why the... calls list is very device-based. You might be able to make calls from your computer. Lots of people have ways of making a call from a computer. But when I'm on the phone with people, often I like to be up and kind of walking around. So I don't want it to be based on my computer device. I want it to be based on my phone as a device.

It's good to know, keeping those flexible, it seems very easy to add them on at any time. Yeah. Or rename one or something of that sort. One thing I didn't do... was I didn't set up the areas function in Nirvana. And I'd love to hear from Chuck if he's a big-time user, if he uses that or not. I don't subscribe to the work-life balance concept. I think of it as a work-life integration. So I, you know, I think of like, I don't want to separate into polar, but that is of any benefit to others.

For those who are listening in a commute instead of reading, Chuck's comment was it's a real paradigm shift. Paradigm shift when you start seeing the world through clear, constantly shifting context-based open eyes. keeps your senses sharp as you stay ultra aware of your surroundings in a contextual manner. Yeah, for sure. Because if anything, I was always having this fear of dread working. thinking I was using GTD but still hooked on the

to-do list. It's like, well, I haven't done my to-do list. Or I don't want to do that. How do I take it off my to-do list? And I don't want to take it off my to-do list. But now it was just completely mind-blowing to me to think. oh actually making those decisions throughout the day of what I want to work on is more empowering than seeing the list already pre-generated for me.

Right, right. And not to put down having a list. Most people in the world who don't even have a list, you're so far ahead of them because they're trying to hold their list in their head. At least you got it.

externalized and like that and you're talking about um refinements that are in the 99.9 percentile of productivity now so good for you so you're at computer list you may at some point decide to refine that some and separate it out and people i've heard of people doing that based on what device they're working on what kind of computer

what program they're working on. I've experimented with that at times where I've had my computer list divided by some of the major programs I use because those... have different mindsets that go with them if i'm doing something that's more coding or bookkeeping kind of numbers and linear than i may want David Allen has a creative writing context. He puts himself in a comfortable chair in his living room with his laptop on his lap where he can write and it gets him out of the other.

Yeah. The office work context and he has different thoughts. Yeah. And he's not going to email at the same time. Yeah. He could, but I suspect he's, he just makes it more like I'm.

Looking back and forth between the view out the window and the screen and letting my mind work on creative writing instead of replying to seven new emails. Thank you. Let's see. Well, Chuck is looking at whether you can get a screenshot of areas of focus. I would say you don't need to populate those higher horizons unless you have your attention on them.

If you say, I don't really have my goals and objectives and visions and life purpose and all that listed out somehow, that's fine. Areas of focus, you may find it useful because it... can help you to decide what to say yes and no to if you know what is or isn't an area of focus. Yeah, I think I had used GTD. for the main purpose of identifying all of those higher horizons. And I've always kept those as like a reference list and I would do the weekly reviews.

reviews different horizons at different months or quarters. So that was actually pretty strong for me. I guess where I'm not seeing the connection is how to have that. Or if there's any way to leverage that in Nirvana besides just having it as a reference list. Because I definitely got the whole context-based tag and then like the... you know who i'm waiting for concept in nirvana that seems to be helping but um none of my other or none of the horizon you know content

seem to be realized in Nirvana. I know they're available one way or another. And again, let's see if Chuck has a comment or a screenshot or anything. He's used it more. recently than I have. Do you have your projects list distinguished in Nirvana? Okay, great. Okay, so you've got the ground level. And then the second level, which is projects. And then for areas of focus, based on what you described, it sounds like you already know what those are and you may or may not need them.

listed out in any way i mean you've got your areas of focus are you mentioned your family your sister work church you're pretty much i'm trying to pull it up right now and i Areas of focus is similar to accountability, right? Yes. Yeah. The name has changed a bit over the years, but you could call it areas of focus, responsibility, accountability. Yeah. So.

That's it. Church, being a partner to my husband, my job, my children. Actually, I don't even list my sister in there, but that's interesting. Maybe it is an area of focus since I've been helping her out some, or spending a lot of time. Yeah. Well, that would be one of the reasons to put it on there is because it would...

keep you from having any kind of internal cognitive dissonance where you go, oh, I'm spending significant time on this, but it's not part of what I've given myself as a job description. Yeah, that's true. every once in a while it's interesting to talk to somebody who has something like an old-fashioned job description at work and then ask what do you work on and start to find out the

things they work on that are not in the job description or things that are big in the job description, but ask them what they work on. No, I never do anything like that. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, because I just list my job, you know, my profession, but I hadn't thought of the parts of that.

Because I do like to do those reviews just from a job standpoint of making sure I'm getting paid for what, you know, making sure that I'm focusing on what I need to focus on. And I hadn't thought of expanding this, you know, Horizon 2 list. Yeah. To include those sub parts. Yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it. At work, am I doing the work that I'm getting paid for?

