Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

A bit too detailed for my taste, but there are some magnificent principles involved here. I learned a lot.

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 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. Read, go!

Update: one month later, I can say that I do feel less stressed about things, and I'm getting things done like never before. 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 7:30), when we get to go over every project and make sure that everything's on track. 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.

Did not finish (but wasn't meaning to either);
My brother gave this to me in an attempt to reduce my usual stress levels. According to him the first three chapters were the most useful. After skimming through the book I agree so I stuck to those, but I might read the rest of the book later. The writer gives the reader a concept for reducing stress by making a planning and an action plan. This sounds simple but it is elaborated really well and there are some surprising elements. Some eye-openers: David Allen says that the reasons some things give you stress are that you either haven't clarified what the intended outcome is, you haven't decided the next physical action step, or you haven't put reminders of the action required in a system you trust. Such a thing is referred to in the book as 'stuff' (because it hasn't been defined properly yet). Now that I think about it this applies to most things I'm currently stressed about.

Some quotes (also for myself to reread):
"It is possible to be effectively doing while you are delightfully being"
"Rule your mind or it will rule you"
"The beginning is half of every action"
"Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because the doing of them has not been defined"
"There is usually an inverse proportion between how much something is on your mind and how much it's getting done."
"There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought"

I don't know how I missed this productivity classic in all the years since it was published. Turns out there's a GTD cult to go with the book, it's SO popular.

The book is all practical, all realism. It has nothing to do with thinking about your goals; it leaves that up to you. It's all about how to organize your stuff and your lists to get them done.

It's been criticized for being both too general and too detailed, but the generality accommodates complexity, and the details are an essential component of the system.

On the whole, I'm a fan. If I weren't already pretty tooled up with mental, emotional, and practical productivity skills, I would not think it worthy of the cult. I don't think it comprehensive enough to be a sole source of a system. What I got out of it was an essential suite of concepts that really filled the gaps in my process, and I'm looking forward to finding more efficiency refinements from it.

What was truly life-changing for me, though, was processing all my paper in the prescribed method. My filing system is a functional beauty, and I save SO much time just being able to reach straight for something. THAT was worth every minute.

I almost gave this book five stars because of how useful it is, but it just lacks a punchiness and conciseness that could have made it better.

But I’m really glad I read this business book from the 90s with the boring cover. It sounds like the most mundane book, and I kind of assumed that it would only have obvious things in it that I already knew.

So I’m really glad my boss at my last job recommended it to me. I had been sharing with him about how I struggle with constant decision anxiety over what to do next, long lists of things… I’m really ADHD and I make lists on lists on lists and always have way more things to do than I can possibly ever do. Maybe I can do a tenth of it in my lifetime. Maybe.

I also have piles of things all over my house—well, not any more! I HAD piles of things all over my house, because this book convinced me to put everything into one “inbox” and then process it all. And I’m glad I did. I haven’t processed the whole inbox yet, but just putting everything in one place has already helped me quite a bit.

I didn’t realize how much anxiety it was giving me to have all of these random items, piles of items, baskets of items, whatever, lying in all these different areas all over my house. I feel so much more serene already. But I won’t be fully satisfied until I’ve actually processed the pile. Which I’m planning to do Monday, and honestly, I can’t wait to get that freedom of knowing that EVERYTHING in my life that needs to be done is captured in one system.

This book has principles that are really simple, kind of basic and obvious in hindsight. Some of them I had already figured out, some I hadn’t, but the real beauty of this book is that when you put all of these building blocks together, you get a system that is airtight, that lets your mind rest and stop having anxiety about everything you need to do and aren’t doing. No more vague worrying about whether you have some deadlines coming up, or whether there’s something you should have already done and what the consequences might be. No more worrying about forgetting things. No more of any of that.

Because when you implement this system fully, then you know that all of the things you need to do are all written down and are all tracked in your system and that when there are time-dependent tasks, you will get a reminder from yourself that will show up at the appropriate time.

You also have certain habits you do to review different lists regularly so you’re always up-to-date on making sure that you are, at any current moment, doing the right thing. And that is so awesome because then you can just get in the flow of DOING, one simple thing at a time, without all the background anxieties related to productivity. You can just get in a zen, unworried state.

Honestly, I’m excited. I can just feel my blood pressure going down as I implement each part of this system and get closer and closer to that airtightness.

That said, yes, many little details in this book are clearly outdated. He wrote this in a time when the world was in a hybrid state between physical paper and digital. Obviously we now live in an age where we have way better digital calendars etc. So yes, lots of little details in here are outdated, and it would be great for this book to have an update, but putting all of that aside…

None of that really mattered to me too much, because he teaches you concepts in such a way that you can implement them in multiple ways. He helps you understand the principles and doesn’t get hung up with “do it with this exact tool”…even though it is really precise and detailed, at the same time. I am doing a couple of things differently than he recommends but the point is that I am now implementing a system with that airtight system. My productivity is really going up.

