Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

people remove stress and anxiety from their work and personal lives, so they can match every moment of their existence to the purposes they would most like to pursue. Yet with a very few exceptions—for instance, his sensible insistence on developing a “capture” habit,

this book is not so much concerned with getting things done as it is championing appropriate engagement with your world—guiding you to make the best choice of what to do in each moment, and to eliminate distraction and stress about what you’re not doing.

The methods I present here are all based on three key objectives: (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.

Organizations are now almost universally in morph mode,

The average professional is more of a free agent these days than ever before, changing

The relative speed of changes in our cultures, lifestyles, and technologies are creating greater necessity for individuals to take more control of their unique personal situations, more often.

Nothing is really new in this high-tech, globally wired world, except how frequently it is.

What you’ve probably discovered, at least at some level, is that a calendar, though important, can really effectively manage only a small portion of what you need to be aware of to feel on top of your world.

There has been a missing piece in our culture of knowledge work: a system with a coherent set of behaviors and tools that functions effectively at the level at which work really happens. It must incorporate the results of big-picture thinking as well as the smallest of open details. It must manage multiple tiers of priorities. It must maintain control over hundreds of new inputs daily. It must save a lot more time and effort than are needed to maintain it. It must make it easier to get things done.

Reflect for a moment on what it actually might be like if your personal management situation were totally under control, at all levels and at all times. What if you had completely clear mental space, with nothing pulling or pushing on you unproductively? What if you could dedicate fully 100 percent of your attention to whatever was at hand, at your own choosing, with no distraction?

start to feel out of control, stressed out, unfocused, bored, and stuck—do you have the ability to get yourself back into it? That’s where the methodology of Getting Things Done will have the greatest impact on your life, by showing you how to get back to mind like water, with all your resources and faculties functioning at a maximum level.

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

You’ve probably made many more agreements with yourself than you realize, and every single one of them—big or little—is being tracked by a less-than-conscious part of you. These are the “incompletes,” or “open loops,”

Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind,

clarify exactly what your commitment is and

you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly.

you have to think about your stuff more than you realize but not as much as you’re afraid you might.

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

Stuff is not inherently a bad thing. Things that command or attract our attention, by their very nature, usually show up as stuff. But once we allow stuff to come into our lives and work, we have an inherent commitment to ourselves to define and clarify its meaning.

Before you can achieve any of that, though, you’ll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind.

What you do with your time, what you do with information, and what you do with your body and your focus relative to your priorities—those are the real options to which you must allocate your limited resources.

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).

Horizontal control maintains coherence across all the activities in which you are involved.

Vertical control, in contrast, manages thinking, development, and coordination of individual topics and projects.

“project planning” in the broad sense.

The big difference between what I do and what others do is that I capture and organize 100 percent of my stuff in and with objective tools at hand, not in my mind.

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.

In order for your mind to let go of the lower-level task of trying to hang on to everything, you have to know that you have truly captured everything that might represent something you have to do or at least decide about,

As soon as you attach a “should,” “need to,” or “ought to” to an item, it becomes an incomplete.

Basically, everything potentially meaningful to you is already being collected, in the larger sense. If it’s not being directly managed in a trusted external system of yours, then it’s resident somewhere in your mental space.

three requirements to make the capturing phase work: 1 | 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.

Too much stuff is left piled in in-trays (physical and digital) because of a lack of effective systems “downstream” from there.

What do you need to ask yourself (and answer) about each e-mail, text, voice mail, memo, page of meeting notes, or self-generated idea that comes your way?

The outer ring of the workflow diagram shows the eight discrete categories of reminders and materials that will result from your processing all your stuff. Together they make up a total system for organizing just about everything that’s on your plate, or could be added to it, on a daily and weekly basis.

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

initially creating a single list of all of them will make it easier to customize your system appropriately as you get more comfortable with its usage.

What does need to be tracked is every action that has to happen at a specific time or on a specific day (enter those on your calendar); those that need to be done as soon as they can (add these to your Next Actions lists); and all those that you are waiting for others to do (put these on a Waiting For list).

Three things go on your calendar: time-specific actions; day-specific actions; and day-specific information

No More “Daily To-Do” Lists on the Calendar Those

Having a working game plan as a reference point is always useful, but it must be able to be renegotiated at any moment.

The way I look at it, the calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all.

So where do your entire action reminders go? On Next Actions lists,

This is the “parking lot” for projects that would be impossible to move on at present but that you don’t want to forget about entirely. You’d like to be reminded of the possibility at regular intervals.

you take a look at all your outstanding projects and open loops, at what I call Horizon 1 level (see page 55), on a weekly basis.

Everything that might require action must be reviewed on a frequent enough basis to keep your mind from taking back the job of remembering and reminding.

And the more you trust it, the more complete you’ll be motivated to keep it. The Weekly Review is a master key to maintaining that standard.

The basic purpose of this workflow-management process is to facilitate good choices about what you’re doing at any point in time. At

THE KEY INGREDIENTS of relaxed control are (1) clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure, and (2) reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly. This is what I call horizontal focus. Although it may seem simple, the actual application of the process can create profound results.

Your mind goes through five steps to accomplish virtually any task: 1 | Defining purpose and principles 2 | Outcome visioning 3 | Brainstorming 4 | Organizing 5 | Identifying next actions