Time-Management
This is the best Self-Help Productivity book ever written. Well, I think so and I’ve been using it for 13 years. It has had such a profound impact on my working life that to this day, it is a part of my daily practice. I have the GTD apps on my phones and tablets, and it is a default webpage I load automatically in my browser. The greatest fear we have when we’re dealing with so many projects or issues or people is that item that we forget because our brain is maxed out with everything else that is flying at us. We need to get it out of our heads and into a trusted system so we can function clearly – today’s modern technology makes this easier. Plug for Toodledo.

I have read the typical time management books and if I hear the ‘big rocks first’ story one more time I’ll hurl one of them at someone. What struck home with me in this book was the recognition of things constantly coming our way throughout the day and more than probably from our bosses, or customers who don’t take kindly to being considered anything but a large rock. This book, therefore, deals with a very pragmatic and defined workflow for managing things we need to get done and understanding the priority. The workflow proffered here is

1. Collect
2. Process
3. Organise
4. Review.

The book is well written with a style that is easy to read and provides margin notes and images where appropriate. He tends to use bullet points and flowcharts which help illustrate important concepts. If you can take on-board just some of his concepts you’ll notice the difference immediately.

I would highly recommend this book and process for managing the To-Dos in your life.

This was a re-read, I first read this book some 15yrs ago. I found it inspirational, not as much for the actual “system” to get organized (although I borrowed some elements from it), but for the strong message that it’s important to have “a” system to stay organized and get things done, while also keeping a “mind like water” (ie, mind free from worries, etc)

Подходих с доста ниски очаквания към книгата, тъй като последно време ми е втръснало от книги за продуктивност и организация. Обикновено съветите са кошмарни и само докато четеш и вече се напрягаш. Обаче останах неочаквано очарована от GTD. Всъщност се чувствам надъхана да пробвам нещо ново и потенциално да ъпгрейдна системата, която ползвам да управлявам ежедневието и живота си като цяло.

Базовата информация за т.н. подход за Getting things done е най-интересното от книгата, но докато го четеш може да видиш, че е написано по начин, който очевидно е от време, когато технологиите не са били така развити и че опитът на автора е предимно в корпоративния свят. Всичко това, той го отбелязва още в началото. Това настрана, ако успееш да се абстрахираш и да видиш скелета на методологията му, всъщност си изумен колко лесно и приятно звучи. Малко ми напомни Мари Кондо, но Мари Кондо на to-do листите. :)

Последните няколко глави от книгата не бяха най-интересни. Там са според мен просто за пълнеж и да се оправдае това "ново", от 2015-та издание.

The book repeats a lot of basic efficiency tools - checklists, doing minor things asap, etc.

Besides from the classic "airport book" challenge of extending an idea to way too many pages, the book has two challenges in my view:

1) The book is probably most useful to young professionals, however, given that they don't have much experience yet, only a few of the tools are relevant. Most experienced people will probably already be doing checklists if that is something that matches how their brain works (which leads to my second point).

2) If the reader is experienced, then the person will most likely either a) already have started on techniques like checklists, or b) if checklists don't match the personality, then a book won't be the right way to learn this. Learning the techniques presented in the book naturally appeal to people who are already very structured.

***SPOILER ALERT***
In my view, the book could be summarized in a few bullets:
* Do anything that can be done in less than 2 minutes straight away
* Keep track of your tasks in lists
* Check your lists frequently so you don't lose track of what's important
* Create a simple system for your files including reminders if you need to get back to any of them at a set future point

The book argues that because technology is changing so rapidly, it doesn't make sense to recommended tools to how people can best accomplish the techniques. While this may be true, it does mean that the reader will anyhow have to invent their own process as most tools aren't flexible enough to cater for any kind of process.

