50. GTD and Vacations

Transcript

Automatically transcribed and lightly edited. Timestamps omitted for readability.

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

Lars: Hi Morten, good to be back with you once again after the vacation to record another episode. So happy to, happy to be here once again. If you have not listened to our podcast before, our goal with this podcast is to support you in learning GTD or becoming an even better GTDer so you can experience the benefits of GTD, becoming more productive, get a better overview of all your commitments, and be better at staying present with whatever you're engaged in. And as always, we hope that you find these episodes valuable regardless of how experienced you are with GTD. And if you'd like a refresher or learn more about the basics of GTD, The 5 steps, we recommend you go back and listen to episodes 1 through 6 of the podcast.

Morten: Yes, indeed. And today's episode, we have dubbed GTD and Vacations, and we are going to cover vacation, during vacation, and after vacation, getting back on your game after vacation. And in the pre-show, we talked a little bit. A little bit about, you know, you are doing quite a lot GTD during your vacation while I am not doing a lot. And I don't know if this is— and that goes to show that GTD, you can adapt to your lifestyle and, and the way that vacations happens. So if I'm going to start this quickly and say that when I I don't do a lot of GTD during a vacation. That is, I do capture, you know, if I get an idea, I capture it either in my Capture Wallet or in my OmniFocus list. And even if I'm really just dumb and lazy, I just want to be reminded of something when I leave somewhere, I will use the Siri reminders that remind me of doing X when I leave here. And that's, that is always helpful. And I put things in the calendar that I can't just not forget. So, but that's me. How do you capture during, you even do a mind dump, mind sweep?

Lars: Well, yeah. So I do that just like you said. And I think it's, the reason this came up really, the topic was that I was curious to hear more about how you use GTD during your vacation. And I think we probably do more of the same things than it sounds like, but just since Since I thought about the topic, I just ran through and did a quick mind sweep of the items that I wanted to mention that I did during the vacation. And a few came up like you said. First of all, yeah, of course, writing things down when they showed up. I use the Capture Wallet as well. I have my inbox on my iPhone. I will speak to Siri sometimes and I'm a big fan of the Memos app in my watch. So I'll use that because sometimes I'll just be carrying my watch and it has the data connection and I can just speak into that and everything is synced and works great. So, so really a big, big fan of that. And especially for the more complex ideas where I would struggle to write down all the details and cool aspects of the idea that I just came up with. When those kinds of things show up, the Memos app is just a great companion to have to capture these kinds of things. And then I emptied my emails for you know, did the triage thing where, you know, read the email, can I delete it? Can I archive it? Just get rid of those emails. If something that I need to deal with now, then deal with it. Very, very few, I think 3 emails during the vacation. So very few for me that I had to deal with during my vacation. And most of them ended up in the action after the holidays folder that I created for this purpose. So they were there waiting for me when I got back and I could start chewing my way through those. Other than that, I think when we went traveling, we used our packing list of stuff that we wanted to bring. We did a double vacation. So we came home from one and left the day after for the next one. So we actually packed for both of them in one go. So that was a challenge. And again, good to have the packing lists ready for that. One was to go to a nice warm country. The other one was go to Norway, which can also be warm, but less warm in this case. So we had to pack some some different things for each of those. So good to have those packing lists and get them updated. Our boys are 3 and 6 now, and it's fun to see how much these packing lists evolve over time, where the ones for us are pretty stable, but the ones for the little ones, they really change over time. So they needed some updating for sure. Yeah, go ahead.

Morten: No, I'm listening to you.

Lars: And then we have, of course, the calendars to manage all this stuff. I'm sure you have of course, had those things in your calendar as well with your planes and all those things. In the beginning of the holidays, we were a bit at our summer house. There was some stuff to do. So obviously we used the, or I used the list there to pick what made sense to work on. And then in the pre-show as well, we talked a bit about weekly reviews during the holidays. How do you do that? And none of us actually did real weekly reviews. No, exactly. That, that, that, you know, I was, you know, when we start off GTD, it's great to have that weekly review and really underline weekly and get into that habit. But then I think the way I see it, as time progresses, you really get a feeling of what, when do I need a weekly review and what's the, what's the feeling afterwards. And then you sort of figure out when you need to do them rather than it has to be on a set date and time. It can really be when you need them. And especially during the vacations, you see, I don't need them. The only thing for me was that I needed to get through my inbox, the stuff that I had written down. It could not sit there for 3 weeks for me. I might not remember what it was. So, I had to walk through those and up those. I'm guessing you did the same?

