How to Plan Anything — Geoff Peters explains the Natural Planning Process — Getting Things Done GTD
Geoff from geoffmobile.com gives a speech to explain the Natural Planning Process: why and how to plan anything, no matter how big or how small, from planning your wedding, a work project, a vacation, or an evening out with a friend.
Dear colleagues and fellow professionals, as the week comes to a close what better time for some thinking of the future, and doing some planning. Here is a 7 minute speech video where I explain the Why and How of the “Natural Planning Process” — as described so well by author David Allen in his amazing book “Getting Things Done” (GTD). Please give it a watch and let me know your feedback :)
Best regards, and wishing everyone a great weekend and week ahead.
- Geoff
Transcript of video follows below:
Fellow Toastmasters and most welcome guests: my name is Geoff Peters and I’ve been in Toastmasters for quite a few years. I have also been studying personal productivity as a hobby and I really wanted to share an interesting topic today about the Natural Planning Process.
So let’s get into it!
In today’s talk I will first talk about why is it a good idea to do some planning, and what should you plan. Then I’ll talk about the five steps of the natural planning process which are this acronym DOBOI “dough boy”:
- Defining purpose and principles
- Outcome visioning
- Brainstorming
- Organizing
- Identifying next actions.
My theory is that you can use these five steps to plan anything in your life no matter how big or how small. If you’re planning your wedding, it might be one of the biggest things you ever have to plan — there is a huge amount of things to plan. You can follow the same process for planning an evening out with a friend to have dinner. I’ll finally leave you off with a few resources that you can explore later.
So first of all why should we plan? If you’ve ever gone on a vacation and realized oh you forgot your wallet! or you forgot your toothbrush? Let’s say you went to a show and you left the tickets at home. :( Usually a lack of planning results in some kind of unexpected failure. If you don’t plan, something bad might happen. By planning you reduce the chance of something going wrong because you’ve thought about all the different things that might be involved. It’s very important to avoid the last-minute “oh-no’s” that I put up here.
And you’ll have everything go a lot smoother. If you’re planning for example a work project, doing more thinking upfront about the project will result in better estimates and fewer unexpected things going wrong near the end. When you realize oh I didn’t think about this whole use case or this whole other workflow I didn’t even consider. So this is why planning is useful both for personal life and also for work.
Here’s a quote that I like very much. People say “I’m just not a lucky person” or “I don’t have good opportunities” but if you have a good plan the wind and waves will be on the side of the greatest navigators. So by having a good plan you can even create more luck and good fortune in your life because you’ll be more prepared to seize those opportunities that come along.
What can you plan? As I was saying, you can plan anything. For me, planning moving to a new apartment was a huge endeavor. Packing, figuring out the real estate business, what to do with all these documents — all those things made it very important to do good planning.
Even a dinner out with a friend — my friends are very busy and if I try to make a last-minute plan with them generally they say “oh sorry I’m busy”, so I have to do planning several weeks in advance to go for dinner with my best friends. So I definitely do a lot of planning even for simple personal things.
Even planning going to the gym — I think about it a few days in advance: what day am I going to go to the gym, do I need to pack my gym clothes in my backpack the night before, and that day I set my alarm to go down so I don’t miss the opportunity to care for my own body.
Now to the meat of the presentation: the Natural Planning Process. As I mentioned there are five distinct steps. These steps were invented by David Allen who is a personal productivity guru who wrote the book called “Getting Things Done”. I’d really recommend this book for a whole methodology about personal planning and productivity for your task management.
As I mentioned there’s five steps we’ll be going through here.
The first one is to Define your Purpose and Principles. I’m going out for dinner: my purpose would be to improve my relationship and have a better friendship with one of my best friends and my principles might be what kind of restaurant do you prefer: do you want one that’s really upscale and expensive that you can impress everyone who sees your Instagram photos, or is it a place that serves really good food at a cheap price? For me I really like the value for your money. I want to get something good but I also want it to not be too expensive. Those are my principles and the purpose would be to develop my friendship with my good friend and maybe talk about some interesting hobbies that we do. So that’s the first step.
Secondly, Outcome Visioning. Now this is where you can imagine a good possible outcome for your project. In my case I can imagine myself sitting in a waterfront bistro with my friend, eating some thin crust pizza and sipping soda water. And there is a beautiful view.
So I’ve imagined this in my mind — now how can I make this a reality?
Thirdly, Brainstorming. Where you let your mind wander and think about all the possible things that might be useful to think about for your plan. For going for dinner I’m like, well can my friend actually go, is he interested in going, what dates is he available? where should we go? here’s some ideas for what restaurants. I’ve been to this place before, I really would like to go back there, but what about the place on Commercial Drive? So all the ideas: just take everything and write it down freely and organize them later.
The next step is to Organize. Once you’ve got all the ideas there, try to find patterns: maybe a list of five places you want to go to or what are all the things I need to do, and put them in order. Group them into logical categories.
Finally once you’ve got it all organized you can Identify your Next Actions. So these are a sequence of actions. Like any project there’s the first action you can do right away, and there are some that are depending on that one to do later. So you can find a sequence of tasks.
The most important thing is to figure out what you can do right now that you’re not blocked by anything — you can do it right away — that’s your Next Action.
In this example the first thing I could do is email my friend, “hey do you want to go for dinner next Saturday” and once he’s confirmed that, I might make a reservation. I might make another note to remind him closer to the date if he’s doing well and not feeling sick we can still make the dinner.
So what was once an idea, a vision of having this beautiful dinner, becomes something delicious.
The resources I mentioned: the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen, which I’ll refer back to many times. It’s a wealth of information not just about planning but also how to organize your whole life and reduce your stress. It’s called Getting Things Done. Look for this cover, it’s the older edition — I think it’s actually better:
So thanks very much! Good luck with your planning!
Original Video Source: https://geoffmobile.com/blog/how-to-plan-anything-geoff-peters-explains-the-natural-planning-process-getting-things-done-gtd
