Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

I recommend that you block out two hours early in the afternoon of your last workday for the review. Three factors make this an ideal time:

It’s great to clear your mental decks so you can go into the weekend ready for refreshment and recreation, with nothing else pulling on you unnecessarily.

As you increase the speed and agility with which you clear the Ground and Horizon 1 levels of your life and work, be sure to revisit the other levels you’re engaged in, as needed, to maintain a truly clear head.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion. —Albert Camus

The four-criteria model for choosing actions in the moment The threefold model for evaluating daily work The six-level model for reviewing your own work

When you become elegant at dispatching what’s coming in and are organized enough to take advantage of “weird time” windows that show up, you can switch between one task and the other rapidly.

Let’s look at that first example from the bottom up. The phone call you need to make (action) is about the deal you’re working on (project), which would increase sales (accountability). This particular deal would give you the opportunity to move up in the sales force (job goal) because of the new market your company wants to penetrate (organization vision). And that would get you closer to the way you want to be living, both financially and professionally (life).

While Horizon 5 (purpose and principles) is obviously the most important context within which to set priorities, experience has shown me that when we understand and implement all the levels of work in which we are engaged, especially the Ground and Horizon 1 levels, we gain greater freedom and resources to do the bigger work that we’re all about.

You need to set up systems and tricks that get you to think about your projects and situations more frequently, more easily, and more in depth.

The major reason for the lack of this kind of effective value-added thinking is the dearth of easily structured and usable systems for managing the potentially infinite amount of detail that could show up as a result.

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.

If you have children, I recommend that you install one in their bedrooms

Incompletions, uncaptured, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.

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’ve learned the hard way that no matter where we are in the conversation, twenty minutes before the agreed end time of the discussion I must force the question: “So what’s the next action here?”

“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.”

The challenge will continually be to apply the two essential elements of this art: defining what done means and what doing looks like.

fact, all the principles I’ve put forward are as applicable to an enterprise as they are to an individual. Capturing what has a group’s attention, getting clarity about the inherent outcomes desired and actions required, regularly reviewing status and incorporating new realities, and consistently recalibrating and reallocating resources—all are core best practices for any team or company.

your mind is designed to have ideas, based upon pattern detection, but it isn’t designed to remember much of anything!

GTD IS ACTUALLY a lifelong practice with multiple levels of mastery.

The hallmarks of this next level of maturity with Getting Things Done are: a complete, current, and clear inventory of projects; a working map of one’s roles, accountabilities, and interests—personally and professionally; an integrated total life management system, custom tailored to one’s current needs and direction and utilized to dynamically steer out beyond the day-to-day; and challenges and surprises trigger your utilization of this methodology instead of throwing you out of it.

Whenever people actually produce a checklist for this horizon—the areas of professional and personal focus they can identify—they invariably realize that there are more projects they need to add. They

Once you are regularly functioning at this level of mastery, the creative thrust of your “GTD-ing” shifts from implementing the most effective way of dealing with the inputs and inherent demands of your day-to-day world to optimally taking advantage of self-created contexts and triggers to produce creative ideas, perspectives, and actions that wouldn’t normally occur.

This is the stage of maturity along the GTD path of mastery in which the simple idea of checklists takes on sublime significance.