82. Scaling Up With GTD

Transcript

Automatically transcribed and lightly edited. Timestamps omitted for readability.

Morten: Hi and welcome to another episode of the Getting Things Done podcast from Vital Learning. I am Morten Røvik as always, and as always, I'm here with my good friend and colleague Lars Rothschild Henriksen. Lars. Priyvit, Morten.

Lars: Good to see you as always, and good to be with you, our listeners out there. We always start off with a quick reminder to— with the purpose of the podcast, which is to help you learn GTD or become even better GTDers. If you are new to GTD, we recommend you go back and listen to episodes 1 through 6 to get an introduction to the basics of GTD, the 5 steps. And today's episode number is 82. We are fast approaching the 100th episode, or at least it feels that we are getting closer, at least. And today's episode is about scaling up with GTD.

Morten: Indeed. This, and then I've been through this scaling up our operations and you are in the middle of it. So you have some confessions to make, I think.

Lars: Yeah, I think, you know, this topic came up. We had, I think it really came if I think back. It came from— we had these Level 3 test seminars that I did in August and September in 2022 and talking to some of the really hardcore GTDers out there in Denmark. And some of the feedback that I got was also relating to the podcast where they highlighted that they really appreciated the episodes where we share more of our practical experience with GTD also from just our own perspectives. And, you know, since I'm in the middle of this, obviously it takes up quite a bit of my mental space to think these things through. And like you said, you've gone through it and, you know, perhaps someone else out there is going through this or will go through it at some point. And hopefully this episode will be helpful in their reflections on their GTD practice when they are in this situation.

Morten: Indeed. And since we are going to talk about something that might be a little, you know, scaling up, what does that really mean? I just want to define it first. And scaling up is that when you are, for instance, it could be scaling up could be that you are one individual who is practicing GTD and then suddenly your team start practicing GTD. That's scaling up your GTD as well. But what we are going to specifically talk about now is scaling up. If you're part of an organization that grows, how do you scale up? Using Getting Things Done. So how can Getting Things Done help you support that growth that you need in the number of people and the number of, you know, operations that you have? And I just want to kick this off, if it's okay, this that, you know, we talked about this. And if it is okay, I'd like to start with just briefly my story about how we scaled up back in 20— Well, I started earlier in this, but business was 10 years ago, 2012, December. I, you know, I founded what is now Vital Learning and started getting the franchise for the Getting Things Done business in Norway. And then later on in May the year after for the rest of the Nordic region. And scaling up then was, you start with you. I was alone and trying to, you know, make sense of how can I make money at the same time as I grow, which is always the entrepreneurs and the founders' big dilemma. How can we found a company and make money as we grow? And since we didn't have any seed money or any investment, it's just bootstrapping, I think it is called, when you start a company from bottom and you want to grow it organically without investment. And that's what I did. And it has been a long and arduous journey, to be honest. It's, of course, it takes a toll to do this, but it is getting things done helps you stay sane in the middle of all the chaos you might feel that you're in the middle of. So, and one of the things that I've, I'm just going to mention some of the things that I've had really had good use of is especially when we started growing with trainers because, you know, we are an organization that, you know, we hire trainers that are training our clients alongside with us. And, um, but those trainers need to be certified. And I remember, you know, the certification process, as you might remember back in the day, Lars, when you got certified, it's a lot of steps. There's a lot of milestones that you have to pass before you are ready to become a trainer, get certified. And I, as a master trainer, need to get track of that. So checklists have been really fundamental to keeping my sanity and also doing the most important work I can do when I need to do the most important work. So checklists and my second tip, I'm sure you use them as well. Maybe you might want to start there. And I have one more thing that I want to confess before we finish today. So, but checklists, are you using them?

Lars: Yeah. Yes, I could not function if I did not have checklists. Well, I could function, but then I would spend all my mental horsepower actually thinking things through that I had already thought through previously. So no, absolutely no. And especially in a year which I guess quickly the background from my perspective, you know, we started off the year with, as I wrote on LinkedIn recently, just GTD and me. And then, you know, during the year, we actually, one of the key metrics for us is lives impacted. And we actually quadrupled that compared to 2020. We really reached a lot of people. So that was obviously a big, big change. Then the rebranding to Vital Learning with the new partnership with Crucial Learning, certifying 2 new trainers. We inherited 10 certified trainers from, you know, the previous franchisee that are right now— for me, an activity right now is to learn more about how active these trainers are. But nevertheless, there are that many certified trainers out there. And we also onboarded my lovely wife part-time to help manage all of this growth and the work with the new franchise. So many things came up. And on top of that, GTD just really, like I said, took off this year. And that's obviously a lot of speeches, a lot of seminars, a lot of coaching. And without checklists, I don't know where I would be. I really don't know. I don't even want to imagine.

Morten: I feel you, man. I feel you. So, so, but can you give us some concrete examples on how you use your checklist?

