If only I’d finished “Getting Things Done” a year ago…

Admittedly, I have major problems with time (and life) management. I also love to read and like to think that there’s a book out there to solve every problem. Thus far, my quest for the magic book- cure for my Time-Life Management issues has only served to worsen the problem… first, I waste days on end at Borders; then, I end up purchasing books I will never have time to finish. One such book that’s taken up (a two year) residence on my bookshelf is Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen whose apt subtitle is “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.” I bought it because, aside from the promises on the flap (Increased productivity! An End to Procrastination!), I thought the author was my old boss from my days as a Management Consultant (I still don’t know if it is or not– it does look like him, sans 75 lbs., but the name David Allen is still pretty generic.) As is generally the case with nonfiction I buy, I read the first 2 chapters and lost interest. I must have moved on to more interesting fare, like Secrets of a Manhattan Call girl (which is actually very educational– I even blogged about it!).

Imagine my shock upon recently discovering the online cult status of GTD. In the words of many a blogger, it has “geek cred”. Because bloggers tend to be ADD-types and/or Myers-Briggs Type INFP (a personality type whose description reads like an ADD symptom list), I suddenly realized that I’d found my magic book-cure all… two years ago!! If the fans of the GTD system are to be believed, I could have fit the sum of my achievements over the last 2 years into two months!! Gaaaaah!!!!

As I said, I’ve not yet completed the book, but have been able to grasp it’s main tenets, thanks to other GTD geeks. And many of them, at that. Jennalysis is nothing if not overly-informed. So here they are:

The Problem: Stuff

Getting Things Done works because it first addresses a critical barrier to completing the atomic tasks that we want to accomplish in a given day. That’d be “stuff.” Amorphous, un-actionable, flop-sweat-inducing stuff. David says:

Here’s how I define “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. [pg. 17]

Stuff litters our minds, killing every potential moment of serenity. Staff meetings, housewarming parties, old magazines, broken vacuum cleaners, college applications, extra poundage and parking tickets all compete for prime attention in our poor, addled brains. Stuff, as defined in GTD, has no “home” and, consequently, no place to go, so it just keeps swirling around.

It’s overwhelming, and we’re too neurotic to stop thinking about it. We certainly don’t have time to actually deal with it in real time. Jeez Louise, what the hell am I, Superman?

So you sprint from fire to fire, praying you haven’t forgotten anything, sapped of anything like creativity or even the basic human flexibility to adapt your own schedule to the needs of your friends, your family or yourself. Stuff has taken over your brain like a virus now, mutating and replicating until it slows down everything you do, leaving you virtually useless. Sound familiar?

So how does this GTD system help?

This is a really over-simplified version, but here are the main points:

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (“close all open loops”)
2. get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
3. categorize your remaining stuff (don’t forget to add a tickler or To Be Filed category)
4. create homes for your various categories of stuff, in a place that you trust that works for you
4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
5. do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
6. edit mercilessly and reevaluate periodically

Also built-in to the system are an ongoing series of reviews, in which you periodically re-examine your now-organized stuff from various vantage points to make sure your vertical focus (individual projects and their tasks) is working in concert with your horizontal focus (side to side scanning of all incoming channels for new stuff).

I’ll interrupt this summary here to admit that employing the above system sounds overwhelming. When I get overwhelmed, I shut down. Ironically, the thought of taking care of my stuff is having the effect on me that the mere presence of said stuff supposedly does (see above). But the GTD disciples tell me to fear not, as the book lays out this system in a way that makes it seem manageable. And maybe even sort of fun and oddly satisfying.

In a nutshell: make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just throw away. Rid your life of clutter and filler, and your mind will follow.

Everything you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment—both now and well into the future.

Of course, I’ve yet to personally succumb to GTD, but they tell me that employing this system is life-changing. Apparently, I can look forward to an amazing kind of confidence that stems from knowing what’s on my proverbial plate, and knowing nothing will get lost.