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Productivity: David Allen’s Getting Things Done

I recently introduced Life Balance, which is superior to the usual to-do lists. However, not all activities can be mapped in it: a lot of paper ends up on every desk, countless e-mails arrive in every mailbox every day, and Life Balance offers no immediate help (at first). That’s where David Allen’s Getting Things Done comes in.

Getting Things Done, also called GTD by followers, is the description of the organizational method of David Allen, who helped over 1,000 people to work more organized and thus more productive as a consultant for 20 years. Ultimately, he has created a system that creates clarity in a positive working style about what needs to be done, when and how. At the same time, Allen points out that no system can be universally valid, but it is still better to do anything at all than nothing at all. However, once you have achieved an improvement in productivity at one level, the challenges of the next level put the rules that are only just working to the test.

Allen’s system is based on two points:

  • Everything that needs to be done is put into a logical system that you know you can rely on. This system does not mean the head.
  • For each input (everything that somehow comes in is called input) a consistent decision is made.

Everything must therefore be brought into the system, otherwise the mind is occupied with it and is not free; only if the system is reliable, the subconscious mind trusts this system and does not constantly remind you of what actually needs to be done (and usually at a time when you can’t work on it at all).

So it is quite salutary to first take stock and write down everything that needs to be done. Often they are also obligations that you have imposed on yourself. Here it is important to clarify what the obligation is and what needs to be done to be able to fulfil it. At the same time, it is important how the commitments are written down: besides result-oriented thinking, the most important factor is to write down the next step that needs to be taken. For example, don’t change tires, but call the workshop for an appointment for a tire change. In other words, to-do lists should not be a collection of matters, but rather work steps to be performed.

I was particularly fascinated by the process, which Allen offers for free download as a PDF on his website. Because the first obstacle that has to be overcome is the decision as to what it actually is, what has just come in as input, to grasp: Can you even carry out an action with it? Is it something that could be of value now? Sometime? Depending on what the answer is, there is a decision and an action to be taken. This process alone allows me to work through my desk and my e-mail inbox within a very short time. No more panic or a guilty conscience that somewhere between the mails or the stacks of paper there is an important piece of information or a building block of my project that could trip me up in the next moment.

This is just a brief outline of the GTD system. Anyone who complains about too much work and stress is recommended to read the German edition with the somewhat awkwardly translated title Wie ich die Dinge geregelt kriege, which costs less than 10 euros on Amazon.

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Productivity aid: Creating notes from books and magazines

Sometimes it’s the little tricks and tricks that increase your productivity, and that’s how I felt about this “life hack“, as its inventor Phil Gyford calls it. After reading about it on 43 folders last week, I bought large post-it notes, stuck some of them behind the cover of a book, stuck one on the opposite side of the text I was reading, wrote my notes on what I read, stuck full-written post-it notes on the last page and took a new piece of paper from the front. No extra notepad to carry with you (on which you make other notes in between anyway, so that the notes on the book are fragmented); all you need is the book with a stack of sticky notes and a pen. Once you have read through the book, you can take out the notes, stick them next to your monitor and digitize what you have written. The large Post-It notes cost about 80 cents and are a sensible investment for me for people who have to write down what they have read so that they don’t forget it.