Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

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

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,” which I define as anything pulling at your attention that doesn’t belong where it is, the way it is. Open loops can include everything from really big to-do items like “End world hunger” to the more modest “Hire new assistant” to the tiniest task such as “Replace porch lightbulb.”

“In knowledge work . . . the task is not given; it has to be determined.

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

Until those thoughts have been clarified and those decisions made, and the resulting data has been stored in a system that you absolutely know you will access and think about when you need to, your brain can’t give up the job. You can fool everyone else, but you can’t fool your own mind.

lack of time is not the major issue for them (though they may think it is); the real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what associated next-action steps are required.

Clarifying things on the front end, when they first appear on the radar, rather than on the back end, after trouble has developed, allows people to reap the benefits of managing action.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Two things need to be determined about each actionable item: 1 | What “project” or outcome have you committed to? and 2 | What’s the next action required?

Complete the projects you begin, fulfill the commitments you have made, live up to your promises—then both your subconscious and conscious selves can have success, which leads to a feeling of fulfillment, worthiness and oneness.

If you were to take out your calendar right now and look closely at every single item for the next fourteen days, you’d probably come up with at least one “Oh, that reminds me, I need to _______.”

If you take out a clean sheet of paper right now, along with your favorite writing instrument, and for three minutes focus solely on the most awesome project on your mind, I guarantee you’ll have at least one “Oh, yeah, I need to consider ______.”

The verb process does not mean “spend time on.” It just means “decide what the thing is and what action is required, and then dispatch it accordingly.”

When you’re in processing mode, you must get into the habit of starting at one end and just cranking through items one at a time, in order. As soon as you break that rule and process only what you feel like processing, in whatever order, you’ll invariably begin to leave things unprocessed.

What many want to do, however, based on perhaps old habits of writing daily to-do lists, is put actions on the calendar that they think they’d really like to get done next Monday, say, but that actually might not, and that might then have to be moved to following days. Resist this impulse. You need to trust your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of your day’s commitments, which should be noticeable at a glance while you’re on the run.

If you let yourself get caught up in the urgency of the moment, without feeling comfortable about what you’re not dealing with, the result is frustration and anxiety. Too often the stress and reduced effectiveness are blamed on the surprises. If you know what you’re doing and what you’re not doing, surprises are just another opportunity to be flexible and creative, and to excel.

Research has now proven that you can’t actually multitask, i.e. put conscious focused attention on more than one thing at a time; and if you are trying to, it denigrates your performance considerably.

I have learned over the years that the most important thing to deal with is whatever is most on your mind. The fact that you think it shouldn’t be on your mind is irrelevant. It’s there, and it’s there for a reason. “Buy cat food” may certainly not rank high on some theoretical prioritizing inventory, but if that’s what’s pulling on you the most, in the moment, then handling it in some way would be Job One. Once you handle what has your attention, it frees you up to notice what really has your attention. Which, when you handle that, will allow you to see what really has your attention, and so on. Almost without exception the executives I have worked with are most plagued by the management of the nitty-gritty of their workaday world—e-mails, meetings, travel, projects going off the rails, etc. When they begin to get all that under control, their attention invariably turns to areas of focus and interest from a higher perspective—family, career, and quality-of-life stuff. So don’t worry about what horizon or what content of your life is the highest priority to deal with—deal with what’s present. When you do, you will more effectively uncover and address what’s really true and meaningful for you.*

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. More significantly, you incorporate a level of self-confidence in your engagement with your world that money cannot buy. Such is the power of capturing placeholders for anything that is incomplete or unprocessed in your life. It noticeably enhances your mental well-being and improves the quality of your communications and relationships, both personally and professionally.

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.

Maintaining an objective and complete inventory of your work, regularly reviewed, makes it much easier to say no with integrity.

Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It’s all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, that part of you thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you’ve given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you’ve created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can’t do them both at once, and that (apparently significant) part of your psyche will continue to hold you accountable.

anything that is held only in your head will take up either more or less attention than it deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important; it’s that it’s not. Incompletions, uncaptured, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.