'Getting Things Done' by David Allen: My Ten Takeaways
I’m all for enhancing my productivity and learning how to become more efficient, and I’m always on the look out for the best books that teach me how to do exactly that. One book that kept coming across my radar time and time again was David Allen’s ‘Getting things Done’. The methodology in this book is known as the GTD Method. I read this book over a year ago and still implement some of the practices he advocates in his book. Therefore, I feel like this book is worthy of a blog post!
Before I begin my 10 takeaways from the book (remember, I read the books and write these posts so you don’t have to!), I want to provide a disclaimer to anyone who really wants to read the book: skip the first part about how Allen explains in depth how this book and the methodology will change your life. David, we believe you; that’s why we bought the book! Just get on with the good stuff!
My Ten Takeaways:
1. Open loops. Anything you consider unfinished in any way is an ‘open loop’ and must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind (a collection tool) that you’ll come back to regularly and sort through. For me, I made a note on my phone as my ‘capture tool’. I call this my ‘master list’. This is a place where I’ve written down all of the tasks I need to work on, and I’ve used subheadings to split up the content into subcategories so it’s easy to navigate through. At the very top of my note, are the days of the week written as subheadings. During my weekly review (more on this below) I add my tasks, for example, under ‘Monday’ I write all the things I need to get done, including work and personal. I then repeat this for all of the days of the week.
Step 1: Add the days of the week to your Master List
Step 2: Add the tasks for each day
Step 3: Create a ‘next week’ section to capture all of the tasks you need to remember but are not to be completed this week (you will constantly add to this list as things pop into your head!)
Step 4: Create different sections in your Master List by writing subheadings to cover the different aspects of your life you will have projects and tasks for, covering personal and professional. These will make it to your days of the week as time goes on.
2. You must use your mind to get things off your mind. Your mind is not a storage place, and it’s not a reminding tool. Many people mistakenly believe that if they try to hold something in their mind, it will remain there (examples include: ‘I must pick up my dry cleaning’, ‘I need to send that email to Bill’, ‘I want to sort out the kids’ school clubs’ etc.). This isn’t true. The brain’s main function is to be creative, to problem solve, and to innovate. It’s not a storage unit. It has a limited capacity to hold on to information because it needs to be freed up for creative thinking. It’s true we can overload our brains with things we ‘must’ remember. So if you’re someone who is constantly forgetting things and not meeting deadlines, then your brain may be at full capacity already. David Allen’s advice: write it down in a master list (or in my case, a master note). That way, you can get it out of your head, and stored somewhere you can refer back to.
3. Write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward. You can’t do a whole project in one go. You can only do an action related to it. Many actions require only a minute or two, in the appropriate context, to move a project forward.
4. Trust in the capture system: Allen tells us to keep as many tasks out of your head as possible. If it’s in between, with you relying on your brain to remember everyhting and referring to your master list, you won’t trust either one fully. The more compete the system is, the more you’ll trust it. And the more you trust it, the more complete you’ll be motivated to keep it.
5. The weekly review: This is your weekly chance to scan all of the defined actions and tasks on your master list, thus radically increasing the efficacy of the choices you make about what you’re doing at any point in time. The weekly review is the time to:
◦ Gather and process all your stuff
◦ Review your system
◦ Update your lists
◦ Get clean, clear, current and complete.
I complete my weekly review every Sunday morning. I go through my master list kept on a note on my phone, reassess what I managed to get done during the week, clear the content, and then add my plans for my upcoming week.
6. Release the guilt, fear and anxiety about what you’re not doing: There is always more to do than you can do, and you can only do one thing at a time. The key is to feel as good about what you’re not doing as about what you are doing at that moment. That’s why the master list of projects and activities you need to get done is so powerful; because you’ve got the content stored elsewhere, you feel less anxiety about forgetting to do things.
7. The two-minute rule. If something takes less than two minutes to complete, it’s best to get it done straight away. This rule is mentioned a lot in productivity circles, but the idea belongs to David Allen.
8. Email tip: use the @ sign or hyphen (whichever will sort your system) for naming your most important folder. This means this folder will appear at the top of your folder menu. Your resulting @ACTION folder will hold those emails that you need to do something about and will always be viewable when you’re checking your inbox. This was a game changer for me.
9. Use ‘work’ in the universal sense. David Allen believes that your master list should include both personal and professional tasks. ‘Work’ means anything you have a commitment to make happen, so make sure you capture everything you need to get done.
10. Take the pressure off yourself by assessing each task in your master list: Let’s consider the task of cleaning the garage. There are 3 options for dealing with this task:
As an agreement with yourself: write ‘cleaning the garage’ in your ‘upcoming tasks section’ and then assign a day to get the job done. Commit. Then execute!
Lower your standards about your garage and leave it out of the master list of jobs you need to get done (so I have a crappy garage, who cares?…)
I genuinely want to clean the garage. Put ‘clean garage on a someday / maybe section of your ‘master list’. Then when you review that list weekly and you see that item, you can tell yourself ‘not this week’. This means, the next time you walk past the garage, you won’t hear a thing internally, other than ‘ha! Not this week’. You’ve captured your desire to clean the garage, so you now have less guilt over not doing it.
Once I got full swing into the content of the book, I really enjoyed experimenting with Allen’s tips and advice. Creating your master list will take some time at first but once it’s up and running, you won’t know how you ever lived without it! The very fact that I’m still very reliant on my master list, and complete my weekly review every week, means that I genuinely get more things done than I would have in the past.
Would this method work for you? Let me know in the comments…