Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself. Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no such thing. Aristocrats do not strive; they have already arrived.

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

“Boy, that was an amorphous blob of undoability!”

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

The trouble is, however, that most people are so embroiled in commitments on a day-to-day level that their ability to focus successfully on the larger horizon is seriously impaired.

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

Keep everything in your head or out of your head. If it’s in between, you won’t trust either one.

1 | Defining purpose and principles 2 | Outcome visioning 3 | Brainstorming 4 | Organizing

5 | Identifying next actions

But what happens if you don’t plan ahead of time? In many cases, crisis!

It never hurts to ask the why question.

The great thing about external brainstorming is that in addition to capturing your original ideas, it can help generate many new ones that might not have occurred to you if you didn’t have a mechanism to hold your thoughts and continually reflect them back to you. It’s as if your mind were to say, “Look, I’m only going

You know how shopping at a big store with lots of options lets you feel comfortable about your choice? The same holds true for project thinking.

Most projects, given my definition of a project as an outcome requiring more than one action, need no more than a listing of their outcome and next action for you to get them off your mind.

It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of action. —O. H. Mowrer

You may find you have a tendency, while processing your in-tray, to pick something up, not know exactly what you want to do about it, and then let your eyes wander to another item farther down the stack and get engaged with it. That item may be more attractive to you because you know right away what to do with it—and you don’t feel like thinking about what’s in your hand. This is dangerous territory. What’s in your hand is likely to land on a “hmph” stack on the side of your desk because you become distracted by something easier, more important, or more interesting below it.

Errands It makes a lot of sense to group together in one place reminders of all the things you need to do when you’re out and about.

Standing meetings and people you deal with on an ongoing basis often need their own Agenda list.

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.

While some people try to archive texts or voice mails that they still need to do something about, that’s not the most effective way to manage the reminders embedded in them.

When you assess something as a problem instead of as something to simply be accepted as the way things are, you are assuming there is a potential resolution.

The problem most people have psychologically with all their stuff is that it’s still stuff—that is, they haven’t decided what’s actionable and what’s not. Once you’ve made a clean distinction about which is which, what’s left as reference should have no pull or incompletion associated with it—it’s just your library.

Activating and maintaining your Someday/Maybe category unleashes the flow of your creative thinking—you have permission to imagine cool things to do without having to commit to doing anything about them yet.

If you have a project that you don’t really need to think about now but that deserves a flag at some point in the future, you can pick an appropriate date and put a reminder about the project in your calendar for that day.

THE PURPOSE OF this whole method of workflow management is not to let your brain become lax, but rather to enable it to be free to experience more elegant, productive, and creative activity.

A real review process will lead to enhanced and proactive new thinking in key areas of your life and work. Such thinking emerges from both focused concentration and serendipitous brainstorming, which will be triggered and galvanized by a consistent personal review of your inventory of actions and projects.

The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge of all. Once you’ve tasted what it’s like to have a clear head and feel in control of everything that’s going on, can you do what you need to do to maintain that as an operational standard?

get clear, get current, and get creative.

Are there any new, wonderful, harebrained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas you can capture and add into your system, or “external brain”?

Urging you to operate from a higher perspective is, however, its implicit purpose—to assist you in making your total life expression more fulfilling and better aligned with the bigger game you’re all about.

Getting things done, and feeling good about it, means being willing to recognize, acknowledge, and appropriately engage with all the things within the ecosystem of your consciousness.

Handle what has your attention and you’ll then discover what really has your attention.

Knowing you have that ability will give you permission to play a bigger game. It’s truly empowering.

If you aren’t writing anything down, or inputting into a digital device, it’s extremely difficult to stay focused on anything for more than a few minutes, especially if you’re by yourself. But when you utilize physical tools to keep your thinking anchored and saved, you can stay engaged constructively for hours.

When people with whom you interact notice that without fail you receive, process, and organize in an airtight manner the exchanges and agreements they have with you, they begin to trust you in a unique way.

A renegotiated agreement is not a broken one.

I envision a world in which no meeting or discussion will end, and no interaction cease, without a clear indication of whether or not some action is needed—and if it is, what it will be, or at least who has accountability for it.

Is there too much complaining in your culture? The next time someone moans about something, try asking, “So what’s the next action?”

When you start to make things happen, you begin to believe that you can make things happen. And that makes things happen.

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