Chapter 13 of "Getting Things Done" by David Allen - Book Summary/Review

This post summarizes chapter 13 called The Power of Outcome Focusing as well as the subsequent brief Conclusion.

As you begin to use the principles and tools outlined in this book in your day-to-day life, your personal productivity can increase tremendously. They really work in the arena of the ordinary things we must deal with daily. Employing next-action decision-making results in clarity, productivity, accountability and empowerment. Exactly the same results happen when you hold yourself to the discipline of identifying the real results you want and, more specifically, the projects you need to define in order to produce them. At the core, there are only two problems in life:

1. You know what you want, and you don't know how to get it
2. You don't know what you want

If this is true, then there are only two solutions, i.e. (a) specifically define what you want and (b) make it happen. In this context, everything you experience as incomplete must have a reference point for "complete". Once you've decided that there is something to be changed, you ask yourself "How do I now make this happen?", "What is the next action?" and/or "What resources do I need to make this happen?".

What is unique about the practical focus of "Getting Things Done" is the combination of effectiveness and efficiency that these methods can bring to every level of your reality. The value of all this natural project planning is that it provides an integrated, flexible, aligned way to think through any situation. Being comfortable with challenging the purpose of anything you may be doing is healthy and mature. Being able to "make up" visions and images of success, before the methods are clear, is a phenomenal trait to strengthen. Being willing to have ideas, good or bad, and to express and capture all of them without judgments is critical for fully assessing creative intelligence. Honing multiple ideas and types of information into components, sequences, and priorities aimed toward a specific outcome is a necessary mental discipline. And deciding on and taking real next actions are the essence of productivity.

However, even when only portions of the model are inserted, tremendous benefits can ensue. Even the slightest increase in the use of natural planning can bring significant improvement. It all affirms that the way our minds naturally work is the way that we should focus to make anything happen in the physical world. The model is simply the basic principle of determining outcomes and actions for everything we consider to be our work.

In conclusion, "Getting Things Done" has probably validated much of what you already knew and had been doing to some degree before. Nevertheless, it might make it easier for you to apply that common sense more systematically in a world that seems to increasingly confound us with its intensity and complexity. It is a road map to achieve the positive, relaxed focus that characterizes your most productive state. I invite you to use it, like a road map, as a reference tool to get back to whenever you need to.

To consistently stay on course, you have to commit to building the following habits:

1. Keep everything out of your head
2. Decide next actions and outcomes when things first emerge on your radar, rather than later
3. Regularly review and update the complete inventory of open loops of your work and life

Don't be surprised though, if it takes a little while to make them automatic. Be patient and enjoy the process. :-)

Based on: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, p.249-259.

Chapter 12 of "Getting Things Done" by David Allen - Book Summary/Review

This post summarizes chapter 12 called The Power of the Next-Action Decision.

We are all accountable to define what, if anything, we are committed to make happen as we engage with ourselves and others. And at some point, for any outcome that we have an internal commitment to complete, we must make the decision about the next physical actin required. There's a great difference, however, between making that decision when things show up and doing it when they blow up. When a culture adopts "What's the next action?" as a standard operating query, there's an automatic increase in energy, productivity, clarity, and focus. It never fails to greatly improve both the productivity and the peace of mind of the user to determine what the next physical action is that will move something forward.

How could something so simple be so powerful - "What's the next action?". To understand the answer think of all the items / open loops you wrote down as part of clearing your mind (revisit chapter 5) or just think of all the open loops / incomplete projects that are currently on your mind. You'll probably admit that yes, indeed, a few have been a little "stuck". If you haven't defined exactly what the next action step is, then it probably will never get done. What's ironic is it would likely require only about 10 seconds of thought time to figure out the next action for almost everything on your list.