Yeah, because I end up having to pull all that out again. I have to pull out my job description. But if I had it here, it would just already be listed there and wouldn't have to take that secondary step. Oh, okay. There we go. Chuck's working on a new computer. That sounds like a project to me. Well, first of all, I love his color combo. I hadn't thought about changing. I could see when I set up Nirvana, you could change up the colors, but it's fun. Oh, yeah, he's great.

He's got a list of areas of focus. It's a little more detailed than what you were... Yeah. You were saying, I'll read it for those who are listening, civic duty, creative output, family, friends, fashion and style, financial, GTD and personal development, health and longevity, hobbies and leisure. house home, job career, love partnering, online sales, parenting, spiritual growth, sports and fitness, tools and systems, travel and tourism.

Okay. That sounds like a fun life. It does. That's really well rounded. And what's interesting is seeing how he's put some of those together. I focus some of those. topics like in my goals or in my vision. So it's to a lower horizon, maybe focus on a little bit more often. Yeah, something in your areas of focus could generate a goal or a vision that may take you several years to accomplish, or it could generate a project.

An area of focus could skip over projects and go right down to something at the ground level where it's a calendar item or something on a to-do list, an action list, that isn't even part of a larger project. There's no requirement that everything on every horizon link to something above and below it. It doesn't always work that way. Very cool. Thank you, Chuck, for sharing. Yeah.

Thanks for that. He says, I equate GT Mastery to karate belts like David once did. Right now I'm at a yellow level, just about halfway between a white belt beginner and a black belt full mastery. as i feel myself mastering the methodology i change the background color in nirvana to reflect it oh okay that's awesome

Okay, well, I'm going to stop talking. I'm just going to let Chuck ask all his questions because I want to learn from him now. Oh, it's fine to talk, really. Chuck, if you have any questions or other comments, I've seen you often enough to know that you know you have permission to just dive right in any way you want to. And I also want to invite Mariko to... do the same any comments or questions or want to share something about your setup this is my first

office hours. And so Julian, thank you so much for sharing. I'm curious, what led you to Nirvana? Was it your role at your job? You know, it was one of the many weekly reviews I had done where I was encouraged to get creative. And so I'd always try and just... spend a few minutes just perusing the GTD Connect and see what was maybe a new webinar, new thing out there. And I just kept seeing people make comments about Nirvana. And I'm like, I don't even know what this is.

I had kind of prided myself in trying out all the different electronic platforms, and I had never even heard of anyone else using it. So it just always became like a, it was a to-do on my GTT mastery, you know, project list.

And it had been on there for quite some time. And it just became in this job shift. I was like, well, I got a couple days off. Maybe this is the right time to do it because I know I'm going to have to switch all my email. I'm going to have to switch all my... calendar anyway so let me just hold this open and see what happens um to which i was you know of course

I don't like all this change. What am I doing to myself? I don't even know how to use this. And yet I'm, I still need it, you know, so that was hard. But again, felt like I leaned into something uncomfortable and got. so much benefits out of it. So thank you for sharing. This is very helpful. There was a podcast I was listening to. I don't even know if it was a current one or one recorded from before, which.

David had a software developer on and they were talking about trying to develop the perfect app and how it doesn't exist. I almost think there shouldn't be a perfect app, the ultimate GTT app, because I think everyone comes into this so differently and needs different things at different times. And like we've talked about already, it's a lifetime of mastery. If I had a...

perfect, ultimate app. I don't feel like I, I probably would get turned off from it from the beginning because if it didn't fit me exactly, I wouldn't know to grow with it. Even though at many times I've always said, oh, I wish David would just tell me how to do this on.

electronically you know over the years i've heard lots of people say they have the perfect app sometimes it's a developer and say here's my product please pay me this is the perfect app or an end user saying i found it this is what works and then I can't remember a case where it didn't turn out to be the perfect app within a fairly narrow range of requirements. So it's the perfect app if you're on Windows or if you're on a Mac.

Or if you don't need to sync it with your phone, etc. The perfect app for everything, that's a tall order. Chuck Singh. This theoretical ultimate app would be flexible enough to accommodate anyone's needs or desires. Yeah, that's ideal. And I hate to be the naysayer here. It's just that I've watched people try this for a long time.

now. And one of the things that often people run into is, hey, this is the perfect app for me. And then they work at a company that's got security concerns and the IT department says, That may be a perfect app for you, but it has these security holes that open the rest of our network up to issues. So we can't let you use that for your work.

those kind of things. And the other thing that's shown up a lot lately is people want a perfect app that brings in artificial intelligence. They want it to already know everything about them in a way. Perfect app needs to already know what my schedule is for the rest of the day so it can advise me what to work on in this free hour I have after this or something like that. So there are quite a few.

challenges there. And I think it's probably kind of like the path of GTD mastery. It's never, it may never arrive. It's a fun journey. Okay, let's see. Mariko, would you be willing to tell us what you use to manage your lists? Sure. At this time, I am using Todoist. I did do coaching, Mary O'Malley. I had coached with her for foundation. uh, GTD and, um, I think for about a year or so. And initially I,

was paper, because I like the tactile approach. And I do comprehend better when I write. However, I just couldn't keep up with the pace professionally and personally. And as Julianne shared, I like the word integration because sometimes. I'm working more than personal life and personal life more than working. And so and I'm a visual person. So to see it all at one time. So I transitioned to do. To Todoist, I am a Mac user, so I did the free of Todoist and also free.

OmniFocus because at work also it's more of a Microsoft PC platform. And so I ended up with. to do list. And now that I have been involved in it, my disclaimer is I do need to keep practicing the weekly review. I just listened to Meg's Webinar. Keeping it clean. As I'm doing that, it's still. I still feel a little friction. And so that's why I was really curious and joining. And it's great to learn about different platforms because I'm realizing I'm also a visual person.

Perhaps Todoist is not as visually appealing as I need to have. That's a long-winded answer. Good answer. Thank you for listening. Oh, great answer. And that's how something looks can be an important part of whether it works for you and is your ultimate app. Some people would say the ultimate app has to have a light lavender background.

And others would say, no, it needs to have a changeable background. And I need a selection of the Disney movie characters as avatars for my lists. And I'm obviously going. silly here with my associations but how the app looks to you and whether it draws you in visually makes a big difference and then that's just if you're a visual person some people are very

text-based. You probably know from working with Mary O'Malley and Meg Edwards that I suspect they had you look at your cognitive preferences and how much you say like to read versus listen and that kind of thing. Did they take you through some of that? They did. And I'm definitely a sequential person. And I think that's why also visually is appealing to me because I can see it and then.

I'm also a bullet point person. I do not like emails if I have to scroll. So it's always if it's on one screen, I can read it. But if I scroll, my attention is. distracted yes yeah exactly so there are some people who they're they're in uh nirvana to use a

another term, if they see a page of text and get to scroll and go, oh, great, I get to read for half an hour or longer. And other people see that page of text and they're just... repelled by it because it's hard work so it varies so depending on how you are around your preferences with what you like to see and do with your mind that Your app could be different based on that.

I'd like to give a short message to those of you who've been participating and playing with GTD Connect for a while and sort of remind you that all of us with this GTD methodology and this set of practices go through cycles. I still go through cycles myself.

initially there's there's kind of the inspiration and there's a lot of material to ingest and to get familiar with and so people oftentimes when they first come on to connect are just potentially overwhelmed by how much information there is in a way it's just a huge library where we've been able to archive so much different information from so many different perspectives and people and points of view and so understood that it's like walking into a library go gee where do i start

so that's oftentimes the initial phase of this and many people after a year or two you know probably get on some level or some plateau where they go well i kind of got it now i've got my system set up and everything's fine And I'm fine-tuning. And you may find yourself at that point also finding yourself saying, gee, I'm now becoming a resource of this methodology for people around me.

people asking me for assistance and help in this. And we've seen in the forums a number of people now sharing ideas about how to get your teams more involved or families more involved with this information. So some of that information is in there as well. But I think you'll find yourself going through cycles of this, and you may find that much like if you've ever read a software manual, I remember when I read...

when I learned Microsoft Word to begin with. For instance, I read the manual like, wow, this is really cool. And I started to use the tool and didn't need the manual anymore. As a matter of fact, a good example of that right here, the manual for this camera that's taking this picture right now.

Initially I read this, got it all set up. That's really cool and that's really fine. And so pretty much everything was under cruise control. I didn't need to go back to my library to make this really work. And then, of course, as I started to get more sophisticated in terms of the stuff I wanted to do, got more inspired about some things I saw other people are doing, I go, ah, how do I do that?

Went back to the manual. Oh, God, I didn't realize I could do that. I didn't realize I could do that. I remember at least two or three iterations of going back to Microsoft Word back in the days when there actually was a manual for that as opposed to just all online. and realizing oh my god i didn't realize that oh i could do that now i could do that now and i think that's what you might find with connect too is that it's a gold mine of stuff

Well, many people have read Getting Things Done, you know, more than three or four times, and every time they read it, they get something new out of it. So I think you may find Connect the same way and probably even easier because, hey, it doesn't take much to just click on, surf around, see what might be new or what might be of interest to you. And pay attention. There's more than meets the eye in there.