Getting Things Done PDF – David Allen

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BOOK CATALOGS ARE full of listings for volumes that offer advice on how to improve your work habits, your health, your productivity, and your overall success in life. Some of what they say is typically dressed-up common sense. A fraction of it is baloney.

Getting Things Done PDF – David Allen

Much of it is worth reading one time, if that, and is forgettable hours or days after you have put the book down. This book is different. It has sold steadily, in large numbers, since its first appearance, and the audience for David Allen’s programs and philosophies has grown in size and international reach.

Speaking for myself, I can say that this is a book I read carefully when the original version came out. I have revisited every year or two since then. And that I was very glad to learn it was coming out in the updated and revised version you are reading now.

What makes Getting Things Done different? In ascending order of importance, I would list these three qualities, each evident in nearly every chapter. One is its practicality, by which I really mean its modular and forgiving approach.

Many self-improvement schemes work from an all-or-nothing, “everything must be different, starting tomorrow” premise. If you want to lose forty pounds, take control of your financial destiny, straighten out your family, or have the career of your dreams, you have to embrace a radical top-to-bottom change in every aspect of your life.

Getting Things Done PDF – David Allen

Occasionally, people do make these radical leaps: in programs for sobriety, in commitments to new diet-and- exercise plans after serious health scares, or even going into the monastery after a life in the business world. But for most people, most of the time, approaches that are incremental and forgiving of error are more likely to pay off in the long run.

That way, if there is one part of the approach you forget or fall behind in, you don’t have to abandon all the rest. David Allen’s ambitions for his readers are in a sense even grander than those of most other books. His goal is nothing less than helping people remove stress and anxiety from their work and personal lives, so they can match every moment of their existence to the purposes they would most like to pursue.

Yet with a very few exceptions—for instance, his sensible insistence on developing a “capture” habit, so that you are sure to write down or otherwise record every commitment you make or obligation you accept rather than torture yourself trying to remember them all, and the related insistence on having one central, trusted repository where you keep such data—a great advantage of his system is its modular nature.

Getting Things Done PDF – David Allen

This book is full of advice that works better if embraced in its totality. But it is still useful when applied piece by piece. For instance, if you haven’t gone all the way with David Allen’s GTD system, you can still find value in his “two-minute rule” for disposing of obligations now rather than putting them off. (From chapter 6, the two-minute rule: “If an action will take less than two minutes. It should be done at the moment it’s defined.”)

Or his emphasis, explained throughout the book, on relying on an “external brain”— that is, tools that can do routine categorizing and remembering for us, from simple folders in which to store receipts to established places in which you will always put keys, glasses, or other things you don’t want to hunt for each time.

Getting Things Done PDF

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