Review

Rating: 10

I am an office supply junky. I love all things paper, pen, sticky, and stapleable. I found out about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) via a website while I was searching for yet more ways to organize myself. My previous forays into personal productivity surrounded the world of planner guru Stephen Covey and his addictive company, FranklinCovey.

If you are familiar with Covey and his books, you will know that he recommends looking at ‘the big picture’ or ‘the big rocks’ which are your life’s commitments, dreams, goals, and responsibilities and identifying ‘the little pebbles’ or steps you can do on a daily basis to help you slowly but surely tackle the big ones. I never could get into his books past the first few chapters, but I have shelves of binders of planner pages.

Allen’s GTD takes a slightly different approach and fortunately, there are no expensive planners to buy (yet) in order to implement it. This book is more a manual on how to manage and organize everything physical and mental in your life than a guide on how to make a schedule or to-do list.

GTD is extremely accessible, with the only drawback I noticed was my feeling of having picked the wrong occupation — was I really meant to be a corporate professional and not a scholar? Allen is a consultant for bigwigs in the corporate world and most times that is who he is speaking to in his book, including all real world examples he gives. But his methods are applicable to all lines of work, from stay-at-home folks to students to CEOs. All you need are file folders.

The first three chapters are introductory and introduce you to the mind of The David. In chapter one, “A New Practice for a New Reality”, Allen explores the current demands that are placed on us and how previous ways to manage (such as Covey’s) have failed and explores a bottom-up way to look at things.

Chapter two, “Getting Control of Your Life: The Five Stages of Mastering Workflow”, is the first chunk of meat to the book that warrants a permanent bookmark. It lists and details the five stages to getting all your stuff (from emails to snail mail to car registration to to-do lists) organized, complete with diagram and mini-exercises as a sample taste. Chapter two hooks you in to GTD because Allen’s “method” of getting everything organized is stupid-simple, we all just needed him to lay it out for us in bulleted lists and awesome flowcharts.

In chapter three, “Getting Projects Creatively Under Way: The Five Phases of Project Planning”, The David tells you how to handle any type of project you could possibly want or need to do, step-by-step. He gives examples of poor planning methods many readers should be able to identify with and while a lot of it is really basic, he does expose you to things you may not have thought about before.

Chapters four through ten comprise the second part of the book and chapter four, “Getting Started: Setting Up the Time, Space, and Tools”, is where you are guided through setting aside the necessary time in which to implement GTD and are given a list of materials you’ll need (such as file folders and paper) for the coming chapters. Not everything on the list is necessary, such as maybe rubber bands, but I went through almost an entire 100-count box of file folders and was wishing I had bought an electric labeler (I just hand-wrote everything, which is fine for my purposes). Also, when The David says to block “two whole days, back to back”, he’s serious.

Chapters five, six, and seven also warrant their own permanent bookmarks as they walk you through implementation. These chapters, if not the entire book, should be read at least once before you start. In these chapters, you’re given more real life examples and tons of lists.

Starting with chapter eight, the reader is expected to have done everything outlined in the previous chapters and this and the next two chapters serve as additional points for you to consider. Part three (chapters 11-13) is more Covey-esque, with examples and their resolutions that led the folks to better and more productive lives. These chapters are worth at least a cursory examination, to see if there’s anything you can take from them, but they also bored me some.

This book is hailed as a “national bestseller”, so your local library should have at least one copy available. I recommend checking it out and giving it a once-over if you’re looking to get a better grip on your life and everything you have to deal with. Chapters four through eight are the ones worth the US$15, but in the end this book is like all other personal productivity books: you and only you have to do it and stick with it to see results.