Getting Things Done
I had been waiting to get this book for years. I hadn't,
because I...had trouble getting things done. No, actually, I was
getting a lot of good stuff from his website,
www.davidco.com. It has dried up,
since he started really taking off, but a lot of the good stuff is still
there.
The book, on the other hand, is a very useful companion to all of the
top-down, let your values drive you, approaches such as Stephen Covey's
work.
In a nutshell, David Allen believes that the key to
blissful, stress-free productivity is to set up a time-management system
that captures everything and reminds you, effortlessly, to do the right
thing at the right time. When you've recorded everything you have
to and want to do, and you are sure that your system will remind you at
the appropriate times, you can get all of it out of your mind.
This frees you to be truly productive at whatever you are working on at
that moment.
Allen has some disdain for the top-down approaches, because he has
seen so many people fail in using them. He believes that the
reasons that most people fail using them are that they can't stand up to
the business of real life. They create resistance when you start to
realize that you are planning large new projects in order to be in line
with your values, and they create new burdens of complexity and work
when you put those values in as controlling interests.
What Allen ends up being, is a personal efficiency expert, which is
exactly what most people need to free up the time they would need to
truly focus on values. How can you decide what your values are
when you can't stop thinking that you have to remember to take the
videos back before Tuesday. Of course now Blockbuster is saying
don't worry about that, which is nice.
The heart of Allen's method are the five stages
of managing workflow.