Lars: Yeah, no, but you know, for seminars, seminars is just so many things. I think last time I checked, there was 106 items. So on the list, just things that I learned over, over time to keep track of. And you know, this is a combined list. It really sounds like a lot. There aren't that many steps for me for each of the seminars. So it's really a combined list for both open seminars and it's both for in-person and virtual seminars. So there are a lot of things that I can just easily check off. And, you know, when I, when I add a new seminar checklist, I'll go through and just, you know, this is an in-person one. So I'll take out the virtual ones, and I'll just check them off as done, because then I'll, you know, get that thing that feels good. And, you know, so I'll frequently start out, you know, if it's Monday morning, and I'll add a new seminar checklist to-do list, we'll say, wow, you already completed you know, 25 items on your list, that's the goal for the week. So I, you know, sometimes I'll start off with a nice pat on the back. But yeah, so that's just one example with all the different ones with, you know, different invoicing things to follow up about, confirm with the clients, all that good stuff. I imagine you have a pretty elaborate checklist as well for seminars.

Morten: Yes, I do. And it's— I use the template function so that I can just make repeat. So when I've done a seminar, it's easy to then populate a new one.

Lars: But on that one, if I may ask, you were looking into maybe transitioning to another list manager?

Morten: Yes.

Lars: So how would that work?

Morten: No, no, the, the, the, what I'm doing is that I'm, I am transitioning as we speak to, to Reminders, Apple Reminders. Just to try out something fresh. I've been an OmniFocus— yes, I know, I've been an OmniFocus guy for like forever, since version 0.9 or something. And of course, that is a transition for me. But they also have templates. If I'm not mistaken, I will be able to replicate a lot of the things that I do. I can make a list template and then just duplicate that template. The only thing that I will not have using that is my trusted and beloved part of OmniFocus where I can run a script. You know, AppleScripts are not part of OmniFocus, but OmniFocus works good with them. And there are some people, or one individual in particular, who created an OmniFocus script, an AppleScript, where you can populate templates So you can get, you get questions. So you can ask, you fire off the AppleScript and they will ask, what's the client's name? What's the dates for the seminar? Who's your contact person, etc.? And then it will then populate that. And I will miss that feature when I go. But I'm sure I will survive. But, and I'm not going to be going, you know, in length of this. I'm sure that we will have an episode of my, maybe my my experiences of this. But so far, I'm loving the tight integration with the whole ecosystem of Mac and iPhone and all the apps. So, for instance, when I'm on a call, I can ask it, remind me of this. And I've— and then I can then rewrite that. Is that Remind me to call Lars back, and then I will just have the calls, you know, easy. Just, I don't even have to remember your number. I just tap you and then voilà. So tight integration, love it. But, and I don't keep my normal checklist there either in Reminders. I use Apple Notes for that because specifically because I can then reuse checklists if I want, because then when you use a reminder and you tick it off, it disappears. You can of course show completed ones, but then you have to untick them. And then for me, this, it's a visual thing that see how far, you know, I can get, I can get a glance of a note that, sorry, notes, note with a checklist inside and see how far I am just by giving a glance how many items are left. And, and, and, and I'm going to, you know, continue using that. And before I used a lot of my checklist was used, I use in Evernote, but I've stopped using that now. But yes. Where do you keep your checklists?

Lars: I have the, you know, packing lists. They still reside over in OneNote. So things like that for the ongoing ones for seminars and things like that, they are right now in Todoist. So that's where I'm keeping them. But that's one of the things that's actually a next action in my system right now is to revisit this because I want to look into how can we utilize checklists when multiple people are involved. So that's one of the things that I'm investigating and playing with now. How have you used that? Because transitioning, it's so nice to be just one person. I just, I failed to have, yeah, I failed to have truly appreciated that during the last 7 years because it there's really a lot of complexity that arises. And, you know, if we look at our, um, the seminar planning checklist, for example, um, if there were multiple people involved, um, you know, it might be, um, one just admin making sure that everything is moving forward. There might be sales involved and PR, and there might be, you know, finance involved. The trainer is obviously involved, logistics regarding packing things. Um, you know, we're not that many people, um, so it's not that complicated, but nevertheless, there's, you know, just going from 1 to 2 to maybe 3 people, probably 3 or 4 people involved. It does really change things. So I'm going to look into now how can we structure that and perhaps utilize these shared checklists and perhaps a separate system for that. I don't know if you have used that a lot in your scaling up.