Instead of having "tires" on your list, you need to e.g. write "Call three tire stores and obtain quotes". That person who needs new tires for her car probably had that on her radar for quite a while. He probably passed by the phone hundreds of times with enough energy to make these calls, but didn't. Why didn't she make it? Because in that state of mind, the last thing in the world she felt like doing was considering all his projects, including getting tires, and what their next actions where. In those moments he didn't feel like thinking at all. What he needed was to already have figured out all these next action steps beforehand. Then, we having a 15 minute time window before a meeting with energy at 5.7 out of 10, he can look at the list of things to do and be delighted to see "Call tire store for prices". He'll think "That's something I can do and complete successfully" and be motivated to make the call to experience the "win" of accomplishing something productive in his free time.

Often, even the most simple things are stuck because we haven't made a final decision about the next action. We waste tremendous amount of time and energy in that state. We glance at the project and some part of us thinks "I don't quite have all the pieces between here and there". We know something is missing, but we are not sure what it is exactly, so we quit.

It's usually the smartest, most creative, sensitive and intelligent people who procrastinate the most. This is because their sensitivity gives them the capability of producing in their minds lurid nightmare scenarios about what might be involved in doing the project, and all the negative consequences that might occur if it was done finished perfectly. The way out is to silence all that negative self-talk and uncomfortable visions of imminent failure. And this is best done by figuring the next actions for all your incomplete projects. Nothing will essentially change in the world. However, shifting your focus to something that your mind perceives as a doable task will create a real increase in positive energy, direction and motivation.

You are either attracted to or repelled by the things on your lists; there is no neutral territory. Either there is a positive draw to complete the action or reluctance to think about what it is and resistance to getting involved in it. And figuring out the next action is usually what makes the difference between these two extremes. Avoid at all costs to allow "amorphous stuff" on your lists like the following:

• Sarah's birthday
• Eastern Europe trip
• Presentation for xyz Conference in August
• Meeting with John Doe

Instead change these to clear next action steps.

Which do you think is the more efficient way to move through life - deciding next actions on your projects as soon as they appear on your radar screen and then efficiently grouping them into categories of actions, or avoiding thinking about what exactly needs to be done until it has to be done and then frantically engage in last-minute fire-fighting?

Perhaps the greatest benefit of adopting the next-action approach is the dramatic increase in your ability to make things happen with an accompanying rise in your self-esteem. Getting things done on your own accord, before you are forced to by external pressure and internal stress, builds a firm foundation of self-worth that will spread into every aspect of your life. Asking "What's the next action?" undermines the victim mentality. It presupposes that there is a possibility of change, and that there is something you can do to make it happen. 

If there is too much complaining in the culture around you, try asking "So, what's the next action?" People will only complain about something that they assume could be better than it currently is. The action question forces the issue. If it can be changed, there's some action that will change it. If it can't, it must be accepted as part of the landscape to be incorporated as a given element in your strategy and tactics.

Based on: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, p.236-248.

Chapter 11 of "Getting Things Done" by David Allen - Book Summary/Review

This post summarizes chapter 11 called The Power of the Collection Habit

The techniques discussed in this book so far offer a systematic method to keep your mind distraction-free, ensuring a high level of efficiency and effectiveness in your work. That in itself would be sufficient reason to implement these practices.

However, there are even greater implications for your life in general and these will be discussed in chapters 11, 12 and 13. These longer-term results can have a significant impact on you as an individual, and they can positively affect larger organizational cultures as well. For example, when people with whom you interact notice that without fail you receive, process, and organise in an airtight manner the exchanges and agreements they have with you, they begin to trust you in a unique way. Such is the power of capturing placeholders for anything that is incomplete or unprocessed in your life. It noticeably enhances your mental well-being and improves the quality of your communications and relationships, both professionally and personally.

If you are like most people who go through the full collection process, you will probably feels some for of anxiety, being overwhelmed, panic, frustration of fatigue as well as guilt over not having completed all the things you wanted to accomplish. When you understand the source of your negative feelings about all your stuff, you'll discover the way to get rid of them. The source of these negative feelings is not having too much to do (because there is always more to do in life), but rather from not keeping agreements you have consciously or subconsciously made with yourself..

