Personal Productivity: The Art of Getting The Job Done

Although GTD will hold special appeal to workaholics and productivity worshippers, it is potentially beneficial to anyone who struggles to keep track of all the little tasks we need to get done. Apr 11, Tracy Miller marked it as did-not-finish. I'm listening to this because I need to get a grip on my life. I can't even focus enough to listen about how to get my life together, much less do it. I've used a mutated version of this for years, but thought I'd try the original text. I felt it gave equal weight to parts of GTD that are a cakewalk emptying your mind onto a page with parts that sound easy but are complex deciding on next actions.

I'd recommend reading through a summary instead of the 2. I'd recommend reading through a summary instead of the whole book. There are people who explain Allen's system better than Allen. View all 4 comments. Dec 27, Ruben rated it really liked it Shelves: I'm really glad my wife and I read this book together. It's already been very helpful in getting us to look at the reason so many things never get done on time or sometimes not at all. The book is well written. The writing is very clear, with lots of examples, though it's a bit dry in the middle and a little flowery on the ends.

That sounds like a description of a scone or something. We're still working on getting our system set up I mean filing cabinets for reference material so I might nee I'm really glad my wife and I read this book together. We're still working on getting our system set up I mean filing cabinets for reference material so I might need to add more to this in a month's time. I'll let you know then if we're getting more things done. As a matter of fact, that's one test to see whether things are still slipping through the cracks.

Mind you, I'm not perfect, but I feel there's been a noticeable upswing in how aware I am of what needs to get done. Just having an organized filing cabinet and inbox and next actions list allows me to see at a glance the things that used to just float around my mind, fighting for attention. My wife and I look forward to our weekly review Sunday nights at 7: I've been implementing this system in my classroom, too, and that helps with the stacks and stacks of papers I collect as a teacher. I'd love to find some way to teach this to my high school students, who can never remember to do their homework or study for tests.

Anyway, I highly recommend this book. Unless you already feel that your system is highly efficient, give it a shot. This is one of those optimistic books in which YOU THE READER can gain control by your own unaided well almost unaided, you are meant to delegate efforts, and which doesn't take account of that your workflow might very well be determined by things entirely outside of your control. Not to mention if your working space isn't under your control at all for example with hot desking or is very limited if you are in a drone-zone then physically some of the ideas here will be impossible.

And of cou This is one of those optimistic books in which YOU THE READER can gain control by your own unaided well almost unaided, you are meant to delegate efforts, and which doesn't take account of that your workflow might very well be determined by things entirely outside of your control. And of course everything in this book is best suited to someone with a secretary or personal assistant.

But there are some practical bits and pieces to take away, I've found it useful to not just write a to-do list but also to write by each item what I'm waiting on or what has to be done next to progress the item and the book inspired me to use the email calender feature to pop up reminders of things to do and people to chase. Beware however, just because you can deal with something within two minutes doesn't mean that you should do so! For an absolutely different vision of how a business can work its worth reading Toyota Production System Beyond Large-Scale Production or anything by W.

In a wider context this is an entirely depressing and soul destroyingly negative book. It's implicit message is that the modern corporate workplace is a meat mincer. Fresh employees are thrown in at one end, the dead and burnt out, ground down and generally used up ones removed and thrown out on to the scrap heap. A functional view of the workplace might be so bold as to posit that people are employed to do a task which contributes towards the achievement of the overall goals and objectives of the organisation.

Allen is writing for readers you have experienced something that is very different, in their world nobody cares. If you are struggling to deal with the task you have been employed to do, nobody will notice let alone step in to assist. Your only possible salvation is the life raft of books like this one, offering salvation from the threatening seas of an unlimited workload.

Of peculiar interest is that the book is pitched to persons relatively senior - senior enough that they have secretaries or personal assistants. Bizarrely in Allen's world one is appointed to do a job, but there is no reliable way of knowing if you can cope with it or indeed if the job as defined by the organisation can be done by a single person, nor despite the money spent on the employee and their Personal assistant will anybody check or exercise oversight over one's performance. The workplace in Allen's vision is not rational but the site of a particularly lawless gold-rush.

Interestingly to my view enough purchasers agree with him to keep him out of the hamster wheel. Like so many 'business' books it ought to be an A4 or A5 laminated card rather than a book hundreds of pages long but apparently there is no money to be made from people in a hurry or who are struggling to achieve stress free productivity. Jul 17, Josh rated it it was amazing. Before I justify the five-star rating, there are a couple of qualifications: This book is written toward a certain audience: The large majority of examples mentioned are male corporate leaders.

There is the occasional nod to a housewife using the system to get her chores done I kid you not , and a single reference that I can remember to someone whose work is purely creative. I feel that if you know this coming in, it wil Before I justify the five-star rating, there are a couple of qualifications: I feel that if you know this coming in, it will be easier to peel the husk and get to the tasty nougat center.

The system advocated here will not help you with amorphous creative projects. If you're a writer, Allen offers nothing in the way of how to parcel out a book into attackable chunks and bang out the pages. If you're the kind of person who has a hard time focusing on creative work because less-important undone projects are nagging at you, this is a great system. I usually dislike business books for exactly the reasons above. But what Allen does is something more applicable to knowledge workers in general. He recognizes that the amount of potential work is infinite, and then says, "Okay, you'll never get it ALL done.

Let's talk about how you can at least put everything in its place, so you can feel good about what you're NOT doing. The essence of Allen's strategy is this: Develop a method for capturing everything you have to do in your life on an ongoing basis, periodically break it all down into actionable steps, arrange those actions in order, and then go to town on them. Let's say you realize one day that you need to get a new computer.

In practice it means you should write down "get a new computer" in a central repository, and then your brain should be doing something like this: My friend Dana has a Mac and loves to talk about it.

Getting Things Done - Wikipedia

My next action on this should be to call Dana. Last night, I strung my guitar because it finally rose up to the top my big list of things to do. Right now I'm taking the time to write a review of this book because I feel on top of all the other things in my life. I am confident that writing this review is the best thing I could be doing at this exact moment.

For the first time I can remember, the miscellaneous open loops in my life are not tugging at my attention. I've closed the ones I can close, and I'm okay with the ones I haven't closed yet. I'll get to them when it's time. In short, if you're a creative person who has any kind of outside commitments i.

Feb 09, Dianna rated it it was amazing. Recall the last time you went on a significant vacation from work: Felt pretty good to leave that last day, right? David Allen teaches you how to live your life this way: Take the Next Actions and eith Recall the last time you went on a significant vacation from work: It's really that logical and that simple. Now, make a weekly habit of reviewing all those categories. Just like it ought to, the book starts out broad, then each chapter goes into more detail of the system.

Unless you're some crazy detail-loving mogul, you only need to read about to the half-way mark. I went a bit further just because I loved it so much. For about three weeks now, it's worked for me both at work and more loosely at home. If you want to see this book in action, I'll show you my email and desk. I recommend this book to just about everyone.

Read the first chapter.

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I probably only buy books a year -- usually because the library doesn't own it, but I bought this one after reading the first chapter in the library's copy. I knew I'd want my own. Oct 23, Douglas Wilson rated it really liked it Shelves: A bit too detailed for my taste, but there are some magnificent principles involved here. I learned a lot. Jun 25, David rated it liked it Shelves: I decided to investigate further a little while back, and finally picked up the book two weeks ago.

And now I've read it; and I expect I'll go back and re-read this book in a couple months. I may revise my rating at that time. The things that irritate me in this book are exactly the things I expected might irritate me. There are plenty of the obligatory breezy anecdotes about the clie I'd heard about David Allen and his "Getting Things Done" system in the past, but I never paid it much attention.

There are plenty of the obligatory breezy anecdotes about the clients Allen has worked with and how impressed they were with the system; the margins of every page are filled with quotes; there are lapses into business motivation jargon; and there are numbered lists in droves.

I skimmed some parts. But at the same time, there is something I didn't really expect: No wonder there are so many technical readers who have latched on to this guy. Of course, I still have to see whether I can get the meat to work for me.

It's possible that I'll char it into unrecognizability, or that it will give me food poisoning. But I think I've decided to try some of it anyhow. Jan 30, Michelle Powers rated it did not like it. Tried the print and the audio and just couldn't grasp the system which would enable me to get lots and lots of stuff done in an easy manner without struggle.

I guess once you get through the book, nothing else seems like as much of a struggle. Apr 10, Saeed Ramazany rated it it was amazing. Nov 23, K rated it really liked it Recommends it for: People seeking ways to get organized at work. He also shared that he used the principles in this book to run a skills-teaching group for teens with ADHD, and that he uses this system himself. This recommendation came at a time when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed and overloaded at work, so I figured I would try to see if there was anything here that I could adopt so as to better inform my client about how it works while engaging in my own self-imp A colleague recommended this book to me because I was seeing an adult client with ADHD.

This recommendation came at a time when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed and overloaded at work, so I figured I would try to see if there was anything here that I could adopt so as to better inform my client about how it works while engaging in my own self-improvement. These commitments remain in the category of unfinished business, or "open loops," which torture us and stress us out because we haven't figured out how to get rid of them.

The first step, says Allen, is to take all the things we're supposed to be doing and collect them into a small number of physical or virtual in-baskets e. The number of receptacles for collecting unfinished business should be small, and the information in them needs to be processed regularly. Processing involves going through the items, one by one, and deciding what the next action step is on these items. Although it seems obvious, lots of stuff we need to do stays in never-never land because we never figure out, concretely, what the next step is.