My "tech stack" to solve the above as of this writing includes:
* OneNote (went away from using Evernote as prefer the OneNote app for iPhone/iPad)
* Gmail
* Google Calendar
* Google Keep
* Pen and paper (quick notes and drawings to structure my thoughts on the go before adding to OneNote for future retrieval)

I bought this book because I had been excited by using the free productivity software IQTELL which links emails, calendars, and to do lists, and has been built around the principles of Getting Things Done (GTD). Having found the software useful, I bought the book.

Frankly, I was disappointed, for two reasons. First, the version I read was an ancient one and give the impression that people had only just started to use computers, so it talked a lot about making lists on bits of paper. Secondly, although the GTD principles are explained clearly based on the author's many hours of experience of working with over-burdened and burnt-out executives, the principles are simple and could have been stated in about one tenth of the space. They needed a pamphlet, not a book. There was a lot of repetition and stating the obvious which I found tedious.

On the plus side, the GTD principles are interesting, different, and I am finding them useful. GTD deserves attention, even if they need presenting in a different way. I can thoroughly recommend the IQTELL free apps for busy people who are trying to regain some control of their lives and an understanding of GTD will help.

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 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 got a Mac, before OneNote came out for OSX, I migrated to Evernote for my personal and church things. 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?
We'll see. 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 15. 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.

I bought this book, and I read some of it. It sat on a shelf unfinished. I read some more. It sat in my car unfinished. I eventually made the decision to never finish it.

I think this is self-explanatory.

[Edit at a later date:]

Now I'm reading 26 Reasons Not to Use GTD, and it does a good job of articulating the "ehhhh"ness that I felt while reading this.

[Edit at an even later date:]

And if you think GTD's followers are a little cult-like (see, for instance, the angry comments on this review), check this out: When David Allen says in the acknowledgments "deepest thanks go to my spiritual coach, J-R", he's talking about a man named John-Roger "the Mystical Traveler", who believes he is a reincarnation of Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, and Abraham Lincoln. Allen is a minister in his Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness church. Yup.

I'm sure this would work for many but it is not something that would work for me.

2.65 stars.
I've used a mutated version of this for years, but thought I'd try the original text. I was disappointed. 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).

Also I thought the weekly/quarterly review needed more focus. Allen talks about the 20,000/50,000 foot view, but without enough detail on how to accomplish these.

I'd recommend reading through a summary instead of the whole book. There are people who explain Allen's system better than Allen.

Totally changed my organization.

The author is more productivity than man now, and it's a shame because you'd think that someone who gets paid to help corporate executives go through their backlogs of paperwork would have an anonymizable dirty secret or two to spill, or at least a sense of humor. There are a few individual good ideas, but I would rather have heard about them second hand or e.g. just observed a colleague who maintains an empty inbox. Several times I felt the author, imagining his book a hammer, mistook inappropriate things for nails, as when in one of the later chapters he suggests that you occasionally ask your family "what are the next steps here?" at the dinner table.

The writing is repetitive, as yours might become if you use a system of scraps of papers and little notes and so on to maintain stress free productivity for 20 years. An epilogue detailing possible side-effects of his System would be helpful in a future edition.

Check out my Booktube channel at: The Obsessive Bookseller

I love this book. I’ve read it twice and will probably read it again in the future to bask in the, as he calls it, “methodology” of the GTD system. I took a ton of inspiration and new techniques from the book the first time around, and honed it even further upon this second read. This review will be mostly my takeaways from read two, as it’s the most recent.

My favorite tips:

Inbox Processing: When processing your inbox, deal with everything in a strict top to bottom (FIFO/LIFO) system. Make decisions on what needs to happen next before you move on to the next thing. Nothing goes back into the inbox to be dealt with later. I get trapped in the endless email-checking cycles every day where I open gmail periodically to glance through my inbox and focus on just the most interesting things. I don’t actually DEAL with any of it, which in my mind is a complete waste of time and energy. Addictive technologies suck. Allen’s inbox processing strategy can really help me out if I can retrain myself to handle only one thing at a time by deciding on next actions required for each item. Ideally I’d leave everything unopened until I’m ready to process it fully. I’ve also heard this called the “one-touch” method. I’d like to get to a point where I only open my email once or twice a day, and when I do it’s with the intention of handling the things rather than mindlessly scrolling the things. PROCESSING not LOOKING. Asking myself, “What’s the next action?”