If the negative feelings come from broken agreements, you have three options for dealing with them and eliminating the negative consequences:

1. Don't make the agreement: It can feel very good to just throw away a bunch of old stuff, finally deciding not to deal with it. You lighten up if you just lower your standards in relevant areas of your life and operate more according to the 80/20 principle, while rejecting exaggerated perfectionism. Realising the huge price you pay for making and not keeping a large number of commitments can help with being more conscious about what you take on in the future. If you really capture and track everything that is on your mind using GTD, you will think twice about making commitments internally that you do not really want or need to make.
2. Complete the agreement: Another option is to finally complete the task. Actually, you love to do things, as long as you get the feeling that you have achieved something. The magic of the two minute rule (i.e. immediately complete all action, which require up to 2 minutes to complete) shows how life changing this can be in practice. 
3. Renegotiate the agreement: A renegotiated agreement is not a broken one. The fact that you can't remember an agreement you made with yourself does not mean that you are not holding yourself liable for it. As soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, there's a part of you that things you should be doing it all the time. For example, if you walked by your garage six years ago and told yourself that you should clean it, then every time you walk past the garage a little voice in your head that keeps complaining that you still haven't done it. If you want to shut that voice up, you have 3 options for dealing with this agreement with yourself:
• Lower your standards about your garage: "So I have a lousy garage... who honestly cares?"
• Keep the agreement - clean the garage
• At least put "clean garage" on your "someday/maybe" list. Then when you review this list weekly (or monthly) and you see this item, you can tell yourself, "not this week". The next time you walk by the garage, you won't hear a thing internally other than a "Ha! Not this week." :-)

So, every agreement must be made conscious. That means it must be captured, objectified, and reviewed regularly in full conscious awareness so that you can put it where it belongs in your self-management arena. If that doesn't happen, it will actually take up a lot more psychic energy than it deserves. 

If you wonder how much collecting you should do, then the answer is "Until nothing else shows up as a reminder in your mind". Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. Doing the GTD collection process as fully as you can, and then incorporating the behaviour of capturing all the new things as they emerge, will be empowering, productive and in many instances "life changing". In particular, it will naturally make you stand out in any organisation that you work for, i.e. your boss/colleagues can trust that you keep track of all your open loops, tasks, todos that are your responsibility.

In conclusion, organisations of all types should seek to creature a culture in which it is acceptable that everyone has more to do than she can do, and in which it is wise to renegotiate agreements what every is not doing. Unfortunately, you can't legislate personal organisation systems. Everyone needs to have her own way to deal with all outstanding todos. However, you can hold people accountable for outcomes, and for tracking and managing everything that comes their way.

Based on: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, p.225-235.

Chapter 10 of "Getting Things Done" by David Allen - Book Summary/Review

This post summarizes chapter 10 called Getting Projects Under Control

Chapters 4 to 9 have given you all the tricks and methods you need to clear your head and make intuitive choices about what to do when. That's the horizontal level of productivity. In this chapter, we look more at the vertical level, the digging deep and high-level thinking that draws on your creative brainpower. All of us could do more planning, more informally and more often, about our projects and our lives. And if we did, it would relieve a lot of pressure on our psyches and produce an enormous amount of creative output with minimal effort.

If you feel out of control with your current actionable commitments, you'll resist focused planning. However, as you begin to apply the GTD methods in this book, you will find that they free up capacity for enormously creative and constructive thinking. You can put that energy towards thinking more about two types of projects that deserve more of your attention:

1. Projects that still have your attention even after you've determined their next actions: This type will need a more detailed approach than just identifying a next action. What is needed is a more specific application of one or more of the other four phases of the natural planning model: (a) purpose and principles, (b) vision/outcome, (c) brainstorming and/or (d) organising.
2. Projects about which potentially useful ideas and supportive detail just show up: This type needs to have an appropriate place into which these associated ideas can be captured. Then they can reside there for later use as needed.

