Getting Things Done by David Allen

Ideas useful in testing the adequacy of Getting Things Done

• Major life directions: what do you want to be remembered for? and My Life as a Knowledge Worker

• The Individual In Entrepreneurial Society

• Interview: Post-Capitalist Executive

• Interview: Managing in a Post-Capitalist Society

• First Things First by Steven Covey

• Situations commonly seen in the news (see my NoteTaker blog clips notebook for some abnormal examples—outside the Statistical Abstract)

• What if your family or other important people in your life won't participate?

With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow," "mind like water," and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called "Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance".

Not quite. Yes, "Getting Things Done" offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organized, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible "Fast Company" has dubbed "the personal productivity guru," suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech saber known as the cell phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.)

As whole-life-organizing systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk, The next step is to write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket"

That's where the processing and prioritizing begin; in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's commonsense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment; Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belabored, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to soccer moms (who we all know are more organized than most CEOs to start with). --"Timothy Murphy"

• The Art of Getting Things Done
  • A New Practice for a New Reality
  • Getting Control of Your Life: The Five Stages of Mastering Workflow
  • Getting Projects Creatively Under Way: The Five Phases of Project Planning
• Practicing Stress-Free Productivity
  • Getting Started: Setting Up the Time, Space, and Tools
  • Collection: Corralling Your "Stuff"
  • Processing: Getting "In" to Empty
  • Organizing: Setting Up the Right Buckets
  • Reviewing: Keeping Your System Functional
  • Doing: Making the Best Action Choices
  • Getting Projects Under Control
• The Power of the Key Principles
  • The Power of the Collection Habit
  • The Power of the Next-Action Decision
  • The Power of Outcome Focusing
• Conclusion
  

See Getting things done summary (an outline overview of the entire concept)

Processing and Organizing Workflow

Overview of the GTD fundamentals:


enlarged view (2.5 mb)

The Natural Planning Model

• Graphical Overview

• Project planning phases outline

• How much planning?

Also see Ready for Anything