Just a note, this book will not do anything for helping you decide what is actually important, or how to make a good strategy or have good vision…those are all for other books (and if you’re interested, I’d recommend Start With Why and What’s Your Problem?).

The way he describes it is, I’m not going to talk to you in this book about how to make sure you’re sailing in the right direction. But I will help you run a really good, tight ship that you’ll be proud of.

So thankful for this.

While David Allen has a lot of great ideas and the concept of applying a massive productivity program to your life is appealing, the entire book can essentially be summed up as "1. Either do stuff when it comes up, do it later, or get other people to do it for you. 2. Write stuff down so you don't forget to do it. 3. $15, please." Allen also has an incredibly smug and off-putting classist mentality, at one point talking about how "your children's nanny" won't need to use these skills and never using down-to-earth hypotheticals when he can invoke a vacation home or private jet instead.

I really liked this book a lot. I didn't like it as much for its detailed descriptions of physically how to organize things (some of those are way over the top... thirty-one folders, one for each day of the month? Really? And then twelve more for the next twelve months? You've got to be kidding me!) as for the basics of how to think about the stuff you have to do. Maybe it was easier for me to see the point because I was already well on my way to creating my own similar system; I had put most of the things I needed to get done into what I thought was a comprehensive list (turns out Allen had some categories of things that I hadn't thought of adding, but it was as comprehensive as I thought at the time that I could make it) and had begun to categorize them, but Allen helped me kick my thinking up a notch. He also helped me understand why the system I was building had been helping me, and what I could to to make it help even more.

Allen's primary mantra is this: if it needs doing, get it out of your head and into a system where you will find it at the appropriate time. His secondary mantra is: what's the next step that needs to be taken to advance this task? In a nutshell, the idea is that whenever a task or project comes your way, you immediately record it on paper, or into your computer, or whatever works. Later when you can make a few minutes, process those items to figure out what step needs to be taken to get them rolling, and categorize them into things that need doing immediately, things that can be put off, things that can be delegated, and things that actually don't need doing and can go into the trash can. Once everything that needs doing is cataloged and processed this way, you wind up with an extensive list of incremental steps you can take to advance everything you need to do. It lowers the barriers to getting started on things, and it very nearly eliminates even the temptation to procrastinate, because it's just so fun to be able to check things off your list!

I did find the book repetitive in a few spots; a couple of times I wondered if I had the wrong disc of the audiobook in the player because I recognized whole paragraphs from earlier on. I've mentioned that some of the implementation details, such as using physical in-baskets and label-maker machines and single-handedly keeping the file-folder industry afloat, seem a bit dated in an age where everyone carries a smartphone and data is increasingly available in the cloud from anywhere at any time. And I have to admit that in a few spots my mind wandered a bit when Allen described situations that are far removed from my own (I'm not a CEO, and some experiences which are apparently common to CEOs are completely foreign to my frame of reference) or when he began to wax less concrete and more philosophical. And as someone who doesn't have a chance to travel very much, I found his recurring airplane analogy a bit annoying, although it's a perfectly good analogy (or maybe not, because he had used it a good four or five times when I realized that by "runway level" he meant "at the highest level of detail" and not "about to take off"). But I will say that I intend, as the author recommends, to review the book maybe four or five months from now and see if I find things in it that I missed before.

The basic principles in this book are so common-sense and simple that although they require a bit of a time investment at the outset to get going, I can't help but believe wholeheartedly that they can be effectively used by just about anyone. The book was recommended to me by someone who saw the system I was building for myself and recognized that I had stumbled on some of Allen's principles, and I would without hesitation recommend it to others. I just wish the guy who told me about it had told me years earlier!

Für Einige ist dieses Buch ein absolutes Must-Read, für Andere sind GTD-Anhänger fast wie eine Sekte, was wahrscheinlich damit zusammenhängt, dass der Autor einem Kult angehört und ihm das Buch praktisch widmet.
Ich war gespannt ob dieses System es mir tatsächlich erleichtern kann alle Aufgaben die anfallen zu erledigen. Und im Groben ist das Ganze wirklich leicht umzusetzen, wenn der Beginn auch etwas zeitaufwändig ist.

Das Ganze ist sehr detailliert erklärt und teilweise repetitiv, so dass man am Ende wirklich jede Kleinigkeit verstanden hat und verinnerlichen kann. Gleichzeitig wird es so simpel dargestellt, dass es direkt motiviert, mit dem Organisieren zu beginnen.
Einiges war für mich irrelevant, der Autor fordert aber auch immer wieder dazu auf selbst darüber nachzudenken und nur die Dinge anzunehmen, die einem selbst wirklich helfen.

Ich konnte für mich Einiges aus dem Buch mitnehmen. Das System in Gänze zu übernehmen, wäre mir zu viel aber es gibt ein paar Dinge bzw. Methoden, die mich wirklich überzeugen und die ich anwenden kann.