Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

Everything in life worth achieving requires practice.

It is possible to be effectively doing while you are delightfully being, in your ordinary workaday world.

IT’S POSSIBLE FOR a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control.

(1) capturing all the things that might need to get done or have usefulness for you—now, later, someday, big, little, or in between—in a logical and trusted system outside your head and off your mind; (2) directing yourself to make front-end decisions about all of the “inputs” you let into your life so that you will always have a workable inventory of “next actions” that you can implement or renegotiate in the moment; and (3) curating and coordinating all of that content, utilizing the recognition of the multiple levels of commitments with yourself and others you will have at play, at any point in time.

Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax.

Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does.

most stress they experience comes from inappropriately managed commitments they make or accept.

First of all, if it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection tool, that you know you’ll come back to regularly and sort through. Second, you must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it. Third, once you’ve decided on all the actions you need to take, you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly.

You must use your mind to get things off your mind.

Now, describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for this problem or situation. In other words, what would need to happen for you to check this project off as “done”?

Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward. If you had nothing else to do in your life but get closure on this, what visible action would you take right now?

People think a lot, but most of that thinking is of a problem, project, or situation—not about it.

you were required to structure your thinking toward an outcome and an action, and that does not usually happen without a consciously focused effort. Reacting is automatic, but thinking is not.

Welcome to the real-life experience of “knowledge work,” and a profound operational principle: you have to think about your stuff more than you realize but not as much as you’re afraid you might.

This consistent, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy. —Kerry Gleeson

Even if you’ve already decided on the next step you’ll take to resolve a problem, your mind can’t let go until and unless you park a reminder in a place it knows you will, without fail, look. It will keep pressuring you about that untaken next step, usually when you can’t do anything about it, which will just add to your stress.

Research has now proven that a significant part of your psyche cannot help but keep track of your open loops, and not (as originally thought) as an intelligent, positive motivator, but as a detractor from anything else you need or want to think about, diminishing your capacity to perform.

Here’s how I define “stuff”: anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined what, exactly, it means to you, with the desired outcome and the next action step.

We need to transform all the “stuff” we’ve attracted and accumulated into a clear inventory of meaningful actions, projects, and usable information.

the key to managing all of your stuff is managing your actions.

because you can’t do a project at all! You can only do an action related to it.

the real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what associated next-action steps are required.

Getting things done requires two basic components: defining (1) what “done” means (outcome) and (2) what “doing” looks like (action).

There is usually an inverse relationship between how much something is on your mind and how much it’s getting done.

There is no reason to ever have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.

Any “would, could, or should” commitment held only in the psyche creates irrational and unresolvable pressure, 24-7.

A big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can’t do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means as soon as you tell yourself that you might need to do something, and store it only in your head, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time. Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now.

Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored only in your mind, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do them both at the same time. This produces a pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pinpointed.

We (1) capture what has our attention; (2) clarify what each item means and what to do about it; (3) organize the results, which presents the options we (4) reflect on, which we then choose to (5) engage with.

Ask yourself, “When do I need to see what, in what form, to get it off my mind?” You build a system for function, not just to have a system.

one of the major reasons many people haven’t had a lot of success with getting organized is simply that they have tried to do all five steps at one time.

A task left undone remains undone in two places—at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they gnaw at your conscience. —Brahma Kumaris

| Every open loop must be in your capture system and out of your head. 2 | You must have as few capturing buckets as you can get by with. 3 | You must empty them regularly.

I define a project as any desired result that can be accomplished within a year that requires more than one action step.

1 | Defining purpose and principles 2 | Outcome visioning 3 | Brainstorming 4 | Organizing 5 | Identifying next actions

creative constipation.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. —Will Rogers

“So, what are you really trying to do here, anyway?” (vision, purpose).

To know and to be clear about the purpose of any activity are prime directives for appropriate focus, creative development, and cooperation.

Here are just some of the benefits of asking why: It defines success. It creates decision-making criteria. It aligns resources. It motivates. It clarifies focus. It expands options.

If you’re not sure why you’re doing something, you can never do enough of it.

Just taking two minutes and writing out your primary reason for doing something invariably creates an increased sharpness of vision,

“What are we really trying to accomplish here?”

In other words, if you don’t really know when you’ve met your purpose or when you’re off track, you don’t have a viable directive. The question, “How will I know when this is off purpose?” must have a clear answer.

Whereas purpose provides the juice and the direction, principles define the parameters of action and the criteria for excellence of conduct.

In my experience, creating a list of what your real projects are and consistently managing your next action for each one will constitute 90 percent of what is generally thought of as project planning.

The habit of clarifying the next action on projects, no matter what the situation, is fundamental to you staying in relaxed control.

The smart part of us sets up things for us to do that the not-so-smart part responds to almost automatically, creating behavior that produces high-performance results. We trick ourselves into doing what we ought to be doing.

The big secret to efficient creative and productive thinking and action is to put the right things in your focus at the right time.

Things you name, you own. Collected but unnamed stuff owns you.