| Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity | |
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Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity cover |
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| Author(s) | David Allen |
| Subject(s) | Business |
| Publisher | Penguin |
| Publication date | 2002 |
| Pages | 267 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 978-0-14-200028-1 Reprint Edition |
| OCLC Number | 51540420 |
Getting Things Done (GTD) is an organizational method created by productivity consultant David Allen, described in a book of the same name.
The Getting Things Done method rests on the idea that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them externally. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.
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In traditional time management, priorities usually play a central role. In contrast, Allen's approach uses two key elements — control and perspective. He proposes a workflow process to gain control over all the tasks and commitments that one needs or wants to get done, and "6 different levels of focus" to provide them with useful perspective.
The author advocates a weekly review focused on different levels, and suggests that the perspective gained from these reviews should drive one's priorities, which can in turn determine the priority of the individual tasks and commitments gathered during the workflow process. During a weekly review, the user determines the context for the tasks and puts them on the appropriate lists. An example of grouping together similar tasks would be making a list of outstanding telephone calls, or errands to perform while downtown. Context lists can be defined by the set of tools available or by the presence of individuals or groups for whom one has items to discuss or present.
GTD is based on making it easy to store, track and retrieve all information related to the things that need to get done. Allen suggests that many of the mental blocks we encounter are caused by insufficient 'front-end' planning. It is most practical, according to Allen, to do this thinking in advance, generating a series of actions which we can later undertake without any further planning. The human brain's "reminder system" is inefficient and seldom reminds us of what we need to do at the time and place when we can do it. Consequently, the "next actions" stored by context in the "trusted system" act as an external support which ensures that we are presented with the right reminders at the right time. Since GTD relies on external memories, it can be seen as an application of the scientific theories of distributed cognition or the extended mind.[1]
In 2005, Wired called GTD "A new cult for the info age",[2] describing the enthusiasm for this methodology among information technology and knowledge workers as a kind of cult following. Allen's ideas have also been popularized through the Internet, especially via blogs such as Lifehacker,[3] 43 Folders,[4] and The Simple Dollar.[5]
In 2005, Ben Hammersley interviewed David Allen for The Guardian, with an article called "Meet the man who can bring order to your universe",[6] saying "For me, as with the hundreds of thousands around the world who press the book into their friends' hands with fire in their eyes, Allen's ideas are nothing short of life-changing".
In 2007, Time Magazine called Getting Things Done the self-help business book of its time.[7]
In 2007, Wired ran another article about GTD and Allen,[8] quoting him as saying "the workings of an automatic transmission are more complicated than a manual transmission... to simplify a complex event, you need a complex system".
Although GTD material is careful to remain "tool agnostic" and in fact advises people to start with a paper-based system[9], many task management tools claim to be GTD compliant.[10] A wide spectrum of software exists, from commercial packages like Remember The Milk, OmniFocus, Things and ThinkingRock to open source applications such as Chandler to command-line implementations such as Taskwarrior. TiddlyWiki has long been used as a personal productivity tool geared towards Allen's GTD methodology.