Morten: We have. And I was now reminded that you actually asked that question, how do you scale up? How do you do this at that Google chat in the Nordic region? And I answered the less sexy variant. I know, but it actually works. No, but what we are doing is that we are in the, when we do seminars, we have different checklists that reside in a Google Sheet, which is a Google spreadsheet that's online and shared with the people who need to get access to it. And we use that partly with automation. So that we use Zapier, so that when, for instance, when, you know, we have automation. So for instance, if I wanted to send all the participants an SMS, we have set up a system for that. So when you're one week before, I will get a thing in my system saying that you need to copy and paste the names and email addresses into the right sheet. And then the following morning at I think 9, they will get an SMS that that is 4 days or 5 days to their seminar. So, so all of that is partly organized by that. And we have, for instance, we have, um, just, just to give you an idea, we have just complicated things a little. It sometimes happens. Yeah, well, sometimes it happens. Let's say that we have a, a company asking us for a seminar.. So, and we said of course, and we signed a contract with them, and then we are getting ready for delivery, and then we will receive names, addresses, and email addresses, and phone numbers for the people. So then let's say that Espen is head lead on this client. He will then put this information, ask for this information, and get it into the sheet. But it is our lovely assistant and my wife who will pack and send the seminar materials to the people. So she needs to get access to what she needs to get access to. And when she has been— he puts that in the sheet, but she will then use that to create, you know, packing lists for individual packs. We send individual packs often to virtual clients.. And then when she's packed and then she's sent it, and then she has a tracking link to each of the individual packs so that the trainer who's going to deliver can easily see if Mr. X or Madam Y has received their seminar pack or not, or if he or she did not pick it up at the post office. So that's an easy way of doing it., but suddenly it changes. Let's say Espen can't make this and our trainer Kalle Ivar will make the same, then he can go in and he can see exactly where in the process this is. Has the packs been sent? Has the email been sent about information, you know, one week before? How, you know, there's tick boxes that we can tick and it is easy to follow this up. So it's not, maybe not being sexy.

Lars: But it actually works. Yeah, yeah. Now the only thing I, you know, we spoke about this, uh, Karsten, one of our trainers in Denmark, mentioned Basecamp. Um, I, I played around a bit with Monday and Asana, and, um, I think the, the, the place we'll start off with will be in Todoist for now to see if we can, can work it in there. Um, I like being able to assign it to people. Um, I appreciate the, the flexibility of Sheets. Obviously it's very nice, but if we can integrate more. We have the dates in there because I can imagine that, you know, that requires that you go in there to Sheets.

Morten: It's theoretically another system. Yeah, yeah, it is another system. But what I do that, and all of us, I suggest all, all do this, is that we put, um, you can go and say I want to have an email after somebody changed something in that sheet. And it's not so many changes, it's like if you added clients, I will automatically get an email that some new clients is added to the sheet, and I will then go and look and see if do we need to pack and I've done something here. And it's, it's a way of informing each other about changes. And you can, you can then either see the changes, just the changes. So I can say, oh, Khalid updated some phone numbers or he did something. And then, yeah. And, and we can also use this for input to, to.

Lars: Our CRM system automatically. Yeah. Yeah. No. And it may, it may end up that we will just copy and take the same approach that you did. I don't know yet. I need to see that. I need to update the list first. That's my next action. Then I'll know more about how we.

Morten: Can best handle it. Okay. So that's checklist. We both swear by it and couldn't live without it because we want to have a clear head and it helps you not trying to remember every step of every complex process that you might have. But one of the things that I want to confess is that I have Sometimes I enter into a light panic mode. I know you're not supposed to have those when you're here, but hey, I'm human. So I know I'm making— I'm joking, of course, because we are human and we do have things that we need to just be aware of and understand that, you know, even with GTD, you are not becoming superhuman, but you are getting at least me being super aware if something has my attention. For instance, when I work my— when I understand, I mean, you know, getting things out of your head when it is something more or less concrete is easy. But to get an idea out of your head or some— because your brain is a planning machine. It plans all the time. It cannot stop planning. And so if you have an idea of something that needs to get done, but you don't know how to do it yet, it's very easy to procrastinate or just panic. That is my panic mode. When I don't know what to do and I have to do something about it, how do I handle that? Well, mind maps. But I always do them too late. This is, that's why it becomes panic mode. I should just say this is mind mapping mode. Let me get into that, but I have to panic a little before I get there, I think. That's the trigger. So, but the, my mind maps often comes when I have more or less complex ideas about something that needs to get done and I can't see it clearly in my brain and I enter that panic mode. And mind maps helps me a lot to get out of that because it's.

Lars: A.

Morten: Way to show dependencies is a way to flush out ideas and show, well, this is over here and what is connected to.

Lars: Something here.

Morten: And, and, um, and it helps a lot. I'm— I know you use them as well, but what is your— do you wait until you have Panic Modelers or do you.

Lars: Go straight for— what you're.

Morten: Referring to, we have a very good Norwegian expression for that, you gavant. If you don't know what that is, look it up.

Lars: Yeah. Good, good luck spelling that. I think for most non-Norwegian speakers. No, I think when, when, you know, looking back at the last, I think 3 or 4 months, what really helped me was, was certainly that, that, that brainstorming mode, but I had to go to, to Gantt charts. I had to, subscribe to OmniPlan and start moving things around and getting that big picture to see how they were all interconnected. That's how you roll, Dema. That's how I roll. No, so I had a look at that and tried to plan a bit. Looking, you know, thinking back on that list, it really was helpful. It really was, you know, really, really just had to do that to clear my mind. I think I'm a time optimist, as we've spoken about before. So when I looked at the timelines, I think last week as of this recording, they were a bit off. They needed to be updated a bit. But yeah, just getting that out and having sort of the— so first we're going to do this, and then we're going to do this, and then we're going to do this, and we have this deadline that we want to get things ready for. So just having that kind of perspective. Rearranging your mind map basically to have these interdependencies and how it.

