How To Write A Book Proposal

How To Write A Book Proposal Interview with David Allen

In this episode, we cover:

• Writing a book proposal
• Why he writes the book reviews first
• Marketing campaigns for evergreen books

For More of Creative Life Podcast By James Taylor

Artificial Intelligence Generated Transcript

Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.

James Taylor Hi, I'm James Taylor business creativity and innovation keynote speaker. And this is the Creative Life, a show dedicated to you the creative. If you're looking for motivation, inspiration and advice, while at home at work or on your daily commute, then this show is for you. Each episode brings you a successful creative, whether that's an author, musician, entrepreneur, perform a designer, or a thought leader. They'll share with you their journey, their successes, their failures, their creative process, and much much more. You'll find Show Notes for this episode as well as free training on creativity over at Jamestaylor.me. Enjoy this episode. Hi, it's James Taylor here. Today's episode was first aired as part of International Authors Summit. This inspiring virtual summit reveals the secrets of making marketing and monetizing a best selling book. If you would like to access the full video version as well as in depth sessions with over 40 Best Selling authors that I've got a very special offer for you just go to InternationalAuthorsSummit.com, where you'll be able to register for a free pass for the summit. Yeah, that's right. Over 40 New York Times and Amazon best selling authors, book editors, agents and publishers, sharing their insights, strategies and tactics on how to write and market your first or next best sellers. So just go to InternationalAuthorsSummit.com, but not before you listen to today's episode. Hey there, it's James Taylor, and I'm delighted to be joined by the wonderful David Allen. The work of David Allen has had a profound impact on the lives of many authors, entrepreneurs and creatives, including myself. David Allen is founder of the David Allen company and author of getting things done the art of stress free productivity, if you're new to getting things done, or GTD is as often called is a self management methodology that became a worldwide phenomenon and help countless individuals and organizations bring order to chaos. Indeed, time magazine called Getting Things Done the defining self help business book of its time, and the insights contained within it have enabled many to alleviate feelings of overwhelm, and bring greater focus, clarity and creativity to their life and work. It's my great pleasure to have David join us today. So welcome, David.

David Allen Delighted to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

James Taylor So show them what's going on in your world just now. What are you working on,

David Allen we just launched a new book, getting things done for teens, teenagers, staying focused in a distracting world. And that's doing all kinds of interviews and podcasts and things about that. So just helping get that launched. We're also in the process of working on getting things done workbook book, kind of in the genre of, you know, a lot of the Seven Habits workbook and things like that. So, really more focused on Okay, people want to really dig in. And, and here's a real practical how to is about how to get started in applying the methodology. So those are, those are two big projects going on. We're also Consistently refining our global training curriculum. My wife is doing a lot of the heavy lifting on that just graphics and support materials and trademarks on how kinds of things like that. So a lot of stuff going on.

James Taylor So when you when you started on the journey to writing, writing, getting things done, could you ever imagined that it would kind of you'd be one day sitting behind in front of a mountain of translations of your books and writing now for teens and writing for these other groups?

David Allen You know, I've sort of learned a healthy attitude A long time ago about stuff like that have high anticipation, but no expectation. So, you know, so I had a vision, like, wouldn't it be cool if this hit a nerve out there, but I had no idea and I was ready to kind of gird my loins to say, Hey, you know, it's a noisy world. I'm not sure anybody's gonna really kind of catch what this is. And I had a lot of very healthily skeptical people say, gee, David, I don't know if he can put you in a book. And I knew I could translate this methodology with You know, I've spent thousands of hours with some of the best and brightest on the planet, you know, implementing this stuff with them one on one, and certainly having hundreds of thousand people in seminars, you know. So I know that if I had a captive audiences that I could capture them, I wasn't sure that I could put that in a book, or that people could catch it. And then book so I really didn't know I mean, to me, it was a big question mark as to whether I was able to virtualize essentially this methodology and get it in a book. So

James Taylor that took us to the actual process. Then you met you mentioned when you initially kind of went out to the world with this German it's this idea about writing a book about the work that you'd been doing with with clients. How long was that process from you thinking okay, I am going to make this. I want to have a book coming out to the process of actually being in the stores and people being able to read it.

