Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

Anyone with the need to be accountable to deal with more than what he or she can complete in the moment has the opportunity to do so more easily and elegantly than in the mind.

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

There is one thing we can do, and the happiest people are those who can do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present. We can be all here. We can give . . . our attention to the opportunity before us. —Mark

Most people I know have at least half a dozen things they’re trying to achieve or situations they’d like to improve right now, and even if they had the rest of their lives to try, they wouldn’t be able to finish these to perfection.

I have seen too many of these efforts fail, for one or more of the following three reasons: 1 | There is too much distraction at the day-to-day, hour-to-hour level of commitments to allow for appropriate focus on the higher levels. 2 | Ineffective personal organizational systems create huge subconscious resistance to undertaking even bigger projects and goals that will likely not be managed well, and that will in turn cause even more distraction and stress. 3 | When loftier levels and values actually are clarified, it raises the bar of our standards, making us notice that much more that needs changing.

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.

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

Any “would, could, or should” commitment held only in the psyche creates irrational and unresolvable pressure,

The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized stuff—functions much like RAM (random-access memory) on a computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much stuff you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed and performance diminished by their own internal mental overload.

Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored only in your mind, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do them both at the same time.

Let’s examine the three requirements to make the capturing phase work: 1 | Every open loop must be in your capture system and out of your head. 2 | You must have as few capturing buckets as you can get by with. 3 | You must empty them regularly.

Do It, Delegate It, or Defer It Once you’ve decided on the next action, you have three options: 1. Do it. If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined. 2. Delegate it. If the action will take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, Am I the right person to do this? If the answer is no, delegate it to the appropriate entity. 3. Defer it, If the action will take longer than two minutes, and you are the right person to do it, you will have to defer acting on it until later and track it on one or more “Next Actions” lists.

Second, if there’s something on a daily to-do list that doesn’t absolutely have to get done that day, it will dilute the emphasis on the things that truly do.

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

If filing and storing isn’t easy and fast (and even fun!), you’ll tend to stack, pile, or digitally accumulate things instead of putting them away appropriately. If your reference material doesn’t have nice clean edges to it, the line between actionable and nonactionable items will blur, visually and psychologically, and your mind will go numb to the whole business.

the more complete the system is, the more you’ll trust it. And the more you trust it, the more complete you’ll be motivated to keep it.

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. —John-Roger

THE KEY INGREDIENTS of relaxed control are (1) clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure, and (2) reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly. This is what I call horizontal focus.

Here are just some of the benefits of asking why: It defines success. It creates decision-making criteria. It aligns resources. It motivates. It clarifies focus. It expands options.

People love to win. If you’re not totally clear about the purpose of what you’re doing, you have no game to win.

Often the only way to make a hard decision is to come back to the purpose of what you’re doing.

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.

Many techniques can be used to facilitate brainstorming and out-of-the-box thinking. The basic principles, however, can be summed up as follows: Don’t judge, challenge, evaluate, or criticize. Go for quantity, not quality. Put analysis and organization in the background.

Much of learning how to manage workflow in a masterful way is about laying out the gear and practicing the moves so that the requisite thinking happens more automatically and it’s a lot easier to get engaged in the game.

You need to use your system—not continually have to re-create it.

Keep in mind, though, that the tool you use will not give you stress-free productivity. That is something you create by implementing the GTD method. The structure you incorporate will be extremely important in how you express and implement the process, but it is not a substitute for it. A great hammer doesn’t make a great carpenter; but a great carpenter will always want to have a great hammer.

Some consciousness needs to be applied to keep one’s potentially huge digital library functional, versus a black hole of data easily dumped in there with a couple of keystrokes. “I don’t need to organize my stuff, because the search feature can find it sufficiently” is, from what I’ve experienced, quite suboptimal as an approach.

You can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know everything you’re not doing.

Getting “in” to empty doesn’t mean actually doing all the actions and projects that you’ve captured. It just means identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you’re going to do with it.

“The first time you pick something up from your in-tray, decide what to do about it and where it goes. Never put it back in ‘in.’”

The cognitive scientists have now proven the reality of “decision fatigue”—that every decision you make, little or big, diminishes a limited amount of your brain power. Deciding to “not decide” about an e-mail or anything else is another one of those decisions, which drains your psychological fuel tank.

Too much information creates the same result as too little: you don’t have what you need, when and in the way you need it.

Because digital storage, without much forethought, has become almost automatic, it is very possible to create an environment of constant input but no utilization. You are creating a library so big and overwhelming, you have limited your capacity to make it functional for the work that’s important for you to do.

It’s fine to decide not to decide about something. You just need a decide-not-to-decide system to get it off your mind.

If the next action can be done in two minutes or less, do it

If you do delegate an action to someone else, and if you care at all whether something happens as a result, you’ll need to track it.

It’s important that you record the date on everything that you hand off to others.