Morten: Yeah, well, I did as you did the triage during the vacation. Every second day or so, I read email. And the only reason I actually read email is because sometimes the last 2, 3 summers I've had, while I was on vacation, I had, I have had quite a few interesting emails arriving. We have, you know, interviews. Journalists want to interview me for something, for being on the radio in Norway, and I'd go as the national national radio station here, and they wanted to interview me last year from when we were on vacation in Turkey, and that went well. But if I didn't read emails, didn't do triage, then that would be lost on me. So, but this is, you know, being giving something to the people on the national radio is good marketing. You can't just not make that. And so, so, um, so what I do is that I triage my email. It's the same, you know, the same way that you do. I have, you know, what can I delete, what doesn't have any value for me, what is what I call archivable, or where you— they might have a future value that I might want to look at this email again, and then archive it. Or, and then I have a folder called "To be answered after vacation," and I just drag email in there. And I do, for those of you who have some folders, I always use a full stop, a dot, what you call that, punctum, before the name. So it's because I'm sorting my labels or my folders alphabetically, so that goes on the top. So it's easy to drag it from the phone or the tablet I'm using. I use an iPad. And then whatever else that was not going to be answered after the vacation is something I must answer now, and that's as you said, 3, 4, or 5 emails during my vacation. And so that when I came back from vacation, I had the, you know, the job of getting back on my game. So, but I did not, as you said, I don't do, I didn't do a weekly review, not one. And the reason being is that I didn't need to. We talked about, you know, you mentioned this, and for those of you who are new to GTD, you don't have that routine in your, you know, in your daily life that you will actually do a weekly review weekly. So it's important to know that when you get, you know, older with GTD, your, your mastery, level of mastery, it goes up. You will go from I have to do this, it's kind of a chore, until it's become, you know, second nature, until I don't feel like I need one.

Lars: Right now.

Morten: Because it is that good feeling of overview and control enough that you can relax and be in the situation. If you don't, if you can't relax and be in the situation, you should do a weekly review. And I don't know if it's weekly, but you do a review in such depth that you will get things off your mind. So if you have something, I'm not sure about this, 'Oh, I don't feel in control. I don't know if I answer that email, or is this client going to be angry, or what's going to happen?' This all, everything that you have that you don't feel good with, you should use as triggers to pull you back into doing a weekly review. So yeah, I think, and I had.

Lars: Kind of the same reasoning when it comes back to, you know, staying on top of emails if something interesting shows up. But we have some plans right now, for example, with the GTD Summer Camp in Denmark, where I need to stay on top of whether there were more signups than we could, you know, if there was enough room still, do we need to shut down the forum, all that kind of stuff. We had a seminar planned, which is this week, as of this recording, needed to make sure that everything was set for that. So normally I try to really disconnect. I really like that as a principle, but this year that was not possible. And then, and just one reflection on going through that action after the vacation. I was reminded that this is probably how many people pre-GTD would work with emails. At least it rang a bell for me with running through those emails and trying to figure out which ones were the most important because I got back during the middle of the week. There were some emails that I had to handle before the other ones. So I had to scroll up and down to find the right ones and make sure I invited people that had to attend an introductory webinar today. And those emails were in there mixed with all the other ones that were also interesting, but not to look at right now. So it was, it was kind of a fun way to just experience what it can be when you when you don't have email under control and when you have to scroll up and down. So that was, I think, maybe a good reminder for me.

Morten: Can I just— I did something this year I haven't done before, which is, this is a sneaky trick. This is my ninja trick for surviving after vacation is that this year I put my vacation in the calendar a week longer than it actually was, which means I set expectations for anyone who sent me an email, get an email reply, I am back this date. But in the matter of fact is that I'm back one week before. And that gave me, you know, what I needed of time. And I then, of course, when I felt that everything was under control, all the emails was answered. I felt that, you know, I'm, I'm back on track. I'm on my game. I then just changed that. Notification went away and the calendar changed. So I'm like, but this is ninja tricks. So guys, use it wisely and, and don't tell anyone if you do it.

