A colleague recommended this book to me because I was seeing an adult client with ADHD. 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-improvement.

According to David Allen, we feel overwhelmed and distracted because we have too many commitments on our minds rather than taking action on them and/or filing them away in a system where we can revisit them as needed. 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.g., a wire tray that sits on your desk plus your e-mail inbox). 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.g., "calls," "at computer," "errands," "at office," "at home," "agendas" (for people and meetings), or "read/review." You should also keep a list of your ongoing multi-step projects, to be reviewed weekly, with "next steps" categorized into the above categories. 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. You then review your tickler file for that day and your general lists of next actions (e.g., calls to make, things to do at the computer, errands, etc.) to think about what can be done today, where, and when. There's also the issue of choosing which actions to take in the moment, which involves evaluating your context (e.g., are you near a phone? are you near your computer? are you in the car and available for errands?), time available, energy available, and priority (i.e., out of all the options you could take now in this context, with this amount of time and energy available, which is the most important?).

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., review past calendar dates for actionable items, review upcoming calendar dates, document and categorize all open loops and their next actions, review project lists and evaluate what needs to be done, review next action lists, and review any additional checklists.

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.

Ironically, looking in to the GTD (Getting Things Done) system has been bouncing around in the back of my head as something to do for quite some time now. This approach to maximizing productivity is popular among the nerdegalian, probably because of its minimum bullshit approach to actually processing, classifying, and executing what the author David Allen calls "stuff to do." This book discusses the GTD system in its entirety and, more importantly, teaches you how to put it in place.

What I really liked about Allen's work is that it's very straight forward and focused on implementation. It seems like other self-help books in this vein that I've perused are all about inspiration, defining values, motivating yourself, getting in touch with your inner being and letting loose the full potential of you. To those authors I'd like to say the following: No. Stop it. I don't need nor want that, so you can cram it with walnuts, buddy. GTD, in comparison, is prescriptive. Allen gets touchy-feeling in a few places (such as discussing prioritization or project definition) but the vast majority of the book takes a very practical approach to digging yourself out of whatever mountain of commitments you've gotten yourself under and how to stay on top of it once you get there.

In short, GTD focuses on getting "stuff" --commitments, to do items, reminders to gather information, requests for information or actions, etc.-- out of your short-term memory and into a physical, highly organized system that will remind you of the right stuff at the right time. Dumping everything out of your short-term memory allows you to do something that's very critical to productivity: focus on one thing at a time. If you're confident that your other commitments or to-dos are safely stored away somewhere and will not be lost or buried out of sight, you can devote all your attention, time, and mental energy to one thing before knocking it out and moving on to the next. I like to think of the system as an artificial, external, and infinitely scalable attention span that you can connect to and disconnect from as needed.

That's all well and good, but it's probably not beyond the ken of your average retarded monkey. The tough (and in some places nonintuitive) part is the implementation. Again, there's tons more detail, tricks, and tips in the book, but I'll try to capture the gist of it. There are four major parts to the GTD system:

1. Collecting incoming stuff
2. Processing the stuff
3. Doing the stuff
4. Regularly reviewing your system to make sure your action items and project lists are up to date

Collecting stuff is easy. That's just letting stuff accumulate in your physical or virtual receptacles like inboxes, voice mail, or e-mail.

Processing stuff is more involved. It requires sitting down with your inboxes and emptying them. That doesn't mean immediately doing the work associated with each piece of stuff as you pick it up --prioritization is important. It means taking a piece of stuff --an e-mail, a document, a voice mail-- and doing something with it: act on it right then, file it, trash it, delegate it, or create what Allen calls a "Next Action" item associated with it. Again, the book is replete with practical tips, hacks, tools, and rules of thumb for deciding which of these things to do and how to keep it all straight. Therein lies some of the book's best value, but it's too detailed to go into here.

Doing the stuff is self explanatory, but again I'll emphasize the value of being able to focus on one thing at a time without worrying that other things will be forgotten. It's much more productive and much less stressful.