David Allen Well, it was unlike sort of someday maybe list for probably several years. I really pulled to trigger to make it happen from the time I decided, Okay, go on that and start to make it inactive. Make the project active. For years, pretty much. I started in 97 really, and I got on the bookshelves, the beginning of 2001.

James Taylor And that process I would definitely like fiction and nonfiction or fiction, often they'll have to have the whole book written. Did you work on it was creating a book proposal first and then going and speaking with with agents? So what was that process? Like?

David Allen Yeah, I was scratching my head, I had no idea. So I figured, well, I guess I better study how to how to you got to write and sell a book? And what do you do at the time, and I died? Sorry, I don't remember what the books were. But I think at the time, they were three or four books on the market about how to write a book proposal, or how to then write it and sell a book. So I certainly studied all of those. And I'm basically had to create my own version of some sort of a business plan. You know, like, Who's this more what's unique about it? What you know? You know, why would somebody buy this because obviously, if you're trying to get somebody to buy it, to sell it, they're gonna have to trust that they can sell it. And that was an agonizing, but a very fruitful process to go through is write a business plan for your own book. So I did that. I also wasn't sure whether I go right to an editor or publishers because I knew I knew a couple and, or get an agent. And, you know, I made the mistake of actually, you know, sort of contacting a couple of people who were editors are in the publishing business directly themselves. mistake, because I didn't know really how to frame it for them, you know, and so I had a very good friend who was he was in, he was head of adult books for Mifflin in Boston. And he was a client and a good friend. And he said, you know, David, if you're, if you're, if you don't have a name as an author, and your book might have potential, you know, sort of universal appeal or national appeal. He didn't say International, but if it wasn't like a niche, like the the, the retirement of green Eskimos, you know, I don't know, if, if you've got a really niche topic, you probably need to find the niche publisher that that, you know, we'll do that and you'd probably go direct to them. So that's what you would do but if it has more universal appeal, then he said get an agent because they're gonna know how to frame this and help you frame it appropriately. You know, and, and make the deal. And he said, By the way, I know a good one happened to be at NEC his next door neighbor, and she was great. And she still is my agent. Now, this was a thing 18 years later, so that was great. And then she, you know, worth every penny and they know that she gets for her 15% Believe me, and if she had been an ex editor in New York anyway, so she knew the world. She knew that world and she knew people that and she was able to prove you know, to do that but funny when I gave her my book proposal Because, you know, I wrote a sample chapter or two, whatever. She said, Well, Who wrote this? I said, Well, what do you mean? Who wrote this? He said, Well, most people in writing business books don't write them. They're ghost written. So she was quite surprised that I actually had that I'd written and I'm, I'm scratching my head cuz I thought you're supposed to write your own book. As naive as I was. So anyway, so she shopped it, we only got one deal, but it turned out to be a great deal. Yeah.

James Taylor For the book, and how different was that the book eventually hit the shelves compared to that initial proposal was it? Was it like pretty much there? Just it was just kind of tweaked around the edges? Or was it really a big difference in the in the final product?

David Allen Now? Yes, and no, there's kind of a there's kind of a both answers to that. Because, well, the methodology I knew, and I knew it backwards and forwards because I've been doing it for 35 years or 30 years by that point. And so I knew what it is that I wanted to communicate. What I didn't know was how to put it in a book form. So it took, it took a while, took the first year to just sort of get the deal and sort of craft the thing and set it up. And it took the second year to write the first draft. And the first draft didn't work. Because I wrote the first draft, like I delivered a seminar. And on a pretty linear format doesn't work. I want this, this just isn't quite the way it really ought to be. And I had sort of the dark night of the soul, oh my god, I spent all this time and this is not as good as it really ought to be because I was putting this as a bit of my life work, or at least my professional life work that I put into this book. And I literally just threw it away and wrote another draft.

