Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free ProductivityBy David AllenViking, 2001. 267 pgs. Nonfiction
You know you need to read a book when other books mention this one. Getting Things Done is about a decade old now, but still one of the most simple and intuitive organization systems out there. If you’re like me and sometimes just feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things you need to remember to do, then you should definitely check out this book. David Allen explains that our minds are just not designed to remember what we need to do when we need to do it. So trying to depend on it as a catch-all for our lives both personal and professional is ultimately going to fail and stress you out. Even more, this stress and anxiety is actually keeping your mind from innovative thinking and creativity.

David Allen maps out a plan to get everything out of your head and organized into action lists that leave no doubt about what to do next (unlike your old “to-do” lists). The GTD (Getting Things Done) System will definitely take some time to implement, but could really reduce those feelings of being overwhelmed.
AJ

1 comment:

Breanne said...

This book had a lot of great information. Allen has a well-defined plan for helping people to get organized and stay that way in a stress-reduced way. He also has a lot of smaller, specific "tricks" that were really helpful. However, I was quite distracted by the language of the book, which was frequently written in business professional jargon. It seemed unnecessary and made the book feel aimed purely at upper-management business people, which is too bad because I believe the techniques here can have much broader appeal. As it is, this book really does have valuable advice and information, and hopefully readers can think of ways to apply this outside of the business management framework it's portrayed in.