Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

"This was one of the books that started my own interest in this area. It was revolutionary in its time, more than 20 years ago. This book was hugely popular with Silicon Valley people—software developers, computer geeks in general. But it was aimed, in the first instance, at a more conventional realm of managers: there’s a picture of Allen on the cover of the first edition, wearing a suit, the epitome of respectability, nothing remarkable… And yet it’s a book that crystallised a handful of really deep and true and powerful insights about how to organise your work within time—the kind of insights that are so fundamental now that Allen probably doesn’t get all the credit he should get, because they just seem like givens. Probably the most penetrating one is that a lot of the stress that we associate with feeling overwhelmed with work is actually the stress of using our brains to keep track of and remember everything that’s on our plate. It’s not necessarily that there’s too much to do, but that our brains are badly designed for storing lists of what to do, although they’re very well designed for actually doing things. So one of Allen’s core guiding ideas is that if you get all the things that are on your plate out of your head and into what he calls ‘a trusted system’—in one place, on a computer or in a notebook—then your mind can relax, and let go of the attempt to keep track of it all. He would say the thought will come to you at three in the morning that you need new batteries for the smoke alarm—but it will not come to you in the supermarket when you’re walking past the batteries. The mind is ill-adapted to this job. It reminds you of things in a haphazard, stress-inducing way. This builds on the well-known observation that writing things down in a list is stress-reducing, even when you haven’t yet done any of the things on the list. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s stress-reducing merely to get it out of your brain in that way. The other big thing that he maybe doesn’t get enough credit for is the distinction he makes between ‘projects’ and ‘actions’. A project, on his definition, is anything that takes anything more than one action step to complete. So it’s not just big projects like ‘launch new company website’ or ‘write a book’, but ‘clean the house’ or ‘get the car fixed’. A task is doable. You ask: what’s the next action? For getting the car fixed it might be getting the number of the mechanic. Think of your day as a series of actual, doable, physical next steps. “A lot of the stress that we associate with with work is actually the stress of using our brains to keep track of everything on our plate” This explains the phenomenon that I think we’re all familiar with, where someone keeps a to-do list, but there are various items that sit there for ages undone. Like ‘Get car fixed.’ One of the reasons it’s there for ages is because ‘get car fixed’ is not a specific, doable thing. It’s the name of a project, for which the next action hasn’t yet been clarified. I’ve certainly benefited from this system myself. He then builds a whole time management system on top of it, which personally I find can sometimes be a little too involved for my specific work–but any difference of opinion about that pales by comparison to the core insights of this book. What all these books have in common, and what I hope my own book is doing, is that they encourage a certain kind of confrontation with the reality of the situation. What David Allen brings is this idea that there’s too much to do, and that your brain is not a good place to keep it. So it’s all about bringing the focus back to what’s doable, now, in the moment, for real. Deep Work has some of this going on too. I think Cal Newport was deeply influenced by David Allen’s thinking."