Morten: Would all connect. But when you have your mind map or Gantt chart flushed up, how do you operationalize?

Lars: How do you say that? Operationalize, yeah. No, so what I would do was to have Most of what would be on that, that list would be projects. So whatever would be active, so we would be in the time frame where that deliverable was, was being worked on, and that would be an active project either on, on my list or, you know, most of the cases what was on the, the Gantt chart was all of the work that followed with the new, new franchise, the partnership with, with Crucial Learning. So there was a lot of activities relating to publishing and translating the new website, setting everything up. That took a lot of time. The next big, big task was translating the Getting Things Done Level 1 seminar. So those were broken into smaller pieces and fleshed out in the OmniPlan. So I would revisit that on a weekly basis as part of my weekly review to check that vitallearninglongterm.oplx or whatever the file name was. I'll check in on that and see how we were, how we were doing.

Morten: That was how I used it. Understood. And how did that integrate somehow with Todoist, or did you just use that.

Lars: As a separate tool? No, separate tool. Separate tool. And I, you know, it's funny to.

Morten: You know, the, just all the tools talk. You know that OmniPlan is part of the OmniFocus group.

Lars: Yes, it does. It does sound that way. No, and it is, it is actually. But I'm guessing you found this as well. There are requirements that we have the tools that we need. And just like, you know, when we talk about inboxes, we need the right number of inboxes, not too few, not too many, finding the right number. And I think that goes for tools as well. And it was nice for me to actually pull up the separate overview and have that in a separate tool. That was just fine for me. Did not need to integrate. I was fine with just having to manually do that because I just want to see that big picture overview. So I'm playing more and more around with that also now with the increased complexity of the business. Right now, if I look to my right, I have my whiteboard and on that whiteboard I have all of the seminars and key goals for the year that I have written out on that, that we know of in the first 6 months and then goals for 2023. I could write them on a piece of paper on my desk. I could write them in OneNote. I could write them wherever I wanted. But, you know, that— I don't know if there's a feeling relating to this, or there's just, you know, understanding that having the right tool to do it and having it in separate places, that seems to, you know, in some cases work better for me.

Morten: I don't know if that makes sense. It does. It makes a lot of sense. And I've been thinking a lot about obscurity and that we have obscure tools that we use. And most of these obscure tools, and with obscure I mean more hidden, more not so evident, and we have a lot of them in our computers and on our phones. And I know I am not alone saying that sometimes people, myself included, forget that you have tools somewhere in your computer and then that you are more or less compelled to— well, first you have to remember it, and then you have to compel yourself to put it on a list, for instance, to check this tool to see if there's something there. But I, you know, in the olden days, back in the day where we had a lot of paper, I remember those days, and those days were, you know, They had their challenges as well, but paper was very evident. So if you got a letter or you got a note from someone that was on a piece of paper, that note in itself was a system. If your system then becomes a pile, it becomes a dysfunctional system. But if you compose that pile into lists and then put the lists somewhere where you can see them, suddenly there's a system again.. And just to have it visually somewhere. One of the things that I have as a system, as a list, is my trusted— this, I don't know if for those of you who are on camera or can see it in YouTube, I have— it's a life list. It's a memento mori calendar reminding me of that my life is not infinite. I have to spend my life wisely and enjoy it while I have it. And that is a very powerful visual reminder. And I'm sure that on a totally different level, you know, we talk about maps, you know, higher horizons. This is my higher horizons map. I must remember to make use of my days wisely. But on a lower down level, you have to make sure that you are making progress on the most important things. And how do you remember what those are. Yeah, well, a whiteboard can work very well.

Lars: Yeah, so yeah, just getting that overview. And, you know, I've been playing— we, we had a sort of a mini review, as we do the half-year review between, between Christmas and New Year's, and I this year played around with the new app Freeform that came out on, on iOS. So yeah, played around with that, kind of inspired what you've been talking about with the vision boards and the cutouts and We made nice drawings and put in some pictures and wrote out some goals for the year, both for us, each of us individually, both Syl and me, also joint ones, and also some for the boys. We actually— they pitched in now. So the big one wants to score 3 goals in one football game. So that's on the goal list for the year. The youngest one, what do you call it when you throw a rock on water and it sort of skips? Goals. I don't know what it's called in English, you know, but he's aiming for at least to go higher than 3.

