Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

Some companies have designed whole internal walls as erasable writing surfaces, fostering brainstorming and ad hoc visual communications. If you have children, I recommend that you install one in their bedrooms (I wish I had grown up with the encouragement to have as many ideas as I could!). Be sure to keep plenty of fresh markers on hand—nothing stifles creative thinking faster than dry and useless writing tools.

Let our advance worrying become our advance thinking and planning. —Winston Churchill

One insurance executive I worked with described the major benefit he derived from implementation of this system: “Previously I would just tell everyone, ‘Sure, I’ll do it,’ because I didn’t know how much I really had to do. Now that I’ve got the inventory clear and complete, just to maintain my integrity, I have had to say, ‘No, I can’t do that, I’m sorry.’ The amazing thing is that instead of being upset with my refusal, everyone was impressed with my discipline!”

Out of the strain of the doing, into the peace of the done. —Julia Louise Woodruff

There’s another issue here, however. How would you feel if your list and your stack were totally—and successfully—completed? You’d probably be bouncing off the ceiling, full of creative energy. Of course, within three days (if not three minutes!), guess what you’d have? Right—another list, and probably an even bigger one, with more potentially daunting things to do on it! You’d feel so good about finishing all your stuff you’d likely take on bigger, more ambitious things to do. Not only that, but if you have a boss (or a board), what do you think he or she or they are going to do after noticing the high levels of competency and productivity you’re demonstrating? Right again—give you more things to do! It’s the irony of professional development—the better you get, the better you’d better get.

It is the act of forgiveness that opens up the only possible way to think creatively about the future at all. —Father Desmond Wilson

Do you understand yet why getting all your stuff out of your head and in front of you makes you feel better? Because you automatically renegotiate your agreements with yourself when you look at them, think about them, and either act on them that very moment or say, “No, not now.” Here’s the problem: it’s impossible to renegotiate agreements with yourself that you can’t remember you made! The fact that you can’t remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn’t mean that you’re not holding yourself liable for it. 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.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one. —Mark Twain

I am an old man, and I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. —Mark Twain

No matter how big and tough a problem may be, get rid of confusion by taking one little step toward solution. Do something. —George F. Nordenholt

There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction. —John F. Kennedy

Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible. —Saint Francis of Assisi

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 be incorporated in strategy and tactics. Complaining is a sign that someone isn’t willing to risk moving on a changeable situation, or won’t consider the immutable circumstance in his or her plans. This is a temporary and hollow form of self-validation.

As Steven Snyder, an expert in whole-brain learning and a friend of mine, put it, “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.

Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as in knowing what to do next. —Herbert Hoover

An idealist believes that the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run. —Sydney J. Harris

“What does this mean to me?” “What do I want to be true about it?” “What’s the next step required to make that happen?” These are the cornerstone questions we must answer, at some point, about everything. This thinking, and the tools that support it, will serve you in ways you may not yet imagine.

“What do you want to have happen in this meeting?” “What is the purpose of this form?” “What would the ideal person for this job be able to do?” “What do we want to accomplish with this software?” These and a multitude of other, similar questions are still sorely lacking in many quarters. There’s plenty of talk in the big meetings that sounds good, but learning to ask, “Why are we doing this?” and “What will it look like when it’s done successfully?” and to apply the answers at the day-to-day, operational level—that will create profound results.

A vision without a task is but a dream; a task without a vision is but drudgery; a vision and a task is the hope of the world. —From a church in Sussex, England, ca. 1730

Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.

A wonderful exposition of the new discoveries in the science of cognition, related to our limited capacity to manage and maintain awareness of relevant data in the information age, and the necessity of building and utilizing an “external brain,” was put forward by Daniel Levitin in his book The Organized Mind.*

But interestingly, in alignment with the GTD practices, Baumeister has also proven that completion of such items is not required to relieve that burden on the psyche. What is needed is a trusted plan that ensures forward engagement will happen.* In Baumeister’s model merely determining the next action to fulfill a commitment is a sufficient end result of “planning”—as long as the trigger or reminder is parked in a place that we trust we’ll look within a reasonable amount of time. My thinking and model were heavily cited in his wonderful book Willpower, which positions them within a rich context of managing the mental “muscle” we must continually employ, especially in knowledge work.

Simply identifying all open loops and moving them from memory to an external mind while systematically identifying concrete and doable next actions is a pure exercise in self-control and directedness. An individual utilizing GTD knows exactly what needs to be done and exactly what action he can take to achieve it, given the restrictions of available time, energy, and contextual restraints.

Most people resist acknowledging issues and opportunities until they know they can be handled successfully, not realizing that exploring, looking into, or in some way accepting or putting something to bed because there is no solution is an appropriate outcome (project) itself. The ability to create appropriate engagement with your neighbor’s boundary issue, your daughter’s math grades, or the role of a new team member—no matter how ambiguous or unclear the actual path for achieving each may be—by identifying the inherent project and taking steps to resolve it is quite an extraordinary and mature self-management practice.

It’s the smartest individuals who realize they are only randomly in their “smarts” and inspired. They’re the ones who intelligently build in systems and processes to take advantage of the brilliance that often simply lies sleeping behind the dullness required to deal with the brutish world we inhabit.