Vakil Housing-the first Company in India to be trained in GTD.
Yipee! It’s finally over and official. Vakil Housing is now officially trained in GTD. What’s GTD? It’s this truly path-breaking methodology that:
1. Enhances an individuals productivity. (Some of my days are now seven times more productive than before.)
2. Improves one’s ability to focus on the task on hand by leaps and bounds.
3. While simultaneously significantly reducing stress levels.
Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been eagerly awaiting this training to take place and last week it finally happened. Dream Com True! Through Linkage Incorporated, Leslie Boyer Harradine an associate with the David Allen Company, was down here for a whole week for an intensive training session, exclusively for Vakil Housing. Other than Training our staff in this methodology, Leslie, also trained a couple of us to be Trainers ourselves. So that this would not just be a one-time thing, but the practice and training will continue inhouse so that eventually a GTD culture sets-in.
Would like more information on what’s GTD? Well, GTD stands for Getting Things Done. It’s compiled by this genius of a guy, David Allen, who’s authored a book by the same name. Here’s a modified excerpt from my an earlier Blog Post of mine, that explains GTD in a bit more detail.
The Principle of GTD in a nutshell is that, your effectiveness is directly propotional to how relaxed you are. And how can anyone relax if there are 50 to 100 undone tasks (from unsent emails to incomplete reports to file) munching your mind to mush. Hence, the solution to get maximum effectiveness would be to have a system in place where anything…literally ANYTHING that comes to mind (be it via a task assigned to you by someone else or something that popped in your head regarding something that needs to be done), is instantly captured within 10 to 30 seconds in a system that you’re confident and absolutely and positively certain from which the same information can be retrieved at anytime within 10 to 30 seconds.
Therefore now imagine a scenario that you’re early at work, hoping to finish a report before everybody comes in. While you’re at the report, you get a call from home, you grudgingly temporarily put away the report to take the call, it’s your spouse online asking you to do/get something for her/him. As soon as you put the call down and before you can do anything about it, your boss comes in and asks you to step into his office for a n urgent meeting. Does this scenario sound familiar? Well,…instead of going numb of all these new tasks being fired at you and dealing with just the latest and loudest, you immediately record all these unfinished tasks ( i.e. your incomplete report, input from wife’s call & meeting notes from Boss) within 10 seconds from the moment it arrived in your life into a system; so that you can retrieve that info (within 10 seconds) when you are in the position to Get iT Done. And when you do that for every single thing in you mind….it would feel as if someone has lifted a mountain that you were carrying on your head for all these years and gently placed it aside.
I’ve listed further resources on GTD, on the same blog post that you can see by clicking here and scrolling down towards end of the post.
Oh well. This is just the beginning. To have this truly set-in to our culture will take time and a lot of work. Till then, let’s just enjoy at the photographs of the Training that took place, shall we? 
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For implementing GTD you might try out this web-based application:
http://www.gtdagenda.com
You can use it to manage your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts, use checklists, schedules and a calendar.
A mobile version is available too.
As with the last update, now Gtdagenda has full Someday/Maybe functionality, you can easily move your tasks and projects between “Active”, “Someday/Maybe” and “Archive”. This will clear your mind, and will boost your productivity.
Hope you like it.