UNDERSTANDING YOUR GTD-Q® RESULTS

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Contents

Understanding Your GTD-Q® Results 1

Responder or Victim? 2

Implementer or Micro-Manager? 3

Visionary or Crazy-Maker? 4

Captain & Commander or Autocrat

5

Which quadrant should you be in? 6

How Do I Get Started With GTD? 10

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© Real Action Ltd, 2018Real Action Ltd (trading as Getting Things Done - New Zealand) is a Certified Distributor of the David Allen Company, Inc. which owns the intellectual property rights, including but not

limited to all copyright and trademarks relating to GTD and Getting Things Done.

GTD-Q®

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Understanding Your GTD-Q® Results How well are you doing with your control and perspective? Are you a Crazy Maker, Captain and Commander, Responder, or Micro Manager? In less than two minutes, the GTD-Q® will give you visual results about your current reality, describe your strengths, and offer opportunities to find better balance.

Remember, it’s not about what quadrant you are in - it's about knowing how to move from where you are to where you want to be. GTD can help.

You can retake the assessment as often as you like, and it’s worth doing as your work and environment change. As your control and perspective shifts, so will your results.

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GTD-Q®

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Responder or Victim? If you scored just 1 or 2 for both Perspective and Control, your answers indicate that you are not at your optimal level of perspective or control.

In this quadrant you are in the storm, probably somewhere between a mild storm and a major hurricane. Right now it may seem challenging just to keep your boat afloat, not to mention to see where you're going.

On the positive side, you are a Responder. It is the natural defensive game you must play when you are engaged in a "stretch" goal or a major change - even a positive one. The bigger the objectives you have set and the more risks you have taken to step into new and uncomfortable areas, the more likely you will need to focus on tactical responsiveness just to achieve short-term stability.

The downside is that on your worst days, you may feel like the Victim—driven by the latest and loudest inputs and issues, living moment to moment, often in crisis mode. As you perform triage on your daily work, small issues that are overlooked turn into crises over time.

GTD can help you get some control of the "stuff"—all the potential crises that you haven't had the time to prevent. You'll know what's on your plate and be able to make basic decisions about your commitments. As you get a little breathing room, you'll also get perspective on how to look at your catalog of commitments and make good decisions about what to do when. These efforts will relieve some of the pressure you've been feeling.

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GTD-Q®

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Implementer or Micro-Manager? If you score 3 or 4 on the Control scale, but only 1 or 2 on the Perspective scale, you are an Implementer. If you score in this quadrant, you are ahead in maintaining order and structure, and to some degree are using a systematic approach to keep up with your world.

On the developmental side, you are a Micro-Manager. The pressures you feel may be coming from the lack of perspective, rather than from your workflow. A certain degree of form and structure is necessary for freedom; but any more than that creates constriction and limitation. Flexibility is required to maintain real control. There must be a degree of cooperation with the environment, which is always more complex and mysterious than we suppose. Over-adherence to structure under changing circumstances can look like misguided perfectionism.

GTD can offer you a systematic approach to managing workflow that is inherently flexible. The process requires you to focus on outcomes--the purpose behind any activity--then allows you to capture all those commitments appropriately for intuitive decision-making in the moment. You can still feel in control while flexing with the changing landscape of priorities.

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GTD-Q®

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Visionary or Crazy-Maker? If you score 3 or 4 on the Perspective scale, but just 1 or 2 on Control scale, your are a Visionary or a Crazy-Maker.

On the positive side, you are a Visionary—you have no shortage of ideas and inspiration. You're probably pretty good at setting goals, being creative, and focused on "the most important thing."

On the developmental side, you are a Crazy Maker. The challenge is that your ideas, projects, and commitments may be outstripping your ability to keep up with them. Along with the inspiration from what you're envisioning, there may be things falling through the cracks, details being missed, and a general sense of being overwhelmed. Other people in your life may have pointed out to you that you don't adequately consider constraints or limitations when making commitments. And that contributes to overloading those around you.

GTD can offer you a sane way of complimenting your strong perspective with improved control. You can use a systematic, but flexible approach to capture and consider all the commitments you want to make. This should help you get better traction bringing your ideas to life. And the efficiency you realise will help you avoid the title "Crazy Maker" as you build a better track record of handling requests and delegating to others in a timely manner.

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GTD-Q®

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Captain and Commander or Autocrat If you score 3 or 4 for both Perspective and Control, your answers indicate that you are achieving a healthy balance. You are "on your game"!

On the positive side, you are Captain and Commander. Your focus gives you effectiveness and your implementation and follow-through give you efficiency. By managing to keep your world collected, processed, organised and reviewed, you manoeuvre with agility and flexibility

On the developmental side, you could be something of an Autocrat - simply because the power that comes from mastering the control/perspective game could make you vulnerable to a sense of complacency; you might think it will always be this way. To some degree that may be true, but somehow your world will still manage to be a consistent source of surprise. And those surprises tend to get bigger as you take on more responsibility.

The challenge that you face is more about fine-tuning the practices that you already (at least to some degree) have in place. Your improvement opportunity is to pay attention to the more subtle aspects of your work and life. Once you pay attention to what has your attention, you'll discover what really has your attention. As long as there is anything pulling or pushing on your consciousness, no matter how subtle, there will be an opportunity to practice and refine your facility with perspective and control. Are there things you should be doing to stretch "out of the box?" Are there things you ought to be learning, to keep yourself fresh and on your game?

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GTD-Q®

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Which quadrant should you be in?

The Four Modes of GTD-Q:

VISIONARY / CRAZY MAKER Strengths: - Ideas and inspiration - Goal-setting - Creativity - Focus

Challenges: - Things falling through the cracks - Feeling overwhelmed/stressed when trying to

deliver - Inadequate consideration of constraints

- Contributing to others feeling overwhelmed

What GTD Can Do for You: - Systematic approach to capture and consider

commitments - Better traction to take action on ideas

- Efficient processing of requests from others - Timely delegation of tasks

CAPTAIN AND COMMANDER / AUTOCRAT Strengths: - Appropriate focus and control - Can manoeuvre with agility and flexibility

Challenges: - Complacency

What GTD Can Do for You: - Greater attention to subtle opportunities - Stretch beyond current capabilities

RESPONDER / VICTIM Strengths: - Tactical responsiveness - May be necessary for short-term stability

Challenges: - Driven by the latest and loudest - Crisis mentality breeds crises

What GTD Can Do for You: - Get control of incoming “stuff” - Get perspective on where to focus - Relieve

pressure

IMPLEMENTER / MICRO-MANAGER Strengths: - Order and structure - Focused on completing tasks - Highly

systematic approach Challenges: - Lack of perspective - Inflexibility - Misguided perfectionism What GTD Can Do for You: - Systematic approach that is also inherently

flexible - Focus on purpose and outcomes - In control through constantly shifting

priorities

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GTD-Q®

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These assessment descriptions are generalisations, based upon David Allen’s experience working with many people over the years in both their work and home environments. The purpose of these compiled overviews is to assist you in identifying certain aspects of your current situation and to provide suggestions specific to those circumstances that you can use to improve your situation.

In other words, if you are a Visionary, with a non-stop creative mind, bouncing off the wall with a stream of project ideas and inspirations, your improvement will probably not be to have more brainstorming sessions. You need good in-basket capturing with some rigorous next-action thinking and tracking. And if you’ve got great action lists but you’re spending most of your time filling them up with stuff you never have time to actually do, you don’t need more lists. You need a good off-site to decide where you want to be three years from now.

There is no “right” place on this matrix to be. The upper-right-hand quadrant (Captain and Commander) would seem the optimal stance; and in its most pristine form it would be. But if you are not losing control and perspective regularly, you are probably stale. By its very nature, being highly productive means that you are consistently moving forward and pushing your boundaries. Any time you take on a new challenge you are inevitably throwing yourself out of balance, given the ambiguity and uncertainty of where you’re going, how this fits into your life, and how (or whether) you’ll get there!

In other words, it’s not about always being totally in control and having the right perspective - it’s just about recognising where you are and having good tools and techniques to get you back into a positively productive state, whenever necessary.

There are both positive and negative aspects of each style (the negative labels are listed second in the table above). We are all Responders to events in life and work from time to time, but some maintain that as a position (Victim). We are all Visionaries as we hold images in our mind of what we might want, but sometimes we don’t marry that enough with physical realities (Crazy Maker). We all work as Implementers, engineering viable structures to make things easier. But some sacrifice substance for form (Micro-Manager). And we all get on top of our game as Captain and Commander, from time to time, but then

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GTD-Q®

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may not leverage that situation to build sustainability (Autocrat). Again, it’s not about right or wrong - it’s about personal effectiveness. Is your approach working?

If so, no need to spend effort changing it. If not, please consider our suggestions.

This assessment is primarily situational, i. e. it is based on variables that could easily and quickly change for you in time and context.

In reality we are all likely bouncing between all four quadrants many times during a single day. You may come into your office early, organised and focused and feeling like you’re on top of your game, and one unexpected call (full of unexpected opportunities or challenges) can blow that up totally. You get off the phone, your head swimming, with scribbled notes, and you need a good quarter hour to do a brain dump, process your thoughts, and reassess how to spend the rest of the morning. So, though you started as Captain and Commander, your Visionary took over on the call, you became a total Responder at the close, and your Implementer had to handle the chaos, before you could come up for air and be a Captain and Commander again.

Similarly you may find yourself in very different places on the matrix depending on what kind of activity you’re engaged in. You might be a Visionary in the kitchen (with stuff splattered everywhere), an Implementer in the garden (spending $3000 and 300 hours researching and building raised beds for which you miss the planting season), a Captain and Commander as a soccer coach (just enough practice and drills with the right amount of heart and motivation), and a Responder about your car (“Help!! What does this blinking orange light mean?”).

