“Getting Things Done”

by David Allen

GTD^® is the popular shorthand for “Getting Things Done^®“, the groundbreaking work-life management system and book by David Allen that transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity.
Sophisticated without being confining, the subtle effectiveness of GTD lies in its radically common sense notion that with a complete and current inventory of all your commitments , organized and reviewed in a systematic way, you can focus clearly, view your world from optimal angles and make trusted choices about what to do (and not do) at any moment.
GTD embodies an easy, step-by-step and highly efficient method for achieving this relaxed , productive state.

The Problem with “stuff”

• Getting Things Done succeeds because it first addresses a critical barrier to completing the atomic tasks that we want to accomplish in a given day. That’s “stuff”. Amorphous, unactionable, flop-sweat-inducing stuff. David says:
  «Here’s how I define “stuff:” anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step. [pg. 17]»
• Stuff is bouncing around in our heads and causing untold stress and anxiety. Evaluation meetings, bar mitzvahs, empty rolls of toilet paper, broken lawn mowers, college applications, your big gut, tooth decay, dirty underwear and imminent jury duty all compete for prime attention in our poor, addled brains. Stuff has no “home” and, consequently, no place to go, so it just keeps rattling around.
• Worst off, we’re too neurotic to stop thinking about it, and we certainly don’t have time to actually do everything in one day. Jeez Louise, what the hell am I, Superman?
  So you sprint from fire to fire, praying you haven’t forgotten anything, sapped of anything like creativity or even the basic human flexibility to adapt your own schedule to the needs of your friends, your family or yourself. Your “stuff” has taken over your brain like a virus now, dragging down every process it touches and rendering you spent and virtually useless. Sound familiar?

You can do anything – but not everything

• According to David Allen, 54, one of the world’s most influential thinkers on personal productivity, there is the “silent trauma” of knowledge workers everywhere.
  We inhabit a world, he says, in which there are “no edges to our jobs” and “no limit to the potential information that can help us do our jobs better.” What’s more, in a competitive environment that’s continually being reshaped by the Web, we’re tempted to rebalance our work on a monthly, weekly, even hourly basis. Unchecked, warns Allen, this frantic approach is a recipe for dissatisfaction and despair — all-too-common emotions these days for far too many of us.
• Allen argues that the real challenge is not managing your time but maintaining your focus: “If you get too wrapped up in all of the stuff coming at you, you lose your ability to respond appropriately and effectively. Remember, you’re the one who creates speed, because you’re the one who allows stuff to enter your life.”
• “There was a lot of flaky stuff on the edges, but at the core of the philosophy were some good ideas about how to live a life that’s more in line with your values,” Allen says. At the time, many HR executives were also broadening their interest in personal growth — in helping people to think and to work together more effectively. Over time, Allen discovered a bridge between his fascination with self-understanding and his desire to interact practically with the world. That bridge was time management.
• Allen has never been a naturally high-productivity person. (“I’m more of a party guy,” he quips.) But he tried hard to change that. As he did so, he became convinced that time management was the key to personal freedom — to greater self-discovery. He then became convinced that there was a pretty robust market for instruction in his newfound art. Finally, he became convinced that “God didn’t really care whether I had money or not.” More or less at that moment, he became a consultant.

In a series of interviews with Fast Company, Allen shared his ideas on increasing personal productivity in a business world that moves at warp speed.

- If there’s one thing that all of our readers probably agree on, it’s that they have too much to do and too little time in which to do it. Why do so many of us feel that way?

- There is always more to do than there is time to do it, especially in an environment of so much possibility. We all want to be acknowledged; we all want our work to be meaningful. And in an attempt to achieve that goal, we all keep letting stuff enter our lives.
The problem, of course, is that we also want to finish what we start. Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started. That’s why a lot of my work has to do with how people deal with their input — email, phone messages, reports, conversations. Everything that isn’t where it should be is an open loop, an incomplete, a distraction that slows you down. Your brain says, “Hey, that doesn’t belong there,” and you have to deal with that impulse.

• If you allow too much dross to accumulate in your “10 acres” — in other words, if you allow too many things that represent undecided, untracked, unmanaged agreements with yourself and with others to gather in your personal space — that will start to weigh on you. It will dull your effectiveness. You’ve got to dig into the mess and put those things to rest. Productivity is about completion.
• Isn’t it interesting that people feel best about themselves right before they go on vacation? They’ve cleared up all of their to-do piles, closed up transactions, renewed old promises with themselves. My most basic suggestion is that people should do that more than just once a year. In fact, I tell people to take inventory weekly — to sort through all of the stuff that they haven’t yet acted on. If you can get a clear picture of everything that you have to do, you’ll be able to say, “Oh, this is what I have to do right now” — and then take the next step in getting it done.

- If people took such an inventory, what would they find?

• I like to talk about the “runway level” of life — all of the current actions, all of the little things that stack up. On their runways, people typically have enough stuff to create 300 or 400 hours of work. What’s driving all of those tasks are between 30 and 100 projects of various shapes and sizes — commitments that people have made that require many steps to fulfill.
• Once you’ve taken inventory,  you can start to make sense of your runway. But then comes a second challenge: finding the time to do what you need to do. What’s really different today is that we live and work in what I call “weird time.” In weird time, no one gets 2 hours to do anything. Instead, we get 15 minutes — and sometimes only 5 minutes — between meetings and phone calls. You actually can get a lot done in weird time, but most people’s thinking just isn’t set up to take advantage of it. There are lots of opportunities during the day that people waste. They feel bad because they’re not as productive as they should be, but they don’t know what to do about it.
• What to do about it is to turn it into a game: How efficient can I be? When something lands on your radar screen that isn’t where it needs to be, you must decide two things. First, what’s a successful outcome? In other words, what will stop the cognitive dissonance? And second, how do I allocate resources to make sure that the outcome materializes? That doesn’t mean that you need to take action right away. But it does mean that, in order to get the task off of your mind, you need to decide on a course of action. The worst thing that you can do is to let things sit.
• That doesn’t necessarily mean that you should always work on “the important stuff” first. You might not have the energy, the tools, or the time. Sometimes, the most appropriate thing to do with five free minutes is to water the plants. Once you know what you’re doing, productivity becomes your one true competitive edge. There’s an elegance to how you work and live; it’s not just about running faster.

- That leads to a simple question that most of us find difficult to answer: How should we go about setting priorities?

• When people ask me how to set priorities, I ask them a question: At what level do you want to have this conversation? Each of us operates on many different levels at all times. We each have a runway that holds all of the little things that consume our time. At 10,000 feet are the projects. At 20,000 feet, people are deciding on their roles and goals. At 30,000 feet, people are thinking ahead, asking themselves where they want to be in their careers 12 to 18 months down the road. At 40,000 feet, they’re thinking 3 to 5 years out and looking at their organizational aspirations. Then, at the top — at 50,000 feet — they’re asking, “What’s my job on this planet?”

- So a big part of setting priorities is being clear about your values?

• Be careful. That’s a very popular notion these days:
  If you focus on your values, then you’ll improve the “balance” between your business and personal lives. Give me a break. Focusing on your values may provide you with meaning, but it won’t simplify things. You’ll just discover even more stuff that’s important to you.
• We suffer the stress of infinite opportunity: There are so many things that we could do, and all we see are people who seem to be performing at star quality. It’s very hard not to try to be like them. The problem is, if you get wrapped up in that game, you’ll get eaten alive. You can do anything — but not everything. The universe is full of creative projects that are waiting to be done. So, if you really care about quality of life, if you want to relax, then don’t focus on values. Just control your aspirations. That will simplify things. Learning to set boundaries is incredibly difficult for most people.