Lars: Yeah, and I like to start mine. I maybe, maybe I'll steal that one. What I like to do is at least to also start it day or two before you go on vacation. So those last-minute emails that they get a notification that you might not respond to them because otherwise they will be sitting there waiting. There's nothing more annoying than, okay, I set the out-of-office to start on Saturday because my last day is Friday. And then Friday at 4 and 5, you get tons of emails and all of those people will then be waiting weeks maybe for an answer and they don't know that you're gone. So start it a bit early and maybe extend it a bit afterwards. Well, that's a good tip.

Morten: And I don't know if we should go then after vacation now. Do you feel that we ever— Yeah.

Lars: The only thing I would add that I do as well is my half-year review that I mentioned also in last year's series of the podcast to just spend a bit of time. This year it turned out a bit different for me. This was just a couple of hours by myself just to think things through and see what showed up.. And it was just a nice exercise. I'll still have plans to do a day 2 of that sort of half-year review, more long-term planning with myself in 2 weeks, 11 days from now, to do one more round on this. So this was more of a huge minesweep, like you mentioned in the beginning, really just to sit down. And this time it was, I think, around 20 things that came out. So interesting, you know, that, that I captured during the holiday and some things came out. I wrote it down or spoke it into my watch, whatever. But I hadn't captured these things. So this was more of also, you know, day-to-day stuff. But it was also more things like, yeah, it really— I focused on becoming more grateful for a lot of things and found that this has really improved since the last time I did a review. So that was really nice to just capture and acknowledge, wow, that this is actually going better. This seems to be working. So Yeah, really cool. Happy to capture that one and just had a, you know, that good, nice feeling afterwards.

Morten: Yeah, the pat on the back.

Lars: Yeah, exactly. Sitting there by myself on the mountains of Norway and patting myself on the back.

Morten: That's what I did. Okay, so everybody should come to Norway, sitting on the mountains, do their half-year review. And we will make the Getting Things— sorry, GTD Nordic Travels.

Lars: Yes.

Morten: Go to Mecca. And find the purpose of your life. No, I'm joking.

Lars: That sounds like a plan. No, let's give it to after the holidays.

Morten: Yeah. Okay. So, I've jotted down a few things. And I've made some videos on my YouTube channel, @1minutmegget. That is Norwegian, 1 minute with GTD. I give people some tricks within a minute. And one of the first things I'd like to give to you too, our dear podcast listener, is give yourself the freedom to be stupid. After the vacation. Because I know a lot of people, myself included, are beating ourselves up because when you come home from vacation, you feel like your brain is a dull knife. It's been— you've not maintained sharpness, which is good. You need to unwind. You need to let your intellect go and enjoy the moment. And I think that— I don't know if this gets better or worse the older you get, but I think I've always had it. This when I come back from vacation, of course it depends on how long the vacation is and how disconnected I've been. But since I'm now the— I make a joke, I have the emptiest head in the Nordic region. So like when I go to vacation, I don't have anything on my mind and that kind of, if you don't, engage your intellect, it becomes a little dull. It's like a dull knife. And one thing that I've been focusing on is give myself the freedom to be in that, because I will be back on my game. Just give it a few days and my intellect will come back. And just giving myself this freedom. And then I don't know if— I think you have the same. I think you mentioned something that you are dull. Not a dull person, but your brain is like a dull knife after vacation.

Lars: I appreciate the compliment. Thank you.

Morten: You're most.

Lars: Welcome. No, no, I can certainly recognize that. And I think everyone can, you know, it takes time to get up and running again, get into the, you know, all the things that are going on. So, so yeah, certainly recognize that.

Morten: Yeah. So give yourself the freedom to not be sharp. And One of the things I've used is what I call smart breaks. And all the scientists do agree with this, what I'm going to tell you now, that to take short breaks as often as you need to. My suggestion would be like 5-10 minutes every hour, maybe 5 minutes every half an hour, just to, when you work concentrated, and then take a break where you walk out of the situation, move a little, If you can go outside, walk around the block, don't bring your mobile phone, don't check social media, don't do anything that engages your brain. Just be in the moment, smell the smells outside, feel the temperature. And I know that before, that is really a long time ago, a lot of people smoked cigarettes and smoking cigarettes forces you outside, you know, because you must have that nicotine fix. And myself included, I smoked too many years, many years ago. But I recognize that that just changed the environment. Go do something different and just maybe talk to someone. Go kiss your wife, your colleagues, maybe not kissing your colleagues, might not be a good idea.

Lars: Not an official recommendation.

Morten: No, but no. But doing something different, uncouple your brain from what you're doing and just be in the moment. And that is, that helps your brain archive what has happened. It helps you think better after. It's like a refresher. So I'm sure you do the same thing, Lars.

Lars: You do something different, get up. It's something that I actually am not good enough at. It's something that I say it's on my, actually on my weekly review checklist to remind myself to be I take these good breaks because I'm just not good enough at doing that. So that means that if I don't do that, I get very tired at the end of the day when I get home to my family. I'm not as fresh and awake as I want to be when I get home to them. So it's something that I'm working progress for me for sure.

Morten: Yeah. Are you using the get up feature from the Apple.

Lars: Watch? Yeah, that normally doesn't trigger it for me. It just, I will tend to move around, go get a cup of coffee or some fresh water or something. So that one doesn't trigger it for me.

Morten: Okay. So I just said that. Yeah, because for those of you who have an Apple Watch, it has a feature where you can, it will give you a notification every 10 minutes to the hour. Remind, get up and walk around a little for a minute. And that might not be at the minute, but it might be helpful if you want you know, build the habit. But I recognize that if I do that every hour, do something different for just a couple of minutes, just 4 or 5 minutes, go on the balcony, just smell, be there, just do something different, helps me get back on my game. So that's my number 2. And then talking about the email backlog, how do you process that? And I batch process it because I understand when you read, clarifying, organizing is heavy mental lifting. And if your brain is not up to par, you're stupid after vacation, maybe you should not try and force yourself to make decisions when your mental horsepower is not there. So I do them in batching. I set aside 45 minutes in the morning to do them from, you know, 8:15, because at 8:00 I start my day. I then, I do a clarifying organizing email for about 15 minutes just to see what's happened since the afternoon before, and then I will start and batch for 45 minutes or 40 minutes the email backlog. The answer after vacation folder. And that way I don't give myself, because if you send a lot of emails, respond to a lot of emails, it tends to come back to you. It's like email ping pong because somebody has a follow-up question or you want to move something along, and it's easy then to have a lot of email coming back to you. So that's my trick. Do you do something similar, or how do you get your inbox to zero.

Lars: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so work my way through that. And last week, like I said, I had to do the emergency scan version to go in and pick up some, some specific emails, signups for a webinar that I'm delivering today. So I had to find those, for example. But yeah, otherwise, you know, set aside time to do that and really keep in mind that this is the heavy mental lifting. And that's also as we were, you know, preparing for this, this episode, one of the things that I wrote down was to, you know, give yourself some time for this, give yourself a lot of time, because like you said, you're you're not really up to speed yet. It takes time to walk through this, and this is really heavy lifting. So, so don't really force yourself to, to, to do everything at once. Just like you said, batch and take it in smaller, smaller pieces and get through it that way for sure. Otherwise, it really gets too, too, too heavy. And the other thing to add to that is also, I guess, related to what you said with keeping your calendar clear and stuff after the vacation. That's also a really good tip to— obviously a bit late now since we have passed the vacations, but, but really keep in mind Next one, to keep, you know, as much room in the day or days following your vacation as you possibly can to give yourself time to get up and running again, get through that email backlog, empty any other inboxes you might have, maybe do a mini weekly review just to make sure that you know all the things that are going on to reorient yourself on all of the commitments that you're engaged in.

Morten: And depending on how much changed the since before you left, you should, you know, the weekly review should be reflecting that. If you have, you know, a lot of things change or you need to make sure that you are doing the right things this autumn after you come back, you need to get back on the horse, get into control, maybe a thorough weekly review is on, you know, I had to do that, a thorough one. But now I feel okay, I know what I'm doing this fall. I have a I have my, what do you call it, my ducks in a row. I'm ready. So, and I think that that is just one thing. I'm sure that some of the listeners will go, wait, what? Not because we talk about this, but you mentioned the GTD summer camp and people go, wait, what? What is this? So, so I don't know. And this is more, I'm sure, and it's not like in Summer has an extended value in Denmark, I'm sure, because this happens in September, doesn't it?