You may, however, find yourself more regularly in one quadrant than the rest. If so, there may be some particular habits or formats that would be useful to install, to ensure greater productivity overall. It will be useful, too, to have some familiarity with the four basic styles and situations, to assist in directing yourself as well as understanding others.

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GTD-Q®

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For instance, we’ve found that Visionaries often allow themselves to be Crazy Makers, with an initial resistance to GTD, because they see the only alternative to be their opposite - the Micro Managers. “Getting organised” is perceived as the path to constraint (which it would be, with too much structure). Conversely, the Implementers become Micro Managers because of their fear of the out-of-control-ness of the Crazy Makers. Understanding that there is a position - Captain and Commander, that incorporates the best of both, resolves that dilemma.

It has also proven of great value for people to recognise the Victim syndrome (in themselves as well as in others) and how to frame a non-judgmental assessment about what’s going on with a blueprint for getting out of it.

You can come back to take the GTD-Q assessment as often as you like. You may find it interesting to take again after you have setup your first GTD system, or done a Weekly Review.

Keep reading to find out how you can get started with GTD, learning by yourself or with the help of our expert trainers and coaches.

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GTD-Q®

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How Do I Get Started With GTD?

Read the Book Since it was first published almost fifteen years ago, Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business books of its era, and the ultimate book on personal organisation. GTD is now shorthand for an entire way of approaching professional and personal tasks, and has spawned an entire culture of websites, organisational tools, seminars, and offshoots.

Now you can get this updated edition of the original "manual" for GTD, with detailed overviews, examples and coaching advice to get your system up and running. This revised 2015 edition also contains new material on the rise of digital technology in our always-on world, and recent cognitive science research that validates the GTD methodology.

You can buy your copy of Getting Things Done or any of Davids other books from our GTD Bookstore at www.gtd.co.nz/shop

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GTD-Q®

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Start Practicing the Five Steps The heartbeat of GTD is five simple steps that apply order to chaos and provide you the space and structure to be more creative, strategic, and focused.

Follow the Five Steps to capture, clarify and organise all your commitments. Build a system that you regularly review and engage with to give you peace of mind and total control.

To learn more about the Five Steps visit our website at www.gtd.co.nz/5-steps

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FIVES T E P S

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Engage with Our Methodology Experts GTD is simple, but it’s not simplistic. There is endless nuance to building a reliable and repeatable system that can deal with the complexity of your life.

Give yourself the best start and the greatest chance of success by learning the GTD methodology through courses packed with engaging lectures, videos about the best practices, hands-on exercises, group discussions, and Trainer demonstrations.

Our courses:

• Teach the best practices for executing on actions, projects, strategies, and initiatives

• Instil easily adopted behaviours that produce greater freedom to focus on the most significant things

• Eliminate distractions and noise, giving you more mental space for creative, innovative, and strategic thinking

• Build on the learning from the previous course

• Are led by expert Trainers who have completed a rigorous certification program

• Are presented through engaging lectures, videos about the best practices, hands-on exercises, group discussions, and Trainer demonstrations

• Can be delivered in one-day or two half-day formats

• Are flexible enough to begin as a pilot program and expand

• Are available in-house at your organisation or through public courses held around the world

To learn more about our courses and trainers, including availability for the next public programme, please visit our website at www.gtd.co.nz/events

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GTD-Q®

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The Mastering Workflow Series The Mastering Workflow Series is a three-level productivity training program based on David Allen’s groundbreaking Getting Things Done® methodology.

The series offers three engaging one-day courses, each with a series of succinct follow up sessions, all designed to ensure you are well-equipped to build and maintain trusted systems and make the most of your investment in learning GTD®.

Though each level is complete and self-contained within its own scope–combined they deliver a total path for mastery. For more information visit www.gtd.co.nz/in-house-courses

FUNDAMENALS PROJECTS & PRIORITIES FOCUS & DIRECTIONLearn critical principles and

techniques for gaining and staying in control, day to day.

Level 1: Fundamentals builds on the five steps of workflow mastery:

capture, clarify, organise, reflect, and engage. It focuses on the need to capture all potentially meaningful

inputs into trusted tools, the decisions required to clarify what those captured items mean, the primary categories for organising information and reminders,

the procedure for reflecting and reorienting, and how to optimise your

system to make priority choices.

Learn key elements for defining and managing a complete

inventory of multi-step outcomes within an integrated system,

providing control and appropriate focus, week to week.

Level 2: Projects & Priorities brings a new and more complete degree of

“Mind Like Water®”—with the facility to recognise tensions as they emerge and transform them into controllable

outcomes and doable actions. Problems, issues, and opportunities are translated into real projects with

executable next actions.

Learn a dynamic model for clarifying and aligning

commitments, values, and interests at all levels, joining vision

with action and execution, providing lifetime keys for staying positively oriented and engaged,

no matter what.

Level 3: Focus & Direction pulls together the idea of the “ultimate map

room” —i.e. the awareness and capacity to create, update, refine, and

utilise the orientation tools that optimise our experiences—seeing the best things to see, at any time, from

the best perspective.

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