James Taylor So was there ever a point in that process where you just actually said to yourself, I think I could do I'm gonna have to give give the you know, if it was in advance, give the advance back and just know you knew that you were certain you have a obviously good at training and working with clients and consulting and speaking but was there ever a point you said, Listen, maybe this Isn't it to me? I don't

David Allen know, I there was certainly a point where I thought, I don't know if I can do this. I don't think I ever thought I would give up. But I, you know, I guess one of the problems is, is that one of the first thing actually, maybe the first thing I wrote, when I sat down to start to craft, this whole idea was I wrote the reviews. And you know that because I'm a firm believer in sort of affirmation, thinking and visioning, thinking and knowing that, you know, if you set something up like that, internally, you know, you You're, you're gonna perform and perceive things differently. And that's the problem is that those reviews, it's not, and I and I even wrote who wrote the reviews, but not that they did, and they weren't exactly the reviews that showed up. But what that did was it raised the bar, and inside of me about the quality of the book, and that's why the first draft didn't work, because I wrote it again, like I do a seminar and that's not the way people really need to read a book. And there were three things that I really wanted to dress or that I wanted to deal with that about this methodology. First of all, I wanted people to just understand kind of what the methodology was itself. And then if people were interested in implementing it, I wanted to give them the How to kind of the specifics about how you actually go about this. And the third, and probably most important thing was I wanted to communicate the, the, And oh, by the way, the cool stuff that really happens when people actually implement this seemingly simple methodology, how transformative it can be, both for individuals and for organizations. And, you know, I could get all that out. If I had people for a two day seminar, I could kind of, you know, I could weave weave it all that stuff through but couldn't do it on a book and not just a linear format I In other words, I had my first draft, people would read it and they went, Oh, my God, David, you nailed me in the first paragraph. But it took four chapters for me to find out how to do it. And so well, that doesn't work. So again, it's kind of the dark night of the soul. One of my big epiphany was okay, David write in three parts. So the first part was a quick overview of the methodology. The second part was, by the way, if you want to implement this, here's the how to use third part was the old by the ways. And that really worked. But it took about a year to do it. So, you know, so I just threw away the first draft I just wrote in a whole nother draft took another year to do that. And, you know, we're at, you know, very cooperative editor and publisher. This was penguin Viking. Janet Goldstein, at the time was my editor. She was fabulous. A great coach. Fabulous on this very light touch with me. But just some of the great little tweaks about how to reach people through a book. Cuz people in a book, you know, you kind of have to it's sort of armchair stuff. somebody sitting in an armchair. You know, how do you reach them in a way that they're not sitting in a seminar. They're not, they're not they haven't hired you as a coach to sit with them at their desk.

James Taylor And it's a very different game. You can move on from that kind of guy. I know you do a lot of speaking keynote, speaking moving from that sage on the stage, the guide on the side and kind of walking them through that. One of the things that I love about the book is you mentioned it that the seven habits, you know, the great Stephen Covey book. And one thing I think your book shares with that is, it's, it's a perennial as a client as a classic. And this is I guess, this, I want to how you kind of resolve this because I'm wondering at certain points, you might have had some people kind of pushing you saying things like, Okay, what tool what, gadget what, you know, widget Should I buy in order to do this? And you felt you very much you left those things out in the book, there's obviously a community that can build around that. But was that was that quite a definite decision that you made? Thinking about? How can this book last for a long time and I think that's something a lot of writers can struggle with, especially in the kind of writing in the kind of business area two or three things ways

