Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

I was first exposed to 'Getting Things Done' (GTD) a few years back in an article about prolific modern knowledge workers and how they thrive amidst a frantic, constant information flow. The very best manage thousands of demands for attention each and every week (emails, voicemails, meetings, etc.) while completing a steady stream of projects both large and small. David Allen's 'Getting Things Done' presents a framework for doing just that while also achieving a sense of personal calm and heightened creativity. I've returned to this book many times over the years to tweak my own GTD implementation and David Allen never fails to inspire. Highly recommended.

This book teaches you how to free your mind of clutter, so that you can operate at your absolute best, to get many things done: from climbing the corporate ladder to running a business, to efficiently managing a family. It is a revolutionary approach which helps you clarify what needs to be done about anything, at any moment. This book shows you that no matter what needs to be accomplished, you get it done by breaking it down to one, two, three, and four etc. actionable tasks (the very next thing or things you will do) to get it done.

This is how I would sum the book up... How do you eat many elephants? You put them in a big box (labeling each elephant A-Z:), then eat it One Next bite at a time.

Why the book you say if the concept can be summed so simply...

The book will show...
How you have always been attempting to eat elephants in some fashion,
how you inefficiently think about the elephants (7 Habits of...),
how you can efficiently think about the elephants,
how to COLLECT and put many elephants in the box,
how to PROCESS the elephants (to eat or not to eat, that is the question),
ORGANIZE the elephants (legs with legs, trunks with trunks etc.),
How to REVIEW your eating progress (ok I've eaten lots of legs and trunks [which elephants are completely eaten], how many more - O no here comes another 50 elephants I've just agreed to eat, time to COLLECT, PROCESS, ORGANIZE, then REVIEW all over again. The saga continues...)

Think I've said too much and now you think you don't need the book guess again! The book is chalk full of ins and outs to effectively set this set of skills to work for you. The Getting Things Done method is simple enough that my ten year old son follows it, yet robust enough that CEOs run enterprises with the same concept.

David Allen did a good job. He guides the reader with important princples to complete a task. From the simplest task to the most complex projects, the principles are straightforward applicable.

This is part of the new story which says, you can't predict and control the future, you can only track your progress against an honest account of reality. Look into other sources like Holacracy and Agile Software development for examples of this story at different levels of scale.

Most time management books, even those well intentioned like Stephen Covey's "First Things First," are unhelpful. Most either tell you how to pile more stuff onto an already too full plate or are so elaborate to be impractical. As "Getting Things Done" points out starting from your goals and priorities often becomes so elaborate and involved most people just give up. Besides, you need to get things done and often those things are forced upon you having nothing to do with goals, passions and dreams.

"Getting Things Done" is the last book on time management and organization you'll ever need. The book isn't so much a system as a way of thinking, a way of life. It is about getting things out of your head so that you can think clearly instead of being clogged up with worries, to-dos and open items. Once you've gotten all the clutter out of your brain and onto paper you can "get them done" instead of worrying about them.

"Getting Things Done" is all about execution and productivity. It is practical, easy to use and remember, and effective. You will get more done with less stress and, for me most importantly, let go of things that were never going to get done in the first place. I've tried most time management systems and products, from Daytimer to Covey to Tracy. "Getting Things Done" works. It can be career and life changing.