Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

How do you know that what you’re doing is what you ought to be doing at any point in time? No software, seminar, cool notebook, smartphone, or even personal mission statement will give you more than twenty-four hours in a day, simplify its content, or make this often tough choice for you.

Anxiety is caused by a lack of control, organization, preparation, and action. —David Kekich

An ambient angst pervades our society—there’s a sense that somehow there’s probably something we should be doing that we’re not, which creates a tension for which there is no resolution and from which there is no rest.

Upping the quality of our thinking and commitments does not diminish the quantity of potentially relevant and important stuff to manage.

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

A good one in regards to playing horn even though the book is unrelated.

But a tense muscle is a slow one.

Most people have lived in a semistressful experience so consistently, for so long, they don’t know that it could be quite different—that

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

Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an “open loop,”

capture all those things that are “ringing your bell” in some way, clarify what, exactly, they mean to you, and then make a decision about how to move on them.

if it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear.

You must use your mind to get things off your mind.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

Thought is useful when it motivates action and a hindrance when it substitutes for action. —Bill Raeder

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

There is no real way to achieve the kind of relaxed control I’m promising if you keep things only in your head.

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

workflow—the ever-present ingestion and expressions of our experiences.

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.

But at the same time, you’ve been capturing things in your environment and in your head that don’t belong where they are, the way they are, for all eternity.

Emptying the contents does not mean that you have to finish what’s there;

Do It, Delegate It, or Defer It Once you’ve decided on the next action, you have three options:

Being organized means simply that where something is matches what it means to you.

I define a project as any desired result that can be accomplished within a year that requires more than one action step.

You don’t actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it.

Three things go on your calendar: time-specific actions; day-specific actions; and day-specific information

the calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. —Albert Einstein

No-action systems fall into three categories: trash, incubation, and reference.

At 3:22 on Wednesday, how do you choose what to do? At that moment there are four criteria you can apply, in this order: context, time available, energy available, and priority.

there are three different kinds of activities you can be engaged in: Doing predefined work Doing work as it shows up Defining your work

In order to know what your priorities are, you have to know what your work is.

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

When the dilemma is whether to stay connected with work and e-mail on a vacation or not, I have to ask, “What’s the primary purpose of the vacation?”

if there’s no good reason to be doing something, it’s not worth doing.

We know that the focus we hold in our minds affects what we perceive and how we perform.

One of the most powerful life skills, and one of the most important to hone and develop for both professional and personal success, is creating clear outcomes.

Identify the significant pieces Sort by (one or more): components sequences priorities Detail to the required degree

Paper-holding trays (at least three) A stack of plain letter-size paper A pen/pencil Post-its (3×3"s) Paper clips A stapler and staples Scotch tape Rubber bands An automatic labeler File folders A calendar Wastebasket/recycling bins

It should take you less than one minute to pick something up out of your in-tray or print it from e-mail, decide it needs no next action but has some potential future value, and finish storing it in a trusted system.

One simple alpha system files everything by topic, person, project, or company,

A personal purge day is an ideal thing to put into your tickler file, either during the holidays, at year’s end, or around early spring tax-preparation time, when you might want to tie it in with archiving the previous year’s financial files.

But if you can hang in there and really do the whole capturing process, 100 percent, it will change your experience dramatically

capture phase usually takes between one and six hours,

That means going through every storage area, including your computers, and every nook and cranny in every location, including cars, boats, and other garages and homes, if you have them.

The first activity is to search your physical environment for anything that doesn’t permanently belong where it is, the way it is,

suggest you print out any task and to-do lists and put them, too, into your in-tray.

Process the top item first. Process one item at a time. Never put anything back into “in.”

The key here is the regular reviewing and purging of outdated information, as I suggested in a previous chapter, as well as more conscious filtering on the front end, as you’re processing your input: “Is this really necessary or useful for me to keep, or can I trust that I can access it from the Internet or other sources if I need it?”