David Allen to answer that. First of all, we did want to try to make it as evergreen as public So that it wasn't outdated. So we went through the book, the first draft of the book anyway, several times to try to pull out all the business buzzwords and anything that was particularly time based. You know, it's So to your point about the technology I did mention in the first in the first edition now, you know, I wrote the new edition and Britain for 2015. You know, getting things done. And one of the things I did was take out a lot of the references in the new addition to technology I actually talked about in the first edition, Lotus Notes and Microsoft and palm pilots and so forth. And, you know, you're probably not old enough to remember a Palm Pilot. And, and so, you know, that ultimately was going to date it. Not only that, you know, once GTD kind of hit as a meme out there in the tech world, you know, at last count, there were over 300 apps that had been built around it now. They're coming out every week, because people read the book, or they get the idea of GTD, they said, well, all I need are lists. And so there's they're all just list managers. But they're, they're changing so rapidly, people say what's the best tool, I say whatever tool you'll use, you know, and it's it because it's actually tool agnostic, you do need a tool, because it's a lot about building the external brain and having holders for reminders, you know, of the of your commitments, you know, in multiple forms. So you do need some sort of external, you know, form and form and format. But any of them will do any kind of a list manager, whether that's low tech, you know, just file folders with data in them or mid tech, where you're just using a loosely planner, you know, pages that are loosely planner, or now high tech, you can use anything, any of the high tech apps that make that make lists, you can do and there's so I didn't want to get people too wrapped around the tool because people didn't get focused on the tool, not the methodology, if you don't get them. If you don't get the methodology, no tool will work.

James Taylor Yeah, if you get the methodology, you may get it to work, but Well, I think fascinating is there was very much I was speaking to Eric Reese recently about the lean startup and you He said, You know, he, how quickly a community started to kind of build up not necessarily by him putting out there. But I sense with looking at, like, if I look at GTD today, there's all these threads on these forums everywhere about how people are using it and talking about how they're applying the methodology. And I think that's great because that in and wait, you've got the core of the thing there. But you've got these communities, new people are kind of coming to all time new people, they're, oh, I've seen a new way that I can apply this, you know, with artificial intelligence nowadays. So you've got all those things starting to come into it as well.

David Allen Yeah, that's true. But again, most people who don't quite get the methodology, it's a lot more. It's a lot more subtle than the simplicity of the model may may indicate. And if you don't really get it, and you keep falling off the wagon, you think the new new is going to help you get back on and so where's the new new cool thing? that'll really get me make me get it to work? And wrong answer. Yeah, no, that's not that. That's That's the new new thing. Yeah, there is to some degree of cool tool helps, you know, because they'll give you more motivation to do it. I know when I first got a Palm Pilot in a way back in the mid 90s I thought wow, that was really cool just because it looks so cool on a dark bar, you know, just great to have a you know, and to learn the graffiti, it was really fun that in your pocket, you know, the form factor was great, you know, and it was kind of a new thing to have something that essentially that simple but that that was that was that functional, you know, in the in you know, as a digital tool. And so just having a cool tool can really help but any tool will work as long as as long as you're working. And then you as you start to kind of pivot to then marketing getting out there marketing and kind of selling the book. Obviously you have an interesting model because you a little bit like the covey thing as well.

James Taylor You have a whole training business behind that book as well. So I wonder when you first kind of went out to the book, what what did that marketing plan kind of look like who were the people that you knew you wanted to be the early adopters to it? And then how has that evolved over the years? Because GTD is a because it is a perennial. I'm guessing you're continually doing interviews like this, you're doing things all the time where you're, you're talking about it. So I'm wondering, what is a marketing plan look like for a classic? Well,