Morten: That's his goal for the year. Oh yeah, yeah, I like that one. Yeah, I remember back when my son was a lot younger, we used vision boards for him because we wanted to When we went for vacations or holidays, we decided we will do that together. We will find what do we want to do, what is our desired outcomes, how does wild success look for us. When we do, for those of you who are familiar with GTD, we use the natural planning model, of course. Why do we, what's the purpose of this vacation? And you should, if you've not done that before with your spouse, Maybe you should, you know, what's the purpose? Some people actually want to stay the whole week on a beach. I don't know how they can make that. I'm sorry. I'm of course remembering how that was because my ex-wife, she wanted just to stay on the beach for the whole week and I would be bored out of my brain if I did that. I have to do something. So that was not my purpose, but we identified 3 different purposes on the 2 different people in the family. My son, who was then maybe 6 or something, had a totally different idea. I don't know how come, but we had good vacations that we did. But to use the horizons of focus, how do you visualize that? I remember back in the One of the things that I have, let me backtrack or just rewind a little because when I started Productive Nordica, virtual learning, back in the day, I made a Horizon of Focus document and I presented that to all the people who wanted to be part of this company, this company structure. And you read that as well back in the day when we got in touch, Loris. And that document is a document telling us why are we here, what's the purpose of this company, what's our values, and what's our vision. And at the little lower level, we get to areas of responsibility. And just to map that out in a company is very important. I suggest that you— I'm sure you have it on your to-do list as well, or at least somewhere in a mind map that you need to clarify the areas of responsibility between all the people that now you're not alone anymore. Who's, who does what, and take a good discussion and get that mapped out. That was something that I had on my wall, you know, on this side of my, my, my desk, so I can very easily just glance over there and have a look at, okay, yeah, this is not my area of responsibility anymore. No, it's not. So you have to let Esben, take this and don't follow your gut reaction because that is one of the problems with growing, scaling up is that you have to be good at letting people do their job and do whatever small or big mistakes they have to do to get into the job. And I just— I didn't recognize that.

Lars: Yes.

Morten: But thank God for the natural planning model where you can delegate very easily. You can use it to identify the purpose of anything. And then, what frames do we have there? What's our outer goal? Sorry, what's the standards we need to adhere to? What does wild success look like? And then when that's established, it's delegatable.

Lars: I call it delegatable, this, whatever it is. That's been one of the hardest things for me, I think, in this process, because, and I think, I guess it comes back to having things under control that, you know, when you do everything yourself, you know, the standards that you adhere to and you know how you want things done. And then when you hand that out to someone else, it really is, it sounds silly, but it really is a challenge to get used to them. I can imagine it must have been for you as well, working with the different countries. And I do things differently in Denmark. Martin does things differently Sweden, you can Finland, et cetera. So it really must have been an interesting process. At least it has been for me to go through that and really just learn to let go of that control. I think that's probably the best way to overall describe it. Because if I look back at the— if we zoom out and look at the horizons of focus, purpose stays the same, really not much changed over the year. We want to help people in Nordics live their best lives by giving them the tools to the we know can change lives. That didn't really change. The increase in trainers really just in quotes was a step towards the vision that we have always had for the Nordics. But then with the new trainers suddenly here and now, I think one of the areas that changed most was the goals that I want to play around with a bit more now, actually during today. And then You know, how many, how many trainers do we want to have at the end of next year? And that's one of the things that I'm looking into. And then, but like you said, the areas of focus is really one where it changed a lot. What I did was when my wife joined, I brought up my areas of focus. I made a copy and I just created a new main node in MindNode that I used, that I think you suggested originally to me and just started dragging things over to her. And it was just a, you know, a nice way to visualize it, walk through it, say, okay, let's try this. We tried some things that didn't work. We found some things that did work, and we're going to change it again, I think, next month and to see what works, what can we, you know, how do we best distribute the different things. Something still makes more sense than I do. Other things that are more easily able to hand out or would make more sense to hand over. And that's been really, really helpful. Helpful. Do you, is it your experience that you, so you align this obviously with the other people involved. Do you then, do they just live with the version that you made or would you ask them to go into more.

Morten: Detail on their own?

Lars: From the natural planning model? No, from areas of focus. I'm thinking, so let's say you have a, I had a mind map that was just me. Areas of focus relating to the business. I made a new node, dragged some things over. That was for my wife to take over. Did you then ask the other person to elaborate more on their own, or was it sufficient with the one that.

Morten: You just made together? Well, depending on, of course, what it is, if it is an area of focus, the person one does not have in-depth knowledge about, then you have to have some handholding until, you know, and we have different levels. For instance, I have my beautiful wife slash assistant who helps us do some admin work. I had to, when we have complex workflows where she had to go into different systems and she had to pick up information, she is For instance, every time we drop an episode of our podcast, she goes into the same Wednesday, she goes into YouTube to get the link to do the video. And she goes into the podcast episode spreadsheet for picking up the, what you call it, show notes. You know, show notes, and then going into SoundCloud to get the URL. And then she creates a post on our virtual learning site. And then she pastes all of this inside and creates a beautiful post for that episode. And that takes maybe 10 minutes to make or maybe 15 minutes. But when you don't have technical knowledge on how to do this, that was a little handholding. And we created workflows for her, where I created a workflow with screen dumps in just a Google Doc and then printed that. And then she made her own notes on top of this, and that becomes her go-to when she had to do this.

Lars: Because you've, you know, we made the same kind of process descriptions on how to do what and handovers between one.