Sometimes there is no next step, in which case the item should either be trashed or filed as reference, or as something to be taken care of at a later date. If there is a next step, you need to decide whether to do it if it can be done in 2 minutes or less , delegate it if someone else can do it , or defer it. Deferring an item may include placing it onto a category list, e. Another system is a "tickler file" for things that need to be done on certain days. The tickler file is a drawer full of file folders that is subdivided into months of the year, with a file folder for each day on the calendar.

This allows you to file tasks that will be done on days other than today.

Your calendar is used only to mark appointments; if you clutter it with task reminders, it will get overwhelming. Once everything you have to do is thus organized, you start each day by looking at your calendar to get a sense of your appointments and what windows of time you have in between.

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You then review your tickler file for that day and your general lists of next actions e. There's also the issue of choosing which actions to take in the moment, which involves evaluating your context e. Another important aspect of this system is the weekly review. A time and place must be set aside once a week to gather loose papers and put them in the in-basket for processing, process any notes, action items, etc.

Basically, this book felt like FLYlady for the office. It was an interesting experience for me, because whereas I can be a total slob at home and found FLYlady invaluable for working on changing that with admittedly inconsistent commitment and progress on my part , I'm actually pretty on top of things at work for the most part. Although I wasn't formally following David Allen's system, I was intuitively using some of his ideas and applying them in my own way. That being said, I found many of his suggestions quite useful and even went out and bought myself a four-tiered tray to keep on my desk for in-box, processing, and out-box.

This small change was surprisingly helpful and went a long way toward increasing my sense of control over what I have to do and decreasing my overwhelm. I also think that, for people who are struggling with staying on top of all the things they have to do, this system could be very helpful.

But like any system, you need to be committed to following it. Sometimes, it comes down to whether you'd rather stress over making sure to take all your preventative steps to stay on top of things, or stress over having to scramble. I think that adults who struggle with ADHD could consider trying this system out and seeing if it works for them. But I know that aspects of the system, and even the system as a whole, have been helpful for individuals without a diagnosis who simply want a system that keeps them organized.

Five stars for the content, two or three for the way it was delivered. But I suspect the purpose of this book wasn't to write beautiful prose, so I'll cut it a break. Since this is a book about an organizational system I'll talk a little bit about what I've tried to incorporate and how mine works. Hopefully doing so will help me to become more conscious of how I can improve it. In a former life - a stupider one, I tried to capture everything in my head. This had results ranging from moderate succ Five stars for the content, two or three for the way it was delivered.

The Habit Of Getting Things Done

This had results ranging from moderate success to catastrophic failure. Considerable stress and a nagging feeling of imminent collapse as my constant companions, and sleep escaped me. While this was all going on, in college I started using a blank Moleskine and OneNote to capture more of my thoughts, but still stayed mostly disorganized. At this point I don't think I used either the Moleskine or OneNote very well, and I was still mismanaging my time and thus losing sleep just to keep up.

When I started my current job, I started using Evernote for that as well. Once Evernote decided to charge for cross-device access, I jumped back to OneNote, which was now supported on Mac the irony is that I don't even use the same OneNote account on more than one device. I use OneNote to keep track of daily to-dos and to keep me accountable to my workday schedule. This change was fairly recent only barely outside of the past six months, I think - and it's been evolving since I started with it.

It started with just a blank sheet as I would use in college, but then I added daily to-dos, and most recently I added a schedule and weekly to-dos less specific than the dailies. So for my part, I really like the system he outlines and have made efforts to incorporate it into my own workday and outside-of-work calendar. I particularly like the "next actions" concept I felt like this was half the book - clearly defining what needs to be done rather than vague "stuff" that need to be checked off.

This corresponds to my to-do list - it's not a list of projects, but concrete actions. I will try to organize tasks concretly more consciously from now on. Outside of work, I'm not sure that my life is busy enough to warrant organizing "next actions" by any further granularity - I just use a small planner for my personal life - though this could be because I haven't captured everything.

I also like the idea of having a "waiting for" bucket - this was a huge gap in my organizational system and I've added it to my OneNote template. In the short time I've been practicing it, the offloading of mental burdens to an "external brain" has been hugely liberating for me. Like he says, one of the biggest humps to overcome is the "capturing" phase - for me, if I'm sure I captured everything that needs to be done in a day and the next, I can rest much easier. Also, having the weekly review is a great concept. Without periodic reviews, how can I know if I'm on track or not?

I'm still in the nascent phase of developing my own organization, but this book has been helpful for me to develop a better framework and "mind like water" I always think of Bruce Lee when he mentioned that phrase in the book. So he had my attention the first time he brought it up. All the good things aside, this book felt much longer than it needed to be - at least from what I took away I think it could have been covered succinctly in five or so chapters, rather than The unnecessary length took away from rather than added to the book - it felt somewhat repetitive and the purpose of one chapter wasn't very clearly distinguishable from the next.