David Allen I can't say that I had a marketing plan as kind of follow my nose and you know, see who wants it and go there, you know, so, you know, and even back then the, you know, the publishing world was pretty much deer in the headlights about how to do this. And, you know, not not a whole lot of money was thrown after, they only threw money after good money. You know, if it only if the book worked, but to try to get it to work. Yeah, you know, the penguin wound up, you know, creating radio tour interviews and things like that. Not a lot. And they set up a few, you know, book, signings and so forth and some of the bigger, some of the bigger markets and bigger bookstores. But they're what really wasn't Much of a plan, the My plan is basically been, you know, pretty much take advantage of any invitation I get to talk about it. You know, so I haven't, you know, kind of time, I think I actually added up, I've averaged one podcast and interview a week for 17 years. So, you know, and they are they still keep coming. It's still, you know, talking to you right now. So they're still and of course with the new book for teens that just came out getting things done for teens, you know, that's, you know, so I'm on lots of interviews about that. So so but I just take take advantage of all of those. I you know, my mission is basically to get this to as many people on the planet as might want it. So why in turn any that down there couple I turned down because there's a sleaze factor, a little sleaze factor that seems obvious if you go, you know, they're either trying to make a whole lot of money off of it, trying to build off my brand, you know, and, you know, those kind of images Sort of filter a couple of those out but I probably turned out 515 years. Remember a point in the launch of the book when the book was kind of getting out there people start talking about you know, a kind of seminal point when you felt this is really getting traction now. So this is this is really moving. No, I don't think there was any one. I don't think there was any one point you know, they in the US anyway, they consider it a best seller if you sell 60,000 books in a year, in the first year in the in the nonfiction world, and it hit that mark. So that was pretty much an indicator and with the fact that that penguin or Viking kept it in hardback for a second year. Which your first hurdle is to get them decide they want to go to paperback and the second one is, or the second thing is, if it's even better than that is they'll keep it in hardback because I make more money off the hardback sales. As soon as it's out in paper, those things diminish, you know, tremendously. So those were indicators that at least in terms of the publishing world, they thought this was doing pretty well and I had been You know, I had been invited, there'd been a couple of fairly interesting business articles written about me. And as they're getting this methodology, we didn't call it getting things done back then, because we didn't call it getting things done until the book was out, because that was the title of the book. And so there was some press that I already had my my name had some brand anyway, Fast Company had done to do a couple of different articles about my stuff. Stuart, also, you know, who was writing for Forbes the time, you know, took a seminar mine and so his next column, he sort of wrote how you know how cool this was that he went to this thing. And it was funny in my seminar, he one of his projects was he had to write the next column. So, somehow, I made it and he's a bit of a curmudgeon. he's a he's a great guy, you know, he really likes to read a lot. And, and but he wrote some very glowing words. About Me and that, that because of just his leverage, and then the his name, that kind of spread. And because I was in the Fast Company articles, I've got Fast Company was doing conferences around the US and I was speaking at several of those. So I had a bit of a little bit of traction already, even before the book came out. So once it did and by the way, the other answer to that point was we did target this to the fast track professional. You know, and because it is it's, it's, it's universal, I mean, even back then, you know, I knew this worked for students, it worked for clergy, it worked for physicians, it worked for accountants, it worked for stay at home dads. I mean, it worked for anybody that's got a busy life. They need to keep track of their stuff. But the the fast track professionals were right about them late 90s were getting hit with a tsunami of email. And they were the ones who also had, you know, training budgets and coaching, you know, consulting budgets, you know, behind them. So that was just the sweet spot really for, you know, for inserting this. So it really looked that way. That's why the second edition that that, you know, I wrote in 2015, very much expanded, people say, well, what's changed a lot of what changed, which is the breadth of the market,

James Taylor and that that fast track professional Did you as you were writing the book, were you very conscious of that, you know, the Stephen King? Was he like the ideal reader in your head? Or was it something was that more kind of just kind of out there? You weren't thinking about it so much.

David Allen I wasn't thinking about it that much. But that was my experience was with that, that group. So all my experience has been a 95% of my experience with this methodology was without audience so you knew all those cookers, they'd been at your seminars, you knew all those kind of follow up questions or the gaps that they would, you'd want to ensure that you were covered in the book.