Regularly reviewing your system is also important, and comes in two flavors: as needed and weekly. You may review your action item list (a.k.a., your "to do list") several times a day as needed, if for nothing but that endorphin rush that comes with checking things off as "done" and deciding what to tackle next. Weekly reviews are also important, and are different in that you take the time to check on your list of active projects and make sure you have a Next Action item for each and every one.

So I really like the book and its system. I'd recommend it to anyone who feels like they're not being productive enough or getting buried in work. Allen only gets mushy and non-specific in a few places that make it seem like he's trying to pad the page count, but the majority of the book is specific, direct, and practical. I also like that Allen is in tune with the modern technology that most professionals encounter. He spends appropriate amounts of time discussing things like e-mail, Outlook and voice mail. He also talks about implementing GTD with high-tech tools like PDAs, Web 2.0 systems, and palmtop computers, but while GTD lends itself well to these kinds of toys, at its heart it is technology agnostic. You could do the whole thing quite effectively with a pen, some paper, and a bunch of file folders. Indeed, some parts of the system, like the tickler file work best that way.

I read this book for the 3rd time now and it's been over 5 years since last time. To my surprise I still follow majority of the principles that are described and many of them even without relating them to this book (for example stressing the importance of weekly review). The principles are very valid even today but it's been over 15 years from publishing the book and back then focus was primarily on the "offline stuff" which is much less relevant today and cannot be carried over to "online" without modifications.

The five stages of mastering workflow: to collect, process, organize, review and do:

What is it? Is it actionable?
If not, trash it, put it in a tickler file or put it in a reference file.
If so, what’s the next action? The next action is defined as the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion.
Will next action take less than 2 minutes?
If yes, do it.
If no, delegate it or defer it.
If it will take longer than 2 minutes, consider it a project (defined as requiring more than one action step) and put it in your project plans which will be reviewed for actions.

The five phases of project planning:
1. Defining purpose and principles
2. Outcome visioning
3. Brainstorming
4. Organizing
5. Identifying next action

Stress-free productivity

1. Setting up the time, space and tools
2. Collection: corralling your "stuff"
3. Processing: Getting "In" to Empty
4. Organizing: Setting up the right buckets
5. Review: Keeping the system functional
6. Doing: Making the best action choices
7. Getting Projects under control

Power of key principles:

The power of collection habit
The power of next-action decision
The power of outcome focusing

Working on different levels of life:

50,000 + feet: Life
40,000 feet: Three- to five-year visions
30,000 feet: One-to two-year goals
20,000 feet: Areas of responsibility
10,000 feet: Current projects
Runway: Current actions

“If you don't pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”

“You don't actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it "done.”

“Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.”

The main idea of this book is awesome & it really works. On the other hand, the details are not that important.
Rather than a book, the whole idea can be delivered in a long blog-post.
If you find a good summary of the book, no need to read it.

كتابنا لهذا اليوم بعنوان:

الإنجاز: فن الإنتاجية المتحررة من الضغوط

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

للكاتب ديفيد ألين

يرى المؤلف أن المفتاح الأساسي في الانجاز هو التحرر من الضغوط و الاسترخاء الذهني. فالتخطيط الجيد و إدارة الوقت و إدارة الأولويات و غيرها من المهارات الإدارية كلها لا تفيد إذا ما طرأ خلل لم يكن بالحسبان ثم نتج عن هذا الخلل ضغوط نفسية لدى الإنسان ولا يتمكن من السيطرة عليها، فتؤدي بدورها إلى تسلل الإحباط و انخفاض الانتاجية.

و حيث أن هذا الخلل المربك للخطط و المشاريع متكرر بصفة مستمرة و يومية في حياة الإنسان فلذلك لزم على الإنسان أن يتعلم مهارة الاسترخاء و عدم الوقوع فريسة للضغوط.

المبدأ الذي يحاول ان يرسيه الكتاب هو أن القدرة على الإنتاج تتناسب طردياً مع القدرة على الاسترخاء وقت الضغوط! و يبرر ذلك بأن الانتاج المجدي و المتقن لا يمكن ان ينتج إلا عن ذهن صافي و أفكار منظمة غير مرتبكة.

