Getting Things Done

by David Allen

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

Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does.

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

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 usually an inverse relationship between how much something is on your mind and how much it’s getting done.

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

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.

As soon as you attach a “should,” “need to,” or “ought to” to an item, it becomes an incomplete.

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

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 middle of every successful project looks like a disaster.

It’s the irony of professional development—the better you get, the better you’d better get.

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.

When a note sits idle in someone’s in-tray unprocessed, or when he or she nods, “Yes, I will,” in a conversation but doesn’t otherwise capture that in some way, my “uh-oh” bell rings.

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?”

Organizations naturally become more productive when they model and train front-end next-action decision making.