James Taylor Yeah. And then you've just written this, this one for teens. Now. I'm interested. What kind of you probably get asked this all the time about tools, but I'm interested in in terms of tools for writing Do you still you still make much a Microsoft kind of person do you some some other kind of tool that you find a useful for your researching in your writing stages

David Allen I word guy from day one. I've tried a number of things, outlining programs and so forth. And even in the early days tried the outlining function in Word, but it was way too complicated and technical for me to work with, I found the best thing to do when I was writing something, you know, fairly significant, like a book, I found it was best to just build two Word documents. One of them was the outline, and the other was the text. So instead of trying to use both those within the same document, I just made two documents. And it was much easier to then function that way to just create a kind of a working outline that I could throw ideas on to that. And then on the other one, I would start writing text because I tend to think while I'm writing text, so you know, I don't really pre think a whole lot of this stuff. I just need to get started and then see how it flows and see where it goes. You know, thank God for word processor. So you know You know, I still remember the days of hunting and pecking and and erase tape, you know, yeah. You know, handwriting was was much easier than then than that but, you know, that's why that's why word and you know the word processing app, you know, and functionality itself was a game changer.

James Taylor And as you can travel around the world just speaking or doing book signings as well, you come across many authors who kind of come to you who are using who use GTD to allow them to kind of get get more writing done as well. I mean, I use GTD I've been for a long long time. And I'm one of the few I was kind of gone from the very kind of techie kind of using certain tools to that to actually I now just use, you know, sheets and blankets again, and with all my lessons, this methodology is the same. And I I can I'm working on a one of my someday maybe projects is now moving into an actual project with lists as well. But I want to come across many authors who are Especially people that come from that professional world, or maybe now moving into the world of writing. And speaking of making that transition and applying the methodology to to their writing,

David Allen I can't say that I can remember anybody specifically saying they were doing that. I've certainly had, you know, thousands of people in my seminars, and I'm sure there have been people out there doing that in anybody who gets GTD, getting things, GTD is nothing but just being highly efficient with an effective with how you think through something and actually make it actually happen and how you execute on everything. So, yeah, I mean, the whole process of outcome and action, what am I trying to produce? What would my wild, what would wild success for this look like? And then you, you know, then you brainstorm, you know, all the potentially relevant stuff that might be relevant to it, then you organize all of that, then you come up with the components and then next actions on the moving parts. I mean, come on. That's how you get out of the room. That's how we talk. So getting things done was I didn't make that up. I just recognized what we do when things really work. really well, and the most optimally efficient way to think through something. So you're not wasting mental energy. Somebody, you know, probably accurately described GTD as lean for the brain, you know, the idea of no waste. Yeah. So don't have a thought twice, don't lose any good thinking. And then make sure that you're accessing all potentially relevant information for that. So the natural planning model that I talked about in chapter three of the book, you know, how do I think through a situation? You know, what's the purpose of it? What are the principles that I need to adhere to while I'm doing this? And what's what would wild success look like? That automatically creates a cognitive dissonance if a wild success is not what you currently have. When you say, Well, what if? So, I have the why and then I have the what but now what's the how and the How comes in two parts? You know, how Part one is just is just brainstorm. Oh my God, we need to think about that. Well, here's an idea. Well, you know, I could, we could do it that way too, and yada yada. So then you want to make sure that that that brainstorming process is for facilitated and rich, and then how Part B is okay, now out of all of that, how do I start to create a coherent structure? You know, out of what that is whether that chapters or sequences stuff for, you know, however you start to structure it, yeah. And then, but then, you know, get going, you can you can actually start this process anywhere to start writing.

James Taylor Yeah, I mean, I think I saw a quote the other day, I think it was, Daniel Pink said he's ewz you just said he's a devout card carrying GTD true believer. And and so he's, you know, this is up as a writer, very kind of prolific writer who can be used as it I don't see in terms of how he uses his writing. He definitely just in terms of being more productive as a human being as a person, in order to be Atlantic can get the work done, he wants to put out into the world.