Morten: Person to the next. Like a checklist. Exactly. It's like a checklist moving between tools. So, and having it do the workflow slash Checklist is important when you want to hand something complex over to someone. But at the same time, when you have, for instance, what, what Espen gets is a lot of different, you know, he has— Espen, our managing director, he is of course managing director, and, and I'm more of an advisor for him. But in the beginning, I have to tell him, you know, well, I suggest that you do this And I suggest that you do that, but it's up to you what you need to do. So now I'm more in an advisor role. So maybe talk about it. I don't, we have an expression in my Turkish, Norwegian, French family called, I don't put my nase, which means I don't put my nose into something or I don't put my, is that an expression at all in English?

Lars: Swedish?

Morten: I don't know. Let us know. Send us an email if you know this is what it is. I think you understand what it is. I don't want to poke into something that's not my, you know, not my business to put my, you know, to poke into. And the reason I'm being very adamant about this and very being I hope that, and I think Espen would agree with me if we got him here and asked him, has that worked? And I hope he feels it has, because it is something I experienced earlier in my career, that I had a boss that did not let go of the reins when I became a managing director before. And that experience, I decided, if I ever get an MD in my, or a CEO, in one of my companies, I would not do that. I will be the advisor that might poke my finger at something when I see something is about to go wrong, saying, have you seen this? This might be something you should focus on. Or later on, just be the advisor. Because what kills motivation is not having the responsibility of your work. And I think that when you hire people to help you to do something, or just to fill a function in the company, let them do their job. Give them desired outcomes if you want to do something, give them something, and then let them do their own thing to get to that desired outcome. And if you need to let people into your brain, take them the natural planning model to take them on a tour in what you think is the most important thing that needs to happen here. And then, and, and I, you know, we've all been in a meeting discussing a problem where you don't use the natural planning model, and there's just as many ideas about what this project or this idea was about as there were people in the room. When you get back to this, the meeting is later, and, and the same topic is discussed, and you understand that the people are looking at problems with their lenses on. You know, I am in marketing, this is what this means to me. And I'm in, you know, I'm in the warehouse, this is what it means to me. And they, instead of focusing on what's the purpose, what's the standards we need to adhere to, and how does wild success look at. If you use the natural planning model, the first two steps, it makes so, it makes it so much easier to ensure that success happens later on. Yeah, exactly.

Lars: Does that make sense to you? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And then also the other thing that really struck me, and then, you know, reflecting on this, it's fun because I have coached so many people that have gone through this process and I know the theory behind it and what should happen. And then it's been fun to live through it. One thing being the work with the areas of focus. Another thing with communications, how that really has changed. You know, when you're just one person, you have the— well, you can talk to yourself, obviously, but it makes things a lot more simple. And now it's just really a new layer, a new lens, or a new filter on that lens that you really need to apply. And then also looking at the projects list, that really changed as well. For those of you who've been listening for a while, before the summer break, I think I really simplified the system. I was really fed up with all of the organizational structure that I had, and I wanted to go back to a more simple projects list. And now as we changed over the, the last 6 months, I have gone back and created new ones with delegated projects, both for admin and trainers, different projects that showed up in relation to the work that followed the new franchise. We have the summer camp planning, all that stuff. So different, different areas of focus still found their way back to my organization system and Overall, it's just been such a requirement to again say no. I think that might be my motto for the new year, is really be even better at saying no. That might be just necessary because that's part of the activity that I'm doing right now. So we're recording this between Christmas and New Year's, and one of the things that I need to do is sit down and look ahead and look at what, you know, the next 6 months looks like. And with the new setup, it requires me to have more time for trainers, them, weekly meetings, monthly meetings, ad hoc things, support for them, more sales work because there are more and more trainers delivering. These new offerings mean new courses that I will be starting to deliver in Crucial Conversations, for example, will take up a significant amount of my time, hopefully, as we, as we move forward in the next 6 months. So one thing that I have been working on now is to knowing that this comes up, be even more diligent about keeping my calendar more clear. And it's, as I say that out loud, I'm reminded that we had a meeting with David at one point. Like, we had a meeting, it must have been a year or two ago, where he said something to the effect of that you will get the coaching clients that you need yourself. So in some magic way, that just seems to happen. And I have just gone through this with a coaching client. She's a really, really cool HR manager at a company in Denmark. Really, really cool. One of the things we've been playing around with a lot is, is, is creating more space in their calendar, and that's exactly what I have been, been trying to do. So if you go in into our shared calendars now, you will start to see that I have blocked out the time for daily processing of new inputs, processing inboxes. I have a note on a daily basis to keep at least 3 hours of space in my calendar each day. So let's see how, how that goes. And, and I've even gone so far as to create— yes, thank you. Gone so far as to try to create a day without meetings. So let's see how that goes. We might record an episode in a few months saying that did not work, but at least for now, I'm trying to create that space because I know I need it. I've seen how the last 6 months played out. And if I want to impact as many lives as we did in 2022, do that again in 2023, I need more space. Because we need to redistribute a bit of the work, utilize more trainers. There'll be more admin work, there'll be more sales work. I need to create time for this. And right now I have so many seminars planned myself with open seminars and other things that I'm, you know, heading to Greenland for 10 days and working there. I need more space. So that's part of the work that I've done. I don't know if, you know, it's been a while since you did that, but I don't know if you can.

