Allen: It’s also an issue of choosing the right work. Peter Drucker said that the toughest job for knowledge workers is defining the work. A century ago, 80% of the world made and moved things. You worked as long as you could, and then you slept, and then you got up and worked again. You didn’t have to triage or make executive decisions. It’s harder to be productive today because the work has become much more complex.

Tony, you’ve also written about how the cultures of some organizations encourage people to work in ways that are unhealthful and ultimately limit productivity. Why do companies do that?

Schwartz: I remember giving a talk at a prestigious investment bank several years ago. At the end a partner stood up and said, “Mr. Schwartz, this is all very interesting, but we have a thousand people knocking on the door who can’t wait to come in and replace the people we’ve burned out. Why should we worry about giving people time to renew? When they burn out, we just bring in a fresh new group of people, who are thrilled to get the jobs.” I’d argue that in knowledge work, you get more out of a person in the third or fifth or seventh year than out of the replacement you brought in because the first worker collapsed in year two. This is a broader issue that deserves attention. We can’t keep pushing people to their limits and expect them to produce at a sustainably high level of excellence. The companies that build true competitive advantage in the years ahead will be those that shift from seeking to get more out of people to investing in better meeting their needs.

David, what’s the biggest roadblock to productivity that you typically observe when you go into an organization for the first time?

Allen: People don’t capture stuff that has their attention. They don’t acknowledge it or objectify it. And it keeps rolling around in the organizational psyche as well as the personal psyche, draining energy and creating incredible psychic residue. People say, “I’ll do that,” but they don’t write it down, and it goes into a black hole. That would be fine if it were just one thing, but it’s hundreds of things. And people don’t determine exactly what their commitment to that stuff is—what’s the outcome they want to achieve, what’s the next action required to move it forward. Your head is for having ideas, not holding them. Just dumping everything out of your head and externalizing it is a huge step, and it can have a significant effect.

The devil’s advocate position is that this results in gigantic to-do lists, which are overwhelming in themselves.

Allen: People do look at all my lists and say, “God, you’ve got too many.” But if you don’t think lists are the way to go, throw away your calendar. Don’t be intellectually dishonest about it. Why do you have a calendar? Because the world started to become a little more complex, and therefore you need help managing creative energy that can’t be closed up or finished. You need lists because your brain isn’t good at keeping them. Your mind is this dumb little computer that will wake you up at 3:00 AM and beat you bloody over stuff you can’t do spit about while you’re lying there. All it’s doing is repeating stuff in open loops, and it sucks your energy like crazy.

Schwartz: There’s a process of humility that’s required here. It’s a little bit of a turn on the 12-step notion of admitting that you’re powerless over your addictions. In this case, the addiction is to e-mail and information. The problem is that our willpower and self-discipline are wildly overrated. We think the way to make a change is to push harder—to resist that chocolate chip cookie, or wake up early and get to the gym. It doesn’t work. It’s humbling to discover that we’re creatures of habit, and what we did yesterday is what we’re going to do today. You want to co-opt the process by which negative habits arise without your intention, and substitute what we call “positive rituals,” or deliberate practices.

How much do you know about each other’s work—and how much do you use each other’s strategies?

Schwartz: I always kept lists, but until I connected with David’s work, I didn’t realize that anything I didn’t download would potentially create distractions—so now I keep lists of everything. Another ritual I have that aligns with David’s work is to always do the most important task of the day first thing in the morning, when I’m most rested and least distracted. Ninety percent of people check their e-mail as soon as they get to work. That turns their agenda over to someone else. They do it because it’s easy—you can feel more effective in a shorter time by answering e-mails. It also feels good to be wanted, and e-mails affirm that people want you. Human beings are designed to do two fundamental things: avoid pain and move toward pleasure. One instinct kept us alive; the other allowed us to reproduce. Those are still the impulses that drive us. You need a higher part of the brain to be able to step back and say, “There’s a better choice to be made here.”

Tony, there’s one test that separates GTD dabblers from true devotees: Do you have a label maker?

Schwartz: No. But you know what? I’m early in my career with GTD, so I don’t feel bad.

David, how has Tony’s thinking influenced the way you work?

Allen: The piece that’s made the biggest difference is his work on energy cycles. I actually brought a pillow into work. I work in a glass office, and now people can see me lying on my floor taking a nap for 20 minutes. That’s directly from Tony’s work. I wish I had the discipline Tony does to tackle the hardest tasks first thing in the morning, but I don’t.

Schwartz: It’s not that you don’t have the discipline—it’s that you don’t have the ritual. If you built that ritual, I have zero doubt that you could do it. There’s a problem with making a decision based on how you’re feeling at any given moment. Generally speaking, that doesn’t work. Psychologically we have two different selves. One is very primitive and reactive. The other is more evolved and reflective. People need to recognize when the primitive, reactive self is taking over and influencing them to avoid things that are uncomfortable. You can’t wait to do things until the spirit moves you.

Allen: Part of the way to attack that problem is to break big tasks down and focus on smaller “next actions,” which can seem more manageable. What most people put on a to-do list are vague things like “Mom.” Great! So Tony will write down “Mom,” signifying that he has to decide whether to get his mother a birthday present, and what to buy, and how to deliver it. He’ll resist looking at the list, because he knows there’s a lot of work in that simple notation. Instead the list should specify a smaller next action—say, “Call sister re Mom’s birthday.” Oh, look—I can do that! There’s actually a part of us that loves to produce, that loves to be complete. Now I’ve created motivation: I see a desired result, I have the confidence I can get there, and I see the path. A lot of what GTD does is set it up so that you only have to think about things once. The problem is that everybody is multitasking and getting distracted by the latest and loudest. They fail because they haven’t captured, clarified, organized, or built in a regular review system they trust.

Schwartz: Let me beg to differ a little. Say you’re working on a primary task and you get an e-mail. You hear that little Pavlovian beep, and you cannot resist it. So you turn to the e-mail and lose track of the initial task, and it takes you time to reconnect to it afterward. Researchers have found that over time and with practice, people get better at task shifting, but they never get remotely as good as they’d be if they did one thing at a time.

Allen: Let’s take it a step further. Why do people get disturbed by that e-mail beep? It’s because they don’t trust that they’ve emptied their e-mail every 24 hours. Most people are living in an emergency scan mode. They never deal with their e-mail, so they’re afraid there’s still something sitting in there, and they’re constantly allowing themselves to get distracted by it.

Schwartz: Before the next question—how long have we been talking?

Allen: Eighty-five minutes.

Schwartz: Can we pause for a moment? I’m thirsty, and my mind is starting to be less than 100% here. I’ve built this 90-minute cycle into my body, and it’s gotten very good at saying to me, “Give me a break.”

[After a 10-minute break] What role do leaders play in making workers more productive?

Schwartz: The leader’s role is to be the chief energy officer. It’s to mobilize and focus and direct and inspire and regularly recharge those he or she leads.

Allen: If bosses don’t appropriately manage the tasks for which people are coming to work, it’s impossible for employees to get the bandwidth to do what Tony is talking about. If jobs are not clear, if projects are not well defined, if outcomes are not focused on, if action steps and accountabilities and responsibilities are not allocated, then the leader hasn’t done his job.

Can you talk about why organizations fail when attempting to make knowledge workers more productive?

Allen: Ironically, the people who are most interested in our work—and for whom it sticks the most—are the people who need it least. What our work does is eliminate drag. Who’s most aware of drag? Those who are already the fastest. Formula One race teams spend millions to save a fraction of a second. Many of the companies that embrace our work are already very successful. It’s hard for me to point to an organization that truly failed with our work—if you do only a piece of what we teach, it will improve productivity. So there aren’t any huge disasters where companies tried our method and failed.

Schwartz: I’m going to be honest: We’ve had failures. By that I mean an organization will bring us in to work with a group of people, but the group will fail to ignite. Typically these companies are the most conservative, most hidebound places, where unhappiness among employees runs deepest. They’re in what we call the survival zone.

Allen: Well, if we use Tony’s definition, whereby an organization fails to fully take to what we teach, then I’m a total failure, too.

Schwartz: We’re finding that more and more companies have an appetite for our work, and it’s no longer just the early adopters. For example, financial institutions have been consistently successful in adopting our work. They’re not seen as progressive organizations, but they are highly entrepreneurial, and the financial upside for individuals who get more done is so great that all of them behave, to one extent or another, like athletes. Being a better performer has a lot of direct financial upside in that industry. We’re also finding takers in the most traditional businesses, because the reality is that nearly everyone is feeling overwhelmed.

Do you have any point of view about the kinds of companies you work with?

Schwartz: I’m certainly happier working with companies that make products that clearly add value in the world. If they’re making cigarettes, I’m not eager to help them get more productive at that.

Allen: What about Twinkies?

Schwartz: I’m more ambivalent about Twinkies. I’ve been known to eat a Twinkie myself. A Twinkie here and there won’t hurt you. What I do hope is that food companies get more thoughtful about how they package and market their products. I was working with a large food company lately—it doesn’t make Twinkies, but it makes Twinkie-like products—and we ended up talking about whether they should be selling smaller packages, because it would be better for customers’ health. This was a group of senior executives, and it didn’t seem to me that they’d entertained the question before, but I was encouraged that they were willing to discuss it.

David, when you work with a company, how can you tell if your ideas have really taken root?

Allen: I can see it when the culture starts to incorporate the principles as expected behaviors and makes them part of the common lexicon. You’ll hear people build them into the language: “What’s the next action?” “I have three ‘waiting for yous’ here—can we go over them?” They’re writing things down. They’re starting meetings by going over what they expect to accomplish. Those rituals can become enculturated.

Last question: If people could take just one thing away from your work, what should it be?

Schwartz: Organizations need to recognize that human beings are basically organisms containing energy. And that energy is either being renewed or being dissipated over time. An organization has to realize that part of its responsibility, whether it wants it or not, is to ensure that people have full tanks of energy. This is one of the big variables that will determine which organizations thrive in the next 10 or 20 years.

Allen: Think about it this way: While we’ve been sitting here talking, stuff has been piling up in our in-boxes and our voice mails. Some of it has the potential to meaningfully shift our priorities. When we turn to this accumulated stuff, we’ll need to eliminate old business that is pulling on us, that’s taking our attention, and reallocate our resources to these new priorities. You can only do one thing at a time, and you only have so many resources. You either feel OK about sitting here talking to us, or you feel bad about the 9,000 other things you’re not doing. Everybody needs a system to make those choices wisely.