I was asked how to inspire others in your workplace to adopt the GTD methodology recently.
My experience is that you can inspire people one at a time to adopt GTD but to have it taken up by an entire organisation or team at the same time would be quite a feat and huge change of behaviour.
Although it can benefit everyone not everyone is going to be receptive initially and some never will be.
I have found it more effective to let people come to you. When you hear “how are you always so calm when there is so much to do ?” or “how come you always seem to know what to do in all this chaos ?” – then it’s time to say “let me tell you about this book I read by David Allen” which changed my working life. . . . .
I have persuaded my boss and at least one of my direct report managers to read my copy of the book and eventually buy their own but I don’t see either of them fully implementing yet. I do see aspects of it creeping in to their systems and they had recognised systems to begin with. Another peer manager in the office approached me recently because he saw I was involved with this group on LinkedIn and wanted to know more. He’s reading the book now.
I do maintain that the full system is not for everyone. Some people work in a completely different way to start with and are never going to appreciate the benefits and either are or think they are productive already or even don’t think this part of their life is important enough to focus on improving, compared to other things that keep their attention. So in these cases GTD might just have to pass them by. . . for now.
I do coach my teams and my wider department in aspects that come from GTD. For instance effective use of e-mail getting to inbox zero and how to run effective meetings; where I use the natural planning model as a suggestion for the general format of an agenda. I repeat the definitions of a projects vs a next action for people who are struggling to know what to actually do next and when my teams feel overwhelmed, I talk to them about getting everything into a single system so that they can assess all their current demands, even if that is just a central list of all their main projects. They might not realise they are slowly adopting GTD but I’m getting improved productivity from them and eventually some of them will ask where all these ideas are coming from. Time to point to the book again.
So to answer the original question, to do it properly my experience is to win people over one at a time by example. Get them interested in some of the potential improvements and then suggest that they buy the book for themselves. Why shouldn’t David Allen get more sales after all ?! Once there are a few of you practicing this method in team or department then others will follow.