There are probably a few projects you can think of right now that you would like to have more control over. If you haven't done it already, write down a 'next action' right now and put it on the appropriate list. Most of the other work to obtain more control over your projects usually falls into one of the following categories:

• Brainstorming: For example, note down "Draft ideas re X"
• Organising:  For example, note down "Organise Project X notes"
• Setting up meetings: Often, progress will be made on project thinking when you set up a meeting with the people you'd like to be involved in the brainstorming.
• Gathering information: Sometimes, the next task on project thinking is to gather more data, so note down e.g. "Call X re her thoughts on next week's meeting"

Don't lose any ideas about project that could potentially be useful. Many times, you'll think of something you don't want to forget when you are in a place that has nothing to do with the project. One useful tip is to then send yourself an email, record a voice note and email it to yourself or record the idea in another place/list that you know you will check regularly. You need to hold all these ideas until you later decide what to do with them.

Other useful tools for these purposes include tools that automatically synchronise across all your devices, such as:

• Google Documents
• Word documents (and others) stored in your Dropbox account. Use different heading in "Outline" view to organise your ideas very quickly and efficiently.
• Time Tree Calendar & Notes App
• Evernote

Keep good writing tools around all the time (e.g. pen and paper, whiteboards at home, smartphone on the go), so you never have any unconscious resistance to thinking due to not having anything to capture it with. It should also be very easy to create a new physical project folder or a new digital folder in your computer, so that there is as little resistance to creative planning as possible. The mere act of creating a file for a topic into which we can organise random notes and potentially relevant materials provides a tremendously increased sense of control and joy.

Based on: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, p.211-222.

Chapter 9 of "Getting Things Done" by David Allen - Book Summary/Review

This post summarizes chapter 9 called Doing: Making the Best Action Choices

This chapter is all about how to decide, in a given moment, what to do exactly in the face of a multitude of different options. A lot of the answer comes down to trusting your intuition/heart/spirit.

A helpful tool in this context is the four-criteria model for choosing actions in the moment. It recommends making the choice based on four successive criteria:

1. Context: The first thing is to consider what actions are possible given your current location and tools at hand. Some tasks require an internet connection, you being at home or in the office. This is the first filter for your available options and the reason why it's important to organise your action lists by context, i.e. if you have a buch of things to do on one large list, but you can't actually do many of them in the same context, then you force yourself to continually keep reconsidering all of them.
2. Time Available: The second factor in choosing an action is how much time you have before you have to do something else. If your next meeting starts in ten minutes, you'll most likely select a different action to do right now than you would if the next few hours were free.
3. Energy Available: Some tasks require more mental energy than others. Hence, it's advisable to invest your most productive hours (for most people those are in the morning) into the most important tasks each day, while postponing all the small stuff (like responding to emails and phone calls) to a later time. (For more on this check this video from Julie Morgenstern on the topic of "Never Check Email in the Morning".) Therefore, it is good to always keep an inventory of things that need to be done to require little mental or creative energy. When you are in a low energy state, that's the perfect time to tackle them. Careful: It is vital to be organised, because if you're in low-energy state, but your reading material is disorganised, your filing system is chaotic, you tend to simply avoid doing anything at all and then you feel even worse.
4. Priority: Given your current context, available time, and energy you will have to select your next action item based on relative priority. Ask yourself for example "Out of all my remaining options, what is the most important thing for me to do?" At the end of the day, in order to feel good about what you didn't get done, you must have made some conscious decisions about your responsibilities, goals, and values.

Moreover, it is also useful to think of work as falling into three categories:

1. Doing predefined work
2. Doing work as it shows up
3. Defining your work

To be as productive as possible, you need to maintain a good balance between these three types. Many people fall into the trap of getting sucked into the second activity - