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mburnamfink 's review for:
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
by David Allen
Who among does not have trouble Getting Things Done? I'm conflicted about this book. The core advice is solid, but the follow-through to the hard parts is often skimpy.
The goal of Getting Things Done is a productivity flow state, or what Bruce Lee called a "mind like water". Allen's insight is based around the cognitive-psych wisdom that working memory is a very limited resource, and that anything you have on your mind, even minor stuff like a mental to-do list or inbox, is taking up resources that should be used to make important executive decisions; you are after all an important business executive, right?
The first tool for doing this is a mental model of do-defer-delegate-delete. Anything that hits your awareness should either be done immediately, if it can be done so, deferred or delegated to the right person or future block of time for a complex task, or deleted. Most things in the universe are spam. The second tool is a rigorous system of alphabetical folders, which should contain every pieces of paper in your life, and every piece of information similar to paper, especially emails.
I buy the importance of these two tools, the need to reduce clutter, and the need to block out large chunks of time for purge and organization to set up the system. Allen also recommends that you add your personal life to the system. After all, a successful business executive like yourself would never let family and friends waste away because they aren't on the agenda. The thing is that setting up a knowledge management system across multiple email accounts, computers, cloud file systems, etc, is legitimately hard, and there's not much there. Allen also recommends a weekly review session to make sure that there's alignment between long term goals, your projects (something you intend to finish in less than a year), and what you're doing right now, but didn't have much to guide these review sessions except "think wisely".
Getting Things Done is not actively wrong business advice, some of which I've read, but there's a major gap between what's recommended and what's doable, and I'm not sure how well the half-measures work.
The goal of Getting Things Done is a productivity flow state, or what Bruce Lee called a "mind like water". Allen's insight is based around the cognitive-psych wisdom that working memory is a very limited resource, and that anything you have on your mind, even minor stuff like a mental to-do list or inbox, is taking up resources that should be used to make important executive decisions; you are after all an important business executive, right?
The first tool for doing this is a mental model of do-defer-delegate-delete. Anything that hits your awareness should either be done immediately, if it can be done so, deferred or delegated to the right person or future block of time for a complex task, or deleted. Most things in the universe are spam. The second tool is a rigorous system of alphabetical folders, which should contain every pieces of paper in your life, and every piece of information similar to paper, especially emails.
I buy the importance of these two tools, the need to reduce clutter, and the need to block out large chunks of time for purge and organization to set up the system. Allen also recommends that you add your personal life to the system. After all, a successful business executive like yourself would never let family and friends waste away because they aren't on the agenda. The thing is that setting up a knowledge management system across multiple email accounts, computers, cloud file systems, etc, is legitimately hard, and there's not much there. Allen also recommends a weekly review session to make sure that there's alignment between long term goals, your projects (something you intend to finish in less than a year), and what you're doing right now, but didn't have much to guide these review sessions except "think wisely".
Getting Things Done is not actively wrong business advice, some of which I've read, but there's a major gap between what's recommended and what's doable, and I'm not sure how well the half-measures work.