Getting Things Done added January 22, 2011

Everyone wants to accomplish more, or at least this desire is quite universal. The trouble is that only disciplined, systematic processes can be trusted to produce high-quality results in personal effectiveness, and personal discipline does not come naturally.

David Allen attempts to identify common barriers to high performance, addressing them with specific solutions that seem to have helped many people. I have read Getting Things Done multiple times and have found it to be immensely helpful, particularly in combination with material from Bit Literacy on information overload and focus.

One of the most important developments necessary for high performance and optimal effectiveness is to have a consistent approach to cataloging information about all current and planned projects, with a focus on maintaining all critical data in a system that is external from the mind, providing a liberating sense of freedom in having documented clarity about what needs to be done.

One of the core concepts of Getting Things Done is that most of the frustration in handling many projects and challenges is that action steps are rarely defined, not that the number of projects itself is too large. Often project steps lack definition, causing the mind to focus unproductively on worrying about many things simultaneously, without making any progress. A todo list must consist of next actions, not complete projects. Projects are not done; smaller tasks encompassing larger projects are completed in sequence, resulting in their completion.

The book emphasizes the importance of codifying action steps. It also discusses a concept of "information buckets" or dumping areas for collecting ideas and any relevant details for a project. Many valuable ideas come through things that might seem ordinary at the time but could later prove to be enormously influential; such ideas are lost where effective systems for keeping track of them are not in place. Getting Things Done is a manual on orchestrating life to be more effective, and it presents much valuable food for thought. A GTD methodology taken from the book has proven to be somewhat popular, though you must ultimately your own approach to accomplishing things. This book is simply a potentially useful tool for obtaining ideas in the quest for personal effectiveness.