Product Description
In today's world, yesterday's methods just don't work. In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the breakthrough methods for stress-free performance that he has introduced to tens of thousands of people across the country. Allen's premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential. In Getting Things Done Allen shows how to:
€ Apply the "do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it" rule to get your in-box to empty
€ Reassess goals and stay focused in changing situations
€ Plan projects as well as get them unstuck
€ Overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and being overwhelmed
€ Feel fine about what you're not doing
From core principles to proven tricks, Getting Things Done can transform the way you work, showing you how to pick up the pace without wearing yourself down.
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Amazon.com Review
With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow," "mind like water," and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance. Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organized, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Company has dubbed "the personal productivity guru," suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech saber known as the cell phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.) As whole-life-organizing systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk, The next step is to write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket" That's where the processing and prioritizing begin; in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's commonsense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment; Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belabored, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to soccer moms (who we all know are more organized than most CEOs to start with). --Timothy Murphy
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 Great book!
This has been a great resource to get organized both at home and at work. This is definitely the best book I have read on this subject and would recommend it to anyone who is "stuck" and overwhelmed wtih paperwork and piles. With 4 kids and a small business it has worked wonders for me.
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Masterful Workflow Advice for the Busy Professional ( scott_ryan_jones )
I was first exposed to 'Getting Things Done' (GTD) a few years back in an article about prolific modern knowledge workers and how they thrive amidst a frantic, constant information flow. The very best manage thousands of demands for attention each and every week (emails, voicemails, meetings, etc.) while completing a steady stream of projects both large and small. David Allen's 'Getting Things Done' presents a framework for doing just that while also achieving a sense of personal calm and heightened creativity. I've returned to this book many times over the years to tweak my own GTD implementation and David Allen never fails to inspire. Highly recommended.
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How To Eat Many Elephants 101
This book teaches you how to free your mind of clutter, so that you can operate at your absolute best, to get many things done: from climbing the corporate ladder to running a business, to efficiently managing a family. It is a revolutionary approach which helps you clarify what needs to be done about anything, at any moment. This book shows you that no matter what needs to be accomplished, you get it done by breaking it down to one, two, three, and four etc. actionable tasks (the very next thing or things you will do) to get it done.
This is how I would sum the book up... How do you eat many elephants? You put them in a big box (labeling each elephant A-Z:), then eat it One Next bite at a time.
Why the book you say if the concept can be summed so simply...
The book will show...
How you have always been attempting to eat elephants in some fashion,
how you inefficiently think about the elephants (7 Habits of...),
how you can efficiently think about the elephants,
how to COLLECT and put many elephants in the box,
how to PROCESS the elephants (to eat or not to eat, that is the question),
ORGANIZE the elephants (legs with legs, trunks with trunks etc.),
How to REVIEW your eating progress (ok I've eaten lots of legs and trunks [which elephants are completely eaten], how many more - O no here comes another 50 elephants I've just agreed to eat, time to COLLECT, PROCESS, ORGANIZE, then REVIEW all over again. The saga continues...)
Think I've said too much and now you think you don't need the book guess again! The book is chalk full of ins and outs to effectively set this set of skills to work for you. The Getting Things Done method is simple enough that my ten year old son follows it, yet robust enough that CEOs run enterprises with the same concept.
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 getting things done
David Allen did a good job. He guides the reader with important princples to complete a task. From the simplest task to the most complex projects, the principles are straightforward applicable.
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Fundamental change in thinking ( evan_leonard )
This is part of the new story which says, you can't predict and control the future, you can only track your progress against an honest account of reality. Look into other sources like Holacracy and Agile Software development for examples of this story at different levels of scale.
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