Lars: That's true. Yeah. So September 11th and 12th, we are a group of people that are meeting up in Denmark to spend a day and a half together and just talk GCD, different aspects of GCD. And it'll be so much, so much fun. We have almost all the seats are booked now. We'll do a small version this year and maybe, maybe something bigger next year with all things going on. This year, then a smaller version seemed like the right way to go. And it's fun to see all the interest from so many different people. And we have, yeah, you're coming down, Morten. We have people coming from Estonia, from Sweden, and of course a lot of people from Denmark since we are doing it here in Denmark. So that'll be a lot of fun. And hopefully we can invite some more people next year and do an even cooler event.

Morten: It will be mainly in English, all the talks?

Lars: Yes, it will be in English. We talked a lot about this and we actually initially wanted to do it in Danish to make sure, because we were focused on the Danish community, but it's, we just, we reach so many more people and we get so much more interesting feedback. So we get so many more cool people to join if we do it in English. So we went all in on that. There will be some exercises, walk and talk kind of thing where you can still then pair up with someone from Denmark. So if you're only, if you're more comfortable speaking just Danish, then we'll fix it that way.

Morten: Yeah. And then you had to listen to me talk Danish.

Lars: That is also true. That would be— yeah, actually, I have something else in my calendar that day now that.

Morten: I remember. Okay. But since we now have decided for English, that's good. But I'm mentioning this because I'm sure people will say, wait, well, that was interesting. What is AGTD Summer Camp? And it's just meeting for a day and a half in Denmark. And it's going to happen next year, I am sure. But then in summer or maybe in August.

Lars: That's what we're aiming for.

Morten: Yeah. And I have, I've been, when I heard about this idea, I got really excited very quickly because I, in my, I've been to many summer camps in other, you know, before. And the community, you hang out, you do things together. And it's really good to learn something new. You will also hang out with the coolest people in the world, the other DJs in the world. So I'm sure this might be good. And it's not very expensive. The cost is kept down.

Lars: We do this for free. Everyone does it on their own dime. So it's thanks to everyone too. Time and time. Yeah, exactly. And at the end of the second day, we will we'll have David also chiming in virtually. So that'll be really cool as well.

Morten: Cool. So that's a teaser for next year. So I'm sure we will mention it on this podcast. So keep subscribing, listen to the podcast. There will be more information to follow. And I'm sure this is going to grow and be really cool. I'm looking forward to it, to meet all the people. Me too. Yeah. So I think we are at the end. Does that make sense to you?

Lars: I think just one, one last note from my end, just as a reminder to everyone to, to, to keep emptying those inboxes, because we like to mention that you want to get to the bottom of those every, every 24 to 48 hours is a good, good thing to aim for, because otherwise you might not remember what it was about. One of the reasons for doing it that frequently. It doesn't always happen for me. And I had a nice example here. I'm holding a piece of paper in my hand that was here in my work inbox. It says to move something from Home to OneDrive when my new account has been created. I have no idea what that's about. I have absolutely no idea what, why I wrote that. So just wanted to share that with everyone, that it happens to all of us, and there's a reason why we want to get through those inboxes, because I have no idea what that is. Hopefully I'll remember at some point if it's important, but otherwise I'll hopefully be okay. But keep emptying those inboxes. That's a pro tip from.

Morten: Me. I can chime in and say, yes, that's very true. One of the things that just for people to understand that we are also humans, even though we work with GTD and, you know, people might find us, you know, structured and super productive or something, but we are humans. We forget things. And if you don't write it down and be really clear about what you wanted to do with something, and/or you use a little too long before you clarify and organize it, it can slip. It's happened to the best of us. So yes, we're all humans. So, well, now maybe we are ready to say goodbye.

Lars: Now we can take this out, Lars, please. We always wrap up these episodes by reminding you to head on over to gtdnordic.com and have a look around, because on that site you will find links to the country websites for each of the Nordic countries. And on each of those sites you can find articles about GTD GCD in the native language there. You can find links to the newsletters, groups on social media where natives from each of those countries discuss GCD, and of course you can find all of our offerings regarding speeches, coaching, and seminars, both the physical and the virtual ones. And lastly, we really hope that you find these episodes valuable. We love making them as always, and we really hope that you benefit from them. Thanks to those of you who send your feedback. We really really appreciate that. And if you do appreciate these episodes, we really appreciate when you share it with a friend or rate us on iTunes. Those 5-star ratings really help us get out to the, some more people that might, might need to learn about GTD.

Morten: Thank you, Lars, for this episode, and I thank you, the listener, for listening. And until next time, stay safe and stay productive.

Lars: Bye-bye. Bye everyone.