Morten: Remember or recognize that. Yes, yes, I do. And then one of the things that— and I have many things to say about this subject, but to be brief, one of the things I always tell my coaching clients and I tell myself is that you do not reflect enough. And the time to take— just to take time out to do reflection is something that we should do more of. We should be better at reflection. We should, me too. And it's always on top of my, you know, do I think enough? Do I take time? Am I just running and doing or do I need to, and then am I running in the right direction? Am I doing the right things? And then take a step back and defining, am I on the right track here or not? Not. So reflection is something I would highly recommend people have in your calendar to just let daydreaming and go for a walk and then just let your brain just work. Make sure you have a capture tool with you. So if some idea comes up and one of the things I want to come, just come back to something that you talked about, areas of responsibility. Is one of the things I would, I want to stress is we didn't do that. To be able to scale, you must identify what are your skill set that you, what are the things that I do well or as well as I can, or maybe I even do them really well, and how can I do more on on that, especially if there's some revenue-generating thing that you do. That's very important when you scale up, at least a business, and make sure that everything else is handled by someone else. One of the first things I did, and I know you've partially done the same, Lars, during the years, is that I outsource accounting. That is not my— I don't have my strength in doing accounting, so I have to have some some gifted person doing that for me. And just to identify the things where you shine and where you don't. Especially where I try to identify where I had friction.

Lars: So have you done some of the same ideas? Yeah, partly. Just the bookkeeping part is just sort of a, that's a zombie thing for me. And it's nice for me to see where things are moving. So that's actually an enjoyable activity for me. Yeah, just sit there. Oh, that one. Yeah, that's related. That's travel activities. Yeah, that's the kind paid. And you know, that kind of thing that actually is— I actually like that. But I'm the kind of person you, you know, you can give me an Excel sheet with a lot of data in there and ask me to play around with it and play, you know, create pivot tables and create, you know, bar charts. And, you know, there's something that's how I roll. Exactly. That's, that's just me. Now, I think that that's one aspect that's really good to keep in mind. I remember you mentioned that years ago, and it's actually on my, I think, monthly or quarterly checklist to just reflect on that, whether there's anything we can, can now outsource. And the other one was really to take a step back and look at, you know, how can we, you know, impact the most lives? Because that's what, that's what we're trying to do. And, you know, I can run around and deliver and deliver and deliver. Deliver, but could we reach even more people if I ran around a bit less delivering and spend more time reaching out to people and working more with clients and, and setting up more seminars for other trainers to deliver? So that's part of the activity now for me to sit down and reflect on how do I think I can most effectively use my time to achieve our purpose or work towards our purpose.

Morten: That's really what it comes back to for me. Yes, and then, you know, all companies and all organizations go through different phases and stay in that phase longer or shorter. One of the things that I've found, you know, when you found a company or you start a company, you do everything, and then after a while you understand I can't do everything because then I don't make enough money, so I have to outsource something so I can do more of the revenue-generating things. And then maybe you get an accounting officer or some accounting professional to do that for you.

Lars: No, don't do that. Just have fun with it.

Morten: Go on. It's fun. Thank you. Okay. I mean, do not think the same things are fun, Lars. I'm sorry. But, um, okay, but, um, and outsource, uh, what you, you can that is not revenue generating. But at some point you have to, um, maybe— and I did that when I wanted to scale up with getting a managing director— is that I, I knew that would be something that I needed to do because several aspects of this, but I don't want to spend my time doing business administration. You love that with your spreadsheets and such. Maybe you should just continue doing that. I don't know. But I'm sure that my time is more well spent if I can communicate with people, if I can write articles for the newspaper, if I can engage in public debate, if I can, you know, be visible in social media and marketing and do the things and change the lives I need to change, you know, that's in my, you know, impact a life or lives. And just identify what do you think is fun to do, what you like. That is, I think, is the more you do of what you like, the more motivated you get. I don't know. I understand that you are kind of a spreadsheet guy, but have you reflected anything on what you can, you know.

Lars: What can you let go of? Yeah, I think that the key thing for me is there is a balance here in what I think is fun to do and do a lot of that and what is most valuable to again, achieving our purpose or working towards our purpose. So finding that balance in, you know, we really have to get this done. If we did, if I did more of this, then we would be impacting even more lives, for example. Then finding the balance between the two and seeing, yeah, if we can outsource some of the things and we can move those things around. I'll see if I can get someone else to do marketing and then I can play around more with my spreadsheets. But it's just, yeah, it's so interesting to think about and reflect on.

Morten: See what works best and what needs to happen. Yeah. And just identifying what you enjoy and then find someone else that enjoys the things you don't enjoy and try and get them to fulfill their destiny on planet Earth and help them do a good.

Lars: Job.