يعرض الكتاب مجموعة من المهارات و الممارسات الذهنية و النفسية و العملية التي يمكن للإنسان من خلال ممارستها أن يقاوم الضعوط و يحافظ على توازنه و تنظيم أفكاره مهما كانت الإرباكات المحيطة به متعددة و كبيرة.

Since the age of 14 I’ve been obsessed with how to make the most of each day, how to use my time to the greatest effect. So I’ve read a fair number of books on this topic and gleaned principles along the way. This is the best book of its kind I have read so far. Maybe I feel this way because David Allen takes a similar approach to my own in getting things done. He confirm that some of my intuitive time-management practices are sound and effective. Allen also taught me how to refine those processes and make them more conscious. And he added new strategies to my repertoire that I am excited to incorporate.

Besides all the practical strategies I got from this book, I relearned an important life principle, this time through the lens of productivity. Tasks you tell yourself to do or projects that you make an agreement with yourself to take care of and then don't do not only clutter your mind and make it hard to concentrate on anything, they actually feel like broken promises to yourself and weigh on your spirit. To have what the author describes as a “mind like water,” meaning a mind that is fluid, creative, relaxed, and capable of sustained attention, requires that you know what you have to do right away and what you have agreed with yourself you can put off. You have to be able to feel good about what you are not doing right now in order to feel good about what you are doing right now.

If you keep agreements with yourself, you will feel peaceful. If you break them you will feel bogged down and guilty. The mind and spirit do not differentiate between small, relatively insignificant tasks, like getting your carpets cleaned, which you told yourself you would do this month or important life resolutions, like spending more time with your children, which you to told yourself you would do this month as well. They are both just broken agreements that weigh on you if you don’t follow through.

So here is the biggest gem from this book: Renegotiate with yourself often. This is how you keep a mind like water. You renegotiate your list. You go through your in-box every day and assign everything a spot. You look at each project on your project list at least once a week, deciding what the next action is and adding it to the appropriate list, determining when you will do it. Allen says that the day most people feel best about their work is the day before they go on vacation because that is when most people take the time to renegotiate their to-do list and reassign every task a spot. You can feel like that all the time if you regularly process your in-box, assign everything a spot, and then frequently renegotiate what will be done and when.

Allen acknowledges that there is never enough time in this life to do everything. But when you have a good system, you can feel peaceful about what you are choosing to do at each moment and enter fully into the experience with attention and presence of mind.

From the man who started the entire GTD movement !

Quotes :
-------

"Not emptying your in-basket is like having garbage cans that nobody has dumped. You just have to keep buying new ones to hold all your trash."

"I recommend that you create a Someday Maybe List... Give yourself permission to populate that list with all the items of that type... You'll probably discover that simply having the list and starting to fill it out will cause you to come up with all sorts of creative ideas. You might also be surprised to find that some of the things you write on the list will actually come to pass, almost without your having to make any conscious effort to make them happen."

"We're likely to seize opportunities when they arise if we've already identified and captured them as a probability."

"Your system cannot be static."

"What most people don't realize is that my lists are, in one sense, my office."

"What is the weekly review? Very simply, the weekly review is whatever you need to do to get your head empty again. The weekly review is so critical that it behooves you to establish good habits, environments, and tools to support it. Once your comfort zone has been established for the kind of related control that Getting Things Done is all about, you won't have to worry too much about making yourself do your review - you'll have to get back to your personal standards again."

"Where did the not-so-good feelings come from? Too much to do? No, there's always too much to do... It comes from a different place. How have you felt when someone broke an agreement with you? What are all those things in your in-basket? Agreements you've made with yourself."

"... Every agreement must be made conscious - that is, it must be captured, objectified, and reviewed regularly in full conscious awareness so that you can put it where it belongs... If that doesn't happen, it will take up much more psychic energy than it deserves."

"If [the mind] is only focusing on one thing at a time without distraction, you'll be in your zone. I suggest you use your mind to think about things rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself that they exist."

"There's a great difference however between making that decision when things show up and doing it when they blow up."

"I learned this simple but extraordinary "Next Action" technique 20 years ago from a long-time friend and management consulting mentor of mine, Dean Aitchison... One day he just started picking up each individual piece of paper on an executive's desk and forcing him to decide what the very next thing he had to do was to move it forward. The results were so immediate and so profound for the executive that Dean continued for years to perfect the methodology using that same question to process the in-basket."

"What's ironic is that it would likely require only about 10 seconds of thinking to figure out what the next action would be for almost everything on your list."

"We are all already powerful. But deciding on and effectively managing the physical actions required to move things forward seems to exercise that power... Once you make things happen, you really start to believe that you can make things happen."


.

Probably the best self-help book I ever read - in any case the one I most adapted to the organization of my life. It does not have an annoying religious aura to it like 7 Habits or the selfish haberdashery spirit of How to Win Friends and Influence People, but is down to earth and highly practical. I was able to get to Inbox Zero and have held on to that principal for years now. If folks are interested, I can repost here my own adaptation of the techniques. Still for me a reference!

My advice: the inbox method is truly important and infinitely helpful. I figured it out and truly feel less overwhelmed and stressed out by email.

Step 1
Create folders in your various mail programs called
_01 TODO - this is for items that take more than 2 min to read and take action on
_02 TO READ - these are for things you want to read later: newsletters, long explanatory emails, etc
_03 FOLLOWUP - these are things you cannot completed but are waiting on feedback from someone else
_04 WAITING FOR - these are actions you cannot complete and require action from someone else
_05 TICKLER - projects you don’t have time for, but you want to get around to in the near future
_06 UPCOMING TRAVEL - air, car, hotel, tickets for future events and travel

Step 2
With a free hour ahead of you, go through your inbox and apply the following rules
1. If you can take action on the item in less than 2 minutes, do it
2. Else, sort according to the rules above

Step 3
Rinse and repeat

Let me know how it goes for you :-)

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/

Before I justify the five-star rating, there are a couple of qualifications:

1. This book is written toward a certain audience: well-to-do people, mostly business executives, mostly men, mostly older. 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 will be easier to peel the husk and get to the tasty nougat center.

2. 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. What it MIGHT do is help you get a clean brain in order to venture into the fog with confidence. 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." It's way simple, and after using the system for about a month, I can say that it's way effective, at least for me.

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:

"Okay, I need a new computer. But first I need to figure out whether I'm getting a Mac or a PC. My friend Dana has a Mac and loves to talk about it. My next action on this should be to call Dana."

It was a transformative experience to sit down with all the clutter in my life and break it down into next actions. 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.e., you don't get to lounge about all day writing or painting or watching the stars), then GTD may be a way to give yourself a clean mental slate when you want to do personal creative work.

I feel like this book borders on being too outdated to be helpful in 2020. While there are still some tips that are useful and can be translated to modern day, in my opinion there aren't enough to warrant reading this whole book to hear them.
Also this is way more of a book on 'organisation' (especially organising your work area) than a guide on how to be more 'productive'
If you're anything like me; someone who knows how to plan properly but has trouble actually executing tasks and completing things, then this book isn't going to help you very much.

* i've given the book a 3 star rating however because it's not the book's fault that it was published almost 20 years ago and isn't helpful anymore*

I went through parts of this book/lecture series when I was an undergrad, but am revisiting the audiobook now. It provides some very helpful ways to look at life and how you do the things you do.

There are some key points in this book that can really change how you conduct your life. For me, a few of the big things are:

(1) if you keep everything you worry about doing in your mind, you'll have more anxiety. Instead you should write everything down that you have to do in some sort of trusted system so that your mind is free to enjoy whatever it is you're doing at the moment instead of worrying about some random thing you have to do later.

(2) If it takes 2 minutes or less, just do it now. For me, this means quit putting off sending emails that only take a minute anyway.

(3) Break big projects down into smaller actions that can be done. Instead of writing the name of some project on your to do list, think of next specific actions that you must do to move forward with that project.

(4) Once you get the day-to-day things done—once you clear your mind—then your life is more freed up to be creative and to do the things you want.