Title Getting Things Done

Author David Allen

Year Published 2001

Kind of Book Organization/Productivity

How strongly I recommend it 10/10  

My Impressions Allen argues that we use most of our “mental RAM” just trying to remember everything we’re supposed to be doing. He offers a system to externalize our to-do list and help us get clear on our priorities and to feel confident we are doing the best thing in each moment (even if that thing is sitting in a hot tub). This book has changed the way I get things done more than any other book.

Date Read Circa 2014 and 2019

Practical Takeaways

  • Describe in a single sentence your desired outcome for the problem or situation

  • Write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward (it should start with a verb)

  • Rule your mind or it will rule you-Horace

  • Define what done means (desired outcome)

  • Define what doing looks like (Next-Action)

  • Form for next actions: Verb, object of that verb, desirable outcome eg. Call Katie to get Birthday Ideas

  • Don't worry about writing things that are already habits or things that the world reminds you of (eg. Wash dishes, cut nails)

  • Have as few capturing boxes as possiblee

  • Keep everything in your head or out of your head (but not inbetween)

  • Only use your calendar for time specific or day specific items

  • Organize next actions by Time Available, Energy Available, Resources Available, or priority

  • Complete the projects you begin-John Roger

  • Fulfill the commitments you have made-John Roger

  • Plan out in advance your actions for the day, so that you don't have to waste time on thinking and deciding during the day

  • Ask yourself the why question

  • Put the thing you don't want to forget in front of the door or somewhere else you know you will see it (treat reminders for next actions in the same way)

  • Put your workout clothes even if you don't feel like it

  • Allow mind to follow body when you don't have motivation

  • Don't share a workspace with anyone else

  • Have a big yearly cleaning once a year when you delete old notes and clean house

  • Date everything you handwrite, from post it notes, to ideas

  • Rules To Process: Process the top item first, process one item at a time, Never put anything back into 'in'

  • Once you decide what the next action is

  1. Do it (if the action takes less than 2minutes)

  2. Delegate it (if you're not the best person to do it)

  3. Defer it (into whatever folder it needs to go for you to do later)

  • If the next action involves some kind of decision making, decide what physical activity needs to happen to get you to decide

  • If you have a long time to process your 'in' tray you can extend the 2minute rule to 5 or 10minutes

  • Time yourself during the 2minute rule at first to see how long the action actually takes

  • Record and date everything you hand off to others in your "waiting for" folder

  • Have next action steps defined for all of your current projects

  • Review all the components of the project as frequently as you need to in order to stay productive

  • Throw out old notes and reference material when they become no longer useful

  • If upon reflection you notice that a current project will not be able to be done for a few months, move it to 'not right now' or 'someday maybe'

  • Give yourself yearly or quarterly checkpoints to evaluate your job/career

  • Use calendar to work as a tickler to remind you to do things in the future

  • Use checklists/tracking to help you maintain a focus until you're more familiar with what you're doing or it has become a habit (system 1)

  • Create checklists for anything you might want

Eg. Exercise Regiments or People to stay in touch with

  • Review your to-dos for a few seconds every day

  • Block out two hours every week in the early afternoon for your weekly review

  • Ultimately you must trust your intuition to guide you with what you should be doing at any given moment

  • Organize next-actions by what positive emotion they will give you once they're complete

  • Identify all open loops, and incompletes at all of the levels of resolution

  • Handle what has your attention and you'll then discover what really has your attention

  • Don't keep yourself busy with low-level tasks to avoid having to confront higher-horizon issues

  • Deal with whatever is most on your mind first

  • Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win-Jonathan Kozol

  • Install a whiteboard in your children's bedroom

  • Don't break agreements with yourself about what you are going to do (so set reasonable goals)

  • Either Make fewer agreements with yourself and to others, honor all your agreements, or put some on your someday/maybe list

  • Make every agreement you make with yourself conscious and explicit (write it down)

  • Use your mind to have ideas not to remember ideas

  • Get started. Break complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks. Then get started on the first one.

  • 20 minutes before the end of the agreed upon time of a meeting, ask the question "What is the next action here?"

  • When you're in your office with more than an hour of free time, look at your task list and select something challenging and important to work on

  • When you're feeling flustered and overwhelmed do a mental RAM dump

  • Ask yourself WHAT IS THE NEXT ACTIONABLE STEP?

  • If the task will take less than 2mins to do, do it right then.

 

Big Ideas

  • Usually if you are thinking about something a lot it means you are not taking action on it a lot

  • Doing things takes less energy than deciding what to do

  • It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of acting.

  • You can only feel good about what you're doing when you know everything you're not doing

  • In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion

  • The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

  • The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

  • A vision without a practical action task towards attaining it is a dream

  • Your mind can't let go until and unless you park a reminder in a place it knows you will, without fail, look

  • We make agreements with ourselves all of the time about what we are going to do. Many of them our implicit and unconscious

 

Levels of Resolution

  • Horizon 5: Purpose

  • Horizon 4: Vision

  • Horizon 3: Goals

  • Horizon 2: Areas of focus and accountabilities

  • Horizon 1: Current Projects

  • Ground: Current Actions

 

Unknown Terms

Open Loop (incompletes): anything pulling at your attention that doesn't belong where it is, the way it is

Best Practices: a procedure that has been shown by research and experience to produce optimal results and that is established or proposed as a standard suitable for widespread adoption

Distributed Cognition:  a process in which cognitive resources are shared socially in order to extend individual cognitive resources or to accomplish something that an individual agent could not achieve alone. (eg. Knowing how to make a cake between your brain and your wife's brain, but neither of you knows all the information alone)