Morten: Because I found that, and I might be totally wrong here, but a lot of the people that we work with that, you know, in the Nordic region, we are partners in Nordic region, we are really, you know, people are really nice people. I mean, people who want the best for you, who love people, want to help people, people with a very small ego, most of them. I'm very, very, I don't think I can maybe count on less than Well, half a hand how many people I met in the GTD world who are selfish and self— what's the word for that? When you are— you need to be someone, you need to tell people you are someone if they don't know you. This is, I don't know. Is that even a word for this anywhere? But the opposite of lacking an ego, what's that? Having a lot of ego. But I mean that with a lot of ego, it means that you have the need to tell people who you are and what you do, and you have to pump your self-esteem up. And I think that is more or less non-existing among the, at least the people I know in the DGD world. And that's why I'm calling the DGDers are the nicest people, because They don't have an ego. They don't have to tell you how good their system is or how successful they are. We do have some people in the world who need to show off their success, but those are the outliers, I think. I agree. Absolutely. And just give people the freedom to work with what they want to work with.

Lars: Sorry, I was on a tangent here. No, that's good. That's good. No, and I think, you know, as I reflect back on the whole conversation that we had now, first of all, could we fill an episode with this? I think we, I think we managed to fill an episode with this. And also it's just so nice to, to talk through it. I think that's, you know, part of the podcast. You know, as we record these episodes, part of the value of course is to help more people, but it's also a nice reflection opportunity for us. At least speaking just for myself, going through this now and walking through it with you and hearing your perspectives. I hope it was valuable for people out there as well, that this was.

Morten: Useful in their journey now or at a later stage. Yeah, me too. So hopefully you had some value listening to this, our rants and ideas. And I just want to, I guess people understand this, but we are not perfect people. That does not exist. We don't do perfect GTD because that does not exist. It's just a variety of Getting Things Done that works right now. It has to evolve. It needs to adapt. And you're, you know, the way you work with your Getting Things Done methodology practice needs to change. And there are different phases of life and different phases of companies. And hopefully we are giving you some ideas that you can use and I'm for sure not finishing learning my Getting Things Done because I learn every day and it's a continuous learning process and that will never be finished ever, I think. So, I agree. So, are we at the end? We are nearing to 1 hour. This may be one of the longest episodes we ever made. Thank you for continuing listening if you're still with us. This. Yeah.

Lars: Wake up. Yeah. No, I think we are. I think we covered everything I wanted to cover. And, um, just walking through, that's been an interesting journey. Wanted to share that. And again, hopefully.

Morten: Helpful to people out there.

Lars: Will you take us outdoors? Yes, absolutely. Um, we always do that. By wrapping up the episodes with a quick reminder for you to head on over to vitallearning.eu, or you can head on even over to vitallearning.no or.dk now. Have a look around, learn more about them, the new company, the new offerings. Different countries feature in the Nordic countries. You'll find them if you go to vitallearning.eu, and on each of those sites, have a, have a look around, see what we offer. If you're outside the Nordics, cruciallearning.com is the place to go to find your local partners. Also a quick reminder, summer camp. The summer camp is in about 6 months, I think 5 months when we release this episode. So June 17th to 18th, head on over to gtdsommercamp.com. We have opened the registration. You can now work with the sign-up form as well. We already have sign-ups now from new GTDers or newcomers that have not attended before. More people who have listened to this podcast. So you'll, you'll be with, you know, like Morten said, friendly GTDers. And we also have some experts returning as well. So no doubt that it will be.

Morten: An amazing event once again. And it's filling up fast. I see the registrations come in and, you know, it's been a few. So don't be late.

Lars: Yeah, be early this year. Exactly. So, and that is actually a fair point where the price right now is the early pricing. So, so be sure to sign up if you think you're going. And lastly, as always, we really hope that you find these episodes valuable, as we mentioned before. And if it has been helpful, we always appreciate any ratings you can give us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen, Audible, I think, as well. It really helps the discoverability of the podcast. Morten signed us up for some, some chart overviews, and it's fun to see how we enter the different charts in different areas of the world.

Morten: So thanks, thanks for those, those stars and ratings. Indeed, indeed. And I just want to add a little to the GTD Summer Camp. We have people coming from all over the world. We have Estonia, help me now, the US, Germany, Netherlands.

Lars: Yeah. Europe, but also the far-off Lithuania, I think.

Morten: Yeah, Poland, I think. Yeah. So, so for those of you who are interested in getting things done, just want to hang out with us and other DGDers for a weekend, and it is affordable. Um, how much was it? 2,200 Danish kroner or something like this, I think. Yeah, which is, which is a lot in Norwegian money, but in how many euros is that? 100, 200 euros? €190, something like this. It's very affordable and it is for 2 days and everything is included with sleeping arrangement. And you look into it and see if you want to come with us. And it's a lot of fun. And the trainers who are there are there for our own cost. The companies that we work for pay for the enrollment. We pay the same as you and we work for free. So if you want to hang out with us and enjoy and around with your getting things done or get better at your getting things done practice, please come. Hope to see you there. So how was that for an endorsement? Yes. Okay. Sounds good. Okay. So, so until next time, people, stay safe and stay productive. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.