Getting Things Done with David Allen: An Organized Life

Credit: Flickr/colemama

It is possible to turn your tangled cord into a straight line with Getting Things Done

It’s been two months since I discovered Dave Allen’s simple system for organizing my chaotic life, with its multiple and often conflicting demands

It’s called Getting Things Done, and as the colleague who recommended it told me, “I don’t even want to mention it to you because people who start using this system become such zealots.” (Here’s a shameless plug for her very worthy organization, by the way).

Alas, she’s right. Because it works, this simple system of personal productivity, which eschews prioritizing and the like, simply lumping everything you have to do into a single pot that you sort into bundles you can do at the computer, on the phone, around town and so forth – feels like it can transform your life.

Here’s what to expect when you implement the system.

What to Expect When You’re Getting Things Done

• Expect to trade your feelings of panic and imminent doom for a serene sense that you’ll get to everything, in time.
• Expect to still make mistakes and forget things, but also count on your knowledge that such slip-ups are less catastrophic when you have a system to prevent them recurring.
• Expect to be able to drop a piece of random paper in your inbox without worrying that it’ll get swallowed up and never seen again, especially when you need it.
• Expect to become almost scary efficient once you realize what you need to do at any given time and in any situation, and expect this to have a run-on effect in the rest of your life.
• Expect to become the proselytizer my colleague feared, because once you solve all your problems, you immediately want everyone else to start solving theirs, too.

Read my posts one and two on implementing Getting Things Done.