David Allen Sure. I mean, a lot of what GTD is about is getting giving more space. It's not about time if you more room. So what you do with that room is up to you. What a an artist, you know, musician does with that room has had better song ideas and capture more of them and, you know, produce the songs quicker and faster. You know, somebody else can use more space to think more strategically in terms of their work or their business. Some people certainly writers could use more space call, hey, I need just more room to just do nothing and kind of let them use you know, show up as it does. So, but if you're distracted by two meetings ago, or you you know, or you know, your printers does always out of ink, you forgot to order some more and you know, all kinds of just the ordinariness of life that can then eat you up. You know, that should, you know, but if you don't pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it'll take more of your attention than it deserves. That's a big sort of GTD GTD saying so a lot of what GTD is about is handle all the open loops of your life, put them in, you know, appropriately engage with them. So it gives you clarity of space,

James Taylor and you have that that central point of truth that trusted system in order to get all those things out of the head, they get a brain dump happening as well, which I think is a useful, useful process for any creative person. And if people want to learn more about the the GT D system, where's the best place to go to kind of find out more about it, you obviously mentioned the book, but in a lot of our attendees just now probably got kids, they've got teams, as well. Maybe you kind of want to give them some of that methodology, where's the best place to go to find out all that all that?

David Allen Well, getting things done.com is, you know, our sort of major web website, but we now have a website for the teens, and the team book. So GTD for teens calm is that website, and the book just got launched. So you can get it from all the places you get good books, you know, at least in the in the UK, in the US and the UK is coming really soon. And it's coming really soon in three or four other languages, you know, pretty quick. So yeah, because there's been so much pent up demand. You know, people one of the reasons to write This book for teens was because 30 or even 30 years ago, when I started doing this work, people go God, I wish I'd learned this when I was 12. Right? Or they've got kids that are 12 or 15 or 18. Kids need this. Yeah. You know, as well as me. And I really Yeah, I just didn't know how to reach him because I don't have kids, but I co wrote it with Mike Williams and Mark Wallace. Both of them have kids, you know, and, you know, Mike's got teens himself and has raised them using this methodology. And Mark's a public school teacher and Minneapolis school system. And once he got GTD, he said, God, I can't keep this back for my kids. And so he's teaching, you know, eight 910 year olds, you know, this stuff very successfully. So I there they did really the heavy lifting of how do I, how do we frame this methodology for that next kind of generation. It's still the same methodology and there's the book teams doesn't step it down at all. I mean, you know, a chief executive has to empty their briefcase when they come back from the board meeting and then decide what to do with all that. You know, a 12 year old has to empty their pack. Yeah, when they come home from school, and you know, not let something crawl through in a hole in there that their mom needed to sign three weeks ago.

James Taylor I love that as well the fact that I mean, it makes a little bit of Edward de Bono where there is these different levels that he obviously spoke and he wrote for corporates, you know, many big companies shell BP, we bring him in to work with their top executives. But actually, perhaps the biggest legacy that he will leave is in terms of in kids learning his stuff and education systems, an entire country like Singapore, for example. You know, they've really built a lot of their education system around his his methodology when it comes to creativity. So, so I'm really interested to see how this goes next year, this next step of your journey, maybe you're gonna have entire countries using GTD methodology. I think it'd be a very cool, cool thing to do. That's the mission. Well,

David Allen you know, our mission is that we have have a world where there are no problems only projects. Kids get kids could get there faster than us probably.

James Taylor So well. David has been asked pleasure speaking with you. Again, thank you so much for coming on this and sharing your insights in terms of your writing process and publishing and getting your ideas out to always be in great pleasure talking with you today.

David Allen My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.

James Taylor If you're interested in living a more creative life, then I'd love to invite you to join me as I share some of the most successful strategies and techniques that high performing creatives use. I put them all together in a free downloadable ebook that you can get by going to jamestaylor.me. That's jamestaylor.me.

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