Early Book Review: Getting Things Done, by David Allen

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While I am still working through David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, the Art of Stress-Free Productivity; I would like to go ahead and begin my recommendations of it.

That being said, it requires input. If you are of the demographic that expects the world to center around you and it should be easy and carefree just because, this isn’t for you. If however, you are coming to the conclusion that paper is king (and paper can be digital), then this will put you into a higher gear of productivity.

GTD in a nutshell; Buckets for everything:

  • Inbox for dumping of your brain
  • Create the next action item needed to take you towards your objective
  • Create projects to house next actions that are due
  • Use review cycles to clean, maintain, and propagate movement

There is a much deeper granularity to this that I’ll put into words at another time. Basically, the concept is very easy. Get your brain into bins, clean the bins into smaller bins, bring up required items to calendars and other functions, and then just chew down the items and keep flowing new things to do into the system.

What you find is your brain can free itself from the mundane task of remembering and forgetting. Now instead of fretting over the next things to do, or what should be, it’s all down on paper. Your mind can now work on just accomplishing. Accomplishing leads to movement, which adds to momentum. The system begins to feed itself, your life starts picking up pace because you are following a protocol of handling things with ease. A simple positive reinforced feedback loop. Now that’s the loop I like to be in. Not worry over what I’m doing next.

If you have a Mac you might want to check out Tinderbox, which is an addictive freeform tool that allows you to build some amazing frameworks for harnessing knowledge but it’s not for everyone. If you do use it and want to apply GTD principles to it check out the GTD Template that Ryan Holcomb made.

I find myself every day investing more and more of what I am doing within Allen’s constructs. While not finished with his materials I am already sold due to what it is doing for me.

-a