Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

It is how our conscious mind operates, however, so every agreement must be made conscious.

You’ll feel better collecting anything that you haven’t collected yet.

But there will be a light-year’s difference when you know you have it all.

How will you know when there’s nothing left? When nothing else shows up as a reminder in your mind.

I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them.

Frankly, once you’ve achieved that, you’ll hardly think about whether people are dropping the ball anymore—there will be much bigger things to occupy your attention.

When a note sits idle in someone’s in-basket unprocessed, or when he or she nods “yes, I will” in a conversation but doesn’t write anything down, my “uh-oh” bell rings.

Bailing water in a leaky boat diverts energy from rowing the boat.

I need to trust that any request or relevant information I put on a voice-mail, in an e-mail, in a conversation, or in a written note will get into the other person’s system and that it will be processed and organized, soon, and available for his or her review as an option for action.

Any intact system will ultimately be only as good as its weakest link, and often that Achilles’ heel is a key person’s dulled responsiveness to communications in the system.

Remember, you can’t renegotiate an agreement with yourself that you can’t remember you made. And you certainly can’t renegotiate agreements with others that you’ve lost track of.

Organizations must create a culture in which it is acceptable that everyone has more to do than he or she can do, and in which it is sage to renegotiate agreements about what everyone is not doing.

I HAVE A personal mission to make “What’s the next action?” part of the global thought process.

When a culture adopts “What’s the next action?” as a standard operating query, there’s an automatic increase in energy, productivity, clarity, and focus.

One of the greatest challenges you may encounter is that once you have gotten used to “What’s the next action?” for yourself and those around you, interacting with people who aren’t asking it can be highly frustrating.

How could something so simple be so powerful—“What’s the next action?”

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

Without a next action, there remains a potentially infinite gap between current reality and what you need to do.

It’s really the smartest people who have the highest number of undecided things in their lives and on their lists.

Ceasing negative imaging will always cause your energy to increase.

There is another solution: intelligently dumbing down your brain by figuring out the next action. You’ll invariably feel a relieving of pressure about anything you have a commitment to change or do, when you decide on the very next physical action required to move it forward.

You are either attracted or repelled by the things on your lists; there isn’t any neutral territory.

In following up with people who have taken my seminars or been coached by my colleagues or me, I’ve discovered that one of the subtler ways many of them fall off the wagon is in letting their action lists grow back into lists of tasks or subprojects instead of discrete next actions.

I have had several sophisticated senior executives tell me that installing “What’s the next action?” as an operational standard in their organizations was transformative in terms of measurable performance output. It changed their culture permanently and significantly for the better. Why? Because the question forces clarity, accountability, productivity, and empowerment.

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?”

This is radical common sense—radical because it often compels discussion at deeper levels than people are comfortable with.

Talk does not cook rice. —Chinese proverb

The dark side of “collaborative cultures” is the allergy they foster to holding anyone responsible for having the ball.

The way I see it, what’s truly impolite is allowing people to walk away from discussions unclear.

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

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

Learning to break through the barriers of the sophisticated creative thinking that can freeze activity—that is, the entangled psychic webs we spin—is a superior skill.

One of the biggest productivity leaks I have seen in some organizations is the lack of next actions determined for “long-term” projects.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of adopting the next-action approach is that it dramatically increases your ability to make things happen, with a concomitant rise in your self-esteem and constructive outlook.

Asking “What’s the next action?” undermines the victim mentality.

Americans need a way out of victimization. This is a great first step - pun intended.

Is there too much complaining in your culture? The next time someone moans about something, try asking, “So what’s the next action?”

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.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

When you start to make things happen, you really begin to believe that you can make things happen. And that makes things happen.

As I’ve said, employing next-action decision-making results in clarity, productivity, accountability, and empowerment. Exactly the same results happen when you hold yourself to the discipline of identifying the real results you want and, more specifically, the projects you need to define in order to produce them.

We are constantly creating and fulfilling.

Your life and work are made up of outcomes and actions. When your operational behavior is grooved to organize everything that comes your way, at all levels, based upon those dynamics, a deep alignment occurs, and wondrous things emerge. You become highly productive. You make things up, and you make them happen.

The challenge is to marry high-level idealistic focus to the mundane activity of life. In the end they require the same thinking.

The value of all this natural project planning is that it provides an integrated, flexible, aligned way to think through any situation.

Being comfortable with challenging the purpose of anything you may be doing is healthy and mature. Being able to “make up” visions and images of success, before the methods are clear, is a phenomenal trait to strengthen. Being willing to have ideas, good or bad, and to express and capture all of them without judgments is critical for fully accessing creative intelligence. Honing multiple ideas and types of information into components, sequences, and priorities aimed toward a specific outcome is a necessary mental discipline. And deciding on and taking real next actions—actually moving on something in the physical world—are the essence of productivity.

The model is simply the basic principle of determining outcomes and actions for everything we consider to be our work.

It doesn’t take a big change to increase the productivity standards of a group.

“What do we 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.

Empowerment naturally ensues for individuals as they move from complaining and victim modalities into outcomes and actions defined for direction. When that becomes the standard in a group, it creates significant improvement in the atmosphere as well as the output.

key point. when churches devolve into snivelling they aren't focused on productivity and mission. survival mentality often had these traits.

The microcosm of how people deal with their in-baskets, e-mail, and conversations with others will be reflected in the macro-reality of their culture and organization.