Capturing System: Each time I read this book I come away with a new perspective and more knowledge, but one valuable insight gets slammed home each time:

“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”

The GTD system helps you identify every single thing on your mind that keeps you from being fully present, and offers a way to offload them into a trusted system until you’re ready to tend to them. Since I started putting it into practice, I don’t spend as much time in my own head planning and stressing. If I do find myself there, I know that’s a sign I need to get back to my system.

The biggest takeaway from this second read is that I needed a better capturing system. One that I can trust. I’ve tried a few things over the years (everything from a bullet journal to emailing myself to-dos) and I think I finally found a tool that works for me (the app Todoist). Another thing I wasn’t doing well was taking time to REVIEW my captured items regularly. According to GTD, You need to review your captured items regularly enough to keep away the anxiety of forgetting things.

“The idea is to get comfortable enough with your system that you can completely rely on it not to let things slip through the cracks unintentionally. So that at any given moment you have the reassurance and confidence that whatever you’re choosing to do is what you ought to be doing.” (paraphrased)

What’s more, it makes you more at peace with what you’re NOT doing. I have so many things going on that I often feel swamped and overwhelmed. Being able to emphatically declare that I’m ignoring certain things for the day is liberating. Applying this correctly also means I’ll drop the ball less often.

The Two-Minute Rule: This is a concept from the book that often gets misconstrued. I’ve heard on countless organization lists that to stay on top of life, do anything immediately that can be done in two minutes or less. In the book, this strategy was specifically applied to when you’re processing your inbox and deciding on next actionable items for each item. Basically, if creating a task to-do (like “reply to this email”) takes longer to write down and file than it does to just do the task… just do the task. Allen even says that if you try the two-minute rule outside of the processing phase, you’ll spend your whole day tending to under two minute items, which can feel productive in the moment but may not be high-value enough to ultimately justify that much time. Before getting clarity on the intention behind this origin of the rule, I tried the commercialized version of tending to EVERYTHING and always found myself at the mercy of unimportant tasks all day long. I like it much better in this context. I do, however, subscribe to the advice of “put it away, not down” which is of the same spirit as the commercialized two-minute rule, but only applies to things you are already actively handling. That’s my addendum.

Applying GTD to my Reading Life: A fun new thing I’m doing is taking strategies and inspiration from these personal development books and applying them to reading. I realized a lot of my stress about reading had to do with feeling anxious about getting back to unfinished series. Combined with the ever-present stress that I’m not reading what I SHOULD be reading. Enter the GTD method: I began by combing through my resources and CAPTURING all of the series (one per piece of paper) I intend to continue into a little notebook. I identified 71 of them. 71!! No wonder I was stressed! Having to keep track of that many pending “projects” is one of the main reasons my mind was always jumping around and trying to priorities and get organized. I took those listed pages and PROCESSED each one into piles of priority. The NEXT ACTION REQUIRED was either “read” or “abandon.” After applying this process, that 71 list of open series turned into 15 high-priority series and 56 lesser-priorities. Much more manageable!! I don’t have 71 to focus on right now, just 15 (which is still high, but we’re working with baby steps here). I can also now rely on my stack of “captured” to-dos to keep track of what’s outstanding so I no longer have to carry it around in my head and stress about it. I now have the confidence that what I’m currently choosing to read is indeed the best use of my limited time. Love it!

Recommendations: Read this book. If you’re like me, the nitty-gritty details of the system is like organization porn and you’ll love every minute. It may even change your life.

Thank you to my Patrons: Dave, Katrin, Jen, Frank, Sonja, Staci, Kat, Betsy, Eliss, Mike, and Elizabeth! <3

Via The Obsessive Bookseller at www.NikiHawkes.com

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