Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

Every person I have worked with in the past thirty years has uncovered at least two or three important gaps at this level of discussion. For instance, a common role a manager or executive has is “staff.” Upon reflection, most realize they need to add a project or two in that area, such as “Upgrade support office procedures,” “Research hiring a chief of staff,”

Horizons 3–5 Whereas the three lower levels have mostly to do with the current state of things—your actions, projects, and areas of responsibility—from Horizon 3 up the factors of the future and your direction and intentions are primary.

At the topmost level of thinking you’ll need to ask some of the ultimate questions: Why does your company exist? Why do you exist? What is the core DNA of your existence, personally and/or organizationally, that drives your choices? This is the big-picture stuff with which hundreds of books and gurus and models are devoted to helping you grapple. Why? This is the great question with which we all struggle. You can have all the other levels of your life and work shipshape, defined, and organized to a T. Still, if you’re the slightest bit off course in terms of what at the deepest level you want or are called to be doing, you’re going to be uncomfortable.

can safely say that virtually all of us could be doing more planning, more informally and more often, of our projects and our lives. And if we did, it would relieve a lot of pressure on our psyches and produce an enormous amount of creative output with minimal effort.

The sense of anxiety and guilt doesn’t come from having too much to do; it’s the automatic result of breaking agreements with yourself.

If the negative feelings come from broken agreements, you have three options for dealing with them and eliminating the negative consequences: Don’t make the agreement. Complete the agreement. Renegotiate the agreement.

when you really take on the responsibility to capture and track what’s on your mind, you’ll think twice about making commitments internally that you don’t really need or want to make.

Is there too much complaining in your culture? The next time someone moans about something, try asking, “So what’s the next action?” People will complain only about something that they assume could be better than it currently is. The action question forces the issue. If it can be changed, there’s some action that will change it. If it can’t, it must be considered part of the landscape to

“There are only two problems in life: (1) you know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it; and/or (2) you don’t know what you want.” If that’s true (and I think it is) then there are only two solutions: Make it up. Make it happen.

By this point you’ve probably noticed that Getting Things Done is not some new technology or invention—it simply makes explicit the principles at work within what we all do implicitly. But with that awareness, you can then leverage those principles consciously to create more elegant results.

The constructive evaluation of activities, asset allocations, communications, policies, and procedures against purposes and intended outcomes has become increasingly critical for every organization I know of.

One of the more popular concepts in this field, which has often been associated with GTD, has been the idea of “flow”—the state of optimal performance and engagement. Flow is what the athletes refer to as being “in the zone,” and it can be closely correlated with the idea of “mind like water,” which I introduced in the first chapter.