Most people make the opposite choice. They feel such a sense of responsibility to their job and to their colleagues that they become even more harried…

• Which is utterly self-defeating. Your sense of “responsibility” is a function of your response ability. I learned that in karate. Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax. The power of a karate punch comes from speed, not muscle. And a tense muscle is a slow muscle.
• In other words, you can’t do things faster until you learn how to slow down. How do you slow down? It’s all about the dynamic of detachment. You have to back off and be quiet. Retreat from the task at hand, so that you can gain a new perspective on what you’re doing. If you get too wrapped up in all of the stuff coming at you, you lose your ability to respond appropriately and effectively. If your inbox and your outbox are completely full, or if people are screaming at you, then it’s difficult to back off and think about things at a different level.
• Have you ever felt as though time disappeared? Say, when you’re really into a good movie? Or when you’re busy doing something that you love, and the morning just flies by? From my spiritual practices, I know that when you get to some levels of existence, space and time seem to vanish. When I’m at those levels, I don’t even think in terms of space and time anymore. When everything really lines up for me, speed is not an issue, because I have found my own rhythm. That rhythm may seem lightning fast or deathly slow, but inside me it’s all the same. It’s outside time.
• Look at the best martial artists. They move very slowly. The faster you type, the slower it will feel to you, because you surf with your thinking. The same thing applies to reading: The faster you read, the more time will disappear, because you’ll be able to feed stuff to your brain as fast as your brain can process it. That’s why speed readers have better comprehension. They’ve trained their eyes to recognize stuff as fast as their brain can handle it.
• But it’s hard to leave space and time behind when you’re distracted. If there’s an open loop, space and time will find it. And anything waiting for a decision is an open loop. If there’s a stack of papers on your desk, you have to decide on a course of action. As long as you’ve let that pile into your world, it’s got a hold on you. What’s the very next thing that you need to do? Until you decide on that, there’s a gap between where you are and where you need to be — a big black hole that will suck you in.

So how does GTD work?

This is a really summarized version, but here it is, PowerPoint-style:

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
2. get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
5. do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
6. iterate and refactor mercilessly

So, basically, you make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just get rid of. Everything you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment—both now and well into the future. This gives you an amazing kind of confidence that a) nothing gets lost and b) you always understand what’s on or off your plate.
Also built-in to the system are an ongoing series of reviews, in which you periodically re-examine your now-organized stuff from various levels of granularity to make sure your vertical focus (individual projects and their tasks) is working in concert with your horizontal focus (side to side scanning of all incoming channels for new stuff). It’s actually sort of fun and oddly satisfying.

The System

In Ready For Anything, Allen says that when he has to describe his approach in under a minute, he usually says something like this:
Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up—not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you’re doing (and not doing) at any time. (p.16)
It’s that simple! And that difficult! Below are the major components to the GTD system

• Collect
  Capture everything that you need to concern yourself with in what Allen calls “buckets”: a physical in-box, an email in-box, a notebook you take with you, a little tape recorder, etc. Don’t try and remember everything!
  When you first start: get a big in-box.
  You can put the thing you need to act on itself in your in-box (a bill, an assignment) or write a note on a single sheet of paper (“change oil in the car”). When you first start, or when you feel like there are lots of things on your mind, sit down and do a “mind sweep” of everything you are concerned about.
• Process
  Now it’s time to empty all those “buckets.” Start at the top of the in-box, pick up each item and ask yourself “is there an action I need to take about this item?”
  If there is no action you need to take, either throw the thing away, file it for reference, or make a note on your “Someday/Maybe” list.
  If there is an action you need to take, can you do it in two minutes or less? If so, do it now! If not, decide what that next action is, and enter it on your “Next Action” list. If one action won’t finish this off, enter the overall goal on your “Project” list.
• Organize
  

  

  Obviously, the cornerstone of this system is lists. Like with your collection buckets, you want to have enough lists to keep everything straight, but not so many that you are never sure what list to use. Here are the basics:

  • Next Action: what is the very next thing you need to do to get your thing done? (E.g., “read chapter 4 and take notes,” or “email a copy of my report to Anne for review”
  • Projects: chances are, many of your things will need more than one action to accomplish. Keep track of those multi-action things here. (E.g., “class presentation on Dante,” or “write year-end report for boss”)
  • Waiting: often we depend on others to help get things done. If you are waiting on something, write it down here, so you don’t forget. (E.g. “get back revised version of report from Anne”)
  • Someday/Maybe: for when you have a great idea or long-term goal that you just can’t make time to work on now. You don’t want to forget about it, but you don’t want it to clutter up your Projects list.
  • Context-sensitive lists: e.g., “Phone calls,” “Errands,” etc.
  • Calendar: try and use your calendar just for appointments and other things that have to happen on a particular day/time.
  • Filing: keep a simple, easy to update filing system. Don’t let files pile up in a slush pile. Get comfortable with putting a single piece of paper in a folder, labeling it, and filing it away.
• Review
  If you don’t look at those lists, they won’t do you much good now, will they? You’ll have to review your Next Action list and your calendar every day (and probably several times a day). Set up an appointment with yourself to do a weekly review, where you process all your in-boxes down to empty, and review all lists to be sure you are on top of things.
• Do!
  GTD tends to leave it up to you as to how to decide what needs to be done right now–Allen seems to believe if you have everything laid out in front of you, it will be obvious what needs to be done at any given moment based on your circumstances (deadlines, how much time you have available, what tools are nearby, how much energy you have, etc.)

Thank God It’s Friday

Get Things Off Your Mind and Get Them Done:

1. horizontal control maintains coherence across all activities in which you are involved
2. vertical manages thinking up and down the track of individual topics and projects

At the heart of David Allen’s productivity coaching is the discipline of a weekly review. “That is critical to making personal organization a vital, dynamic reality,” he says. Here, adapted from Allen’s Web site, is a list of steps that you should work your way through every Friday afternoon.

1. Sort your loose papers. Gather all scraps of paper — business cards, receipts, miscellaneous notes — and put them into your in-basket to process.
2. Process your notes. Review journal entries, meeting notes, and miscellaneous scribblings. Turn them into appropriate action items, projects, and so on.
3. Review previous calendar data. Look through expired daily calendar pages for remaining action items, and move those items forward.
4. Download your data. Write down any new projects, action items, “waiting-for” items, and so on.
5. Review outcome lists. One by one, evaluate the status of each project, goal, and outcome.
6. Review “next action” lists. Check off all completed actions. Look for reminders of further action steps.
7. Review “pending” and “support” files. Browse through work-in-progress materials and update lists of new actions, completions, and “waiting-for” items.
8. Review “reminders” lists. Make sure that there isn’t anything that you haven’t done that you need to do. Also, make sure that there aren’t any checklists that you need to review.
9. Review “someday” and “maybe” lists. Look for any projects that may have become active, and transfer them to your “projects” list. Delete any dead items.
10. Review “waiting-for” lists. Record appropriate follow-up actions. Check them off as you complete them.
11. Be creative and courageous. Add to your system any new, wonderful, harebrained, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas that have occurred to you.

Sidebar: Little Tricks

David Allen’s productivity principles are rooted in big ideas – in a continuous search for personal growth and self-understanding. But they’re also eminently practical. Here are some of his tips for confronting life in the fast lane.

• If you travel regularly, dedicate a separate drawer in your dresser to the items that you take on most trips. Keep duplicates of things that you always take — toilet kits, power cords for your laptop, chargers for phones.
• Create an “action support” file in your briefcase or on your desk. Use it for one-off paper items — airline tickets, fax confirmations, and so on — that don’t warrant their own file but that you need to have at hand for certain situations.
• Keep your email inbox empty. Discipline yourself to dump as many messages as you can right away, to address immediately any action that will take less than two minutes, and to group actions that will take more than two minutes into an “Action” folder.
• If you travel with extra batteries for your laptop or cell-phone, put a rubber band around all charged batteries. That way, you’ll always know which batteries are live and which are dead.
• Increase your ease at the keyboard. If you don’t type at least 50 words per minute, install a typing program (such as “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing”), and then practice. Also, learn the seven most common speed-key combinations for navigating Windows.

Based on:

Official site
Getting started with “Getting Things Done”
Lunch & Learn by Steve Lawson,
You can do anything, but not everything