Book Review: Doing things the David Allen way

What is Getting Things Done? In the words of author David Allen, “It’s possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control. That's a great way to live and work, at elevated levels of effectiveness and efficiency”. Another Time Management book I thought. Nevertheless, going through it I found that what it tells is something that all of us are doing every moment of our time. This book, Getting Things Done, turned out to be a tool for productivity about how we organize and utilize our time. It was a new approach that set me thinking about “my work” in a different light. As the name suggests, it is a system for Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.
It rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of their mind and record them elsewhere. This way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate fully on actually performing the tasks at hand.
It is based on two objectives:
1. Capture everything that you need to do in a “trusted system” outside of our head.
2. Create “next actions” for every single input in our life.
Using this system clears our mind of all the tasks that are troubling us about individual tasks and projects in our life.

The author says the methods he presents are based on two key objectives:
1. Capturing all the things that need to be done - now, later, someday, big, little, or in between - into a logical and trusted system outside our head and off our mind; and
2. Disciplining ourselves to make front-end decisions, about all of the "inputs", we let into our life so that we will always have a plan for "next actions", which we can implement or renegotiate at any given moment.
Every thing that we do need to do can be captured in a system. There are numerous ways to do this, but the commitment should not be in our head. If it is in our head, then we will most likely forget it. We need write it down so that we can look at it on a regular basis. Then decide what the end result of the commitment is going to be like, and figure out what the next step should be to achieve that. After we have come up with our ‘next action’, we need to integrate that in our trusted system also.
The author reiterates that every input in our life must be documented and recorded into a trusted system, which covers emails, phone calls, meeting with others, direct reports, and everything else. He makes no distinctions between personal and professional lives. In both, things still need to be done.
He makes it clear that to practice stress-free productivity; we need to master our time, which will enable us to live in the present moment. Lack of time is not the major issue for professionals. The real problem is lack of clarity about what associated action steps are required to execute it. To quote from the book again, the methodology of ‘Getting Things Done’ will have the greatest impact on our life, by showing how to get back to the “mind like water," with all our resources and faculties functioning at a maximum level.

The process he teaches for mastering a relaxed and controlled knowledge work is a five-stage model for managing our workflow. There are five discrete stages that are necessary as we go through our work.
Collect: Everything that is necessary to track, remember, or act on a physical inbox, an email inbox, a tape recorder, a notebook, or any combination of these. The idea here is to get everything out of one's head and into a collection device, ready for processing. All these buckets should be emptied (processed) at least once a week.
Process: Means deciding what to do with each of the items in the "in" box. When this phase is complete, one would have rejected, completed, delegated, put reminders in the actions one must complete, and identified any projects. The author provides detailed guidelines for effective processing of these activities.
Organize: Once the processing is complete, one needs a way to organize the output, which is the next step. The author gives seven primary places to keep the output and tips on making them work effectively.
Review: To keep the system working, one needs to decide what to look at and when. Allen suggests the most frequent review will be of one’s daily calendar and daily appointment folders. After these, the next actions lists should be continuously reviewed.
Do it: Any organizational system is no good if all the time is spent on organizing tasks instead of actually doing them. The author makes it clear that the basic purpose of this process is to facilitate good choices about your actions, which we are doing at any point in time.
The author also gives tools and techniques to implement the above-mentioned steps.
We need to apply the core principles of collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing and doing them diligently until they become a habit. And Getting Things Done will make us more productive immediately. Try it out; I am sure you will thank me for bringing David Allen’s concept to you.

G Ravi