Also, the author's face is on the cover and from a distance he looks like another, more famous David Letterman - was this a clever marketing ploy to get people to hear what Dave Letterman has to say? If so I'd like to express my disapproval. If not, it's still unusual. This is my go-to productivity book. I highly recommended it to those who want to regain control of their time and become efficiently productive. Get things out of your head and into a trusted system. Clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do. Set reminders for the actions you need to take.

They get stuck because the doing of them has not been defined. Collect things that command your attention 2. Process what they mean and what to do about them 3. Organize the results 4. Review as options for what you choose to do 5. Do Workflow Diagram - Processing Image from frankcrum. Think of specifically what a successful outcome would look like.

Decide on the next action. What are you really trying to accomplish? Processing Is it actionable? Sep 05, Amy rated it did not like it Recommended to Amy by: Author was quoted on the back of another book I was reading so I thought I'd check it out. If you are a disorganized mess, his book does not have enough step-by-step to help you. If you have a hint of what you're doing, he is quite vague with no actual hands-on tips. Here are his main ideas: This noise distracts you from what you're doing and makes you feel worried that you should be doing something on that list. Shut out the running to-do list and you can focus on one thi Oy, this guy.

Shut out the running to-do list and you can focus on one thing at a time. Write one idea on a piece of paper and scribble sub-ideas on the same sheet of paper. Decide on the next action for each major thought and write it down. It's mentally distracting you and see point two of gathering up every piece of information laying around. Sound like new ideas? That's because they're not. The whole thing reads like an advert for his consulting business because he gives you just enough information to feel like you don't know what you're doing but not enough concrete tasks to actually get to work.

Pretty ironic for a productivity guy. Unless he's trying to drive up the productivity of his consultancy. One more thing -- the guy doesn't even recommend e-mail filters as a time-saver. I use mostly Luddite organizing methods but seriously. Why can't I give this zero stars? Feb 15, KatieMc rated it liked it Shelves: If posting your colonoscopy video on social media was a thing, I could really prove to you how much I got done by reading this book. This is a good system for dealing with all the minutiae that make up all that we If posting your colonoscopy video on social media was a thing, I could really prove to you how much I got done by reading this book.

This is a good system for dealing with all the minutiae that make up all that we need to do just to manage our careers and lives. Because hardware and software is changing so rapidly, GTD is deliberately technologically-neutral. In fact, Allen advises people to start with a paper-based system. Allen emphasizes two key elements of GTD — control and perspective. The workflow is the center of the control aspect. The goal of the control processes in GTD is to get everything except the current task out of your head and into this trusted system external to your mind.

He borrows a simile used in martial arts termed "mind like water". When a small object is thrown into a pool of water, the water responds appropriately with a small splash followed by quiescence. When a large object is thrown in the water again responds appropriately with a large splash followed by quiescence. The opposite of "mind like water" is a mind that never returns to quiescence but remains continually stressed by every input.

Allen recommends reflection from six levels, called "Horizons of Focus": Unlike some theories, which focus on top-down goal-setting, GTD works in the opposite direction. Allen argues that it is often difficult for individuals to focus on big picture goals if they cannot sufficiently control the day-to-day tasks that they frequently must face. Allen recommends scheduling a weekly review, reflecting on the different levels. The perspective gained from these reviews should drive one's priorities at the project level.

During a weekly review, determine the context for the tasks and put each task on its appropriate list. Context lists can be defined by the set of tools available or by the presence of individuals or groups for whom one has items to discuss or present. GTD is based on storing, tracking, and retrieving the information related to the things that need to get done.

Mental blocks we encounter are caused by insufficient 'front-end' planning. This means thinking in advance, generating a series of actions which can later be undertaken without further planning. The mind's "reminder system" is inefficient and seldom reminds us of what we need to do at the time and place when we can do it. Consequently, the "next actions" stored by context in the "trusted system" act as an external support which ensures that we are presented with the right reminders at the right time.

As GTD relies on external reminders, it can be seen as an application of the theories of distributed cognition or the extended mind. In , Wired called GTD "A new cult for the info age", [8] describing the enthusiasm for this method among information technology and knowledge workers as a kind of cult following. Allen's ideas have also been popularized through the Howard Stern Show Stern referenced it daily throughout 's summer and the Internet , especially via blogs such as 43 Folders , [9] Lifehacker , [10] and The Simple Dollar.

In , Ben Hammersley interviewed David Allen for The Guardian article titled "Meet the man who can bring order to your universe", [12] saying: In , Wired ran another article about GTD and Allen, [14] quoting him as saying "the workings of an automatic transmission are more complicated than a manual transmission From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the action management system by David Allen.

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