Getting Things Done – Review

Following rave reviews from many different sources (among others: The Simple Dollar, 43 Folders, or Amazon Customer Reviews) , I’ve been looking for  Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
(GTD), a book written by David Allen, for a long time. Surprisingly, Malaysian book-stores always seemed to be out of stocks. I finally found it a few weeks ago and decided to take my time to go through the book and its system. What follows are my thoughts on this walk-through, which hopefully will help you make up your mind whether or not you should struggle with your book-store to get it.

The method: getting rid of, defining, and organizing “stuff”

Most reader of self-development books are in search of control and perspective. David Allen’s concept is to allow you to focus on what’s important by removing all the “stuff” you need to do / plan out of you head. Here is how D. Allen defines “stuff”:

Anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step.

The best way to do that is to set in place a system which will ensure you identify and keep track of all the stuff that isn’t in the right place. You should then either(1) get rid of the stuff by either simply tossing the unimportant ones or delegating the ones you can, (2) define each one by its next actionable item, (3) tackle it straight away if it requires less than two minutes to complete, or (4) create a folder or places you trust where you be able to access it and come back to it easily.

If you follow this method, you should end up with a manageable list of actionable items and project, which reflect your priorities, and which yo can tackle following your time, your energy, and/or the context of any given moment.

Of course, you also need to update and review the stuff you accumulated, and the actionable you did not yet tackle on a regular basis to ensure you stay on top of your game.

What do I think?

I think GTD is a very good book with a strong system. The writing is engaging and D. Allen knows how to motivate. I worked the system for a few days and came out with the following conclusions:

1. I felt empowered after listing down all my “stuff”.
2. The best moment were getting rid of all the non-necessary ones
3. I found many useful tips on how to get my “stuff” actionable
4. I improved my organizing method
5. The full system needs to be updated very often.

Unfortunately the last point I raised is problematic with me. I always end up losing focus at some point in time, and end up with a non-updated system. I ended up frustrated, and re-initialized the process of getting my “stuff” actionable and organized two times already. Each time I reviewed my system and got rid of a few things D. Allen recommend. I now have a system which I adapted to my processes, and I just realized it is very close to the one JD discovered when he read Zen to Done: The SIMPLE Productivity Syste. I guess it will be my next read !

Should you read it?

Yes.  I highly recommend you read Getting Things Done. Even if you don’t use the system once you finished it, you will come out with many nuggets of wisdom and actionable you can incorporate in your own personal system.

You can start by borrowing it from friends to discover it. If you like it and want to have it on your bookshelves to refer to it later on you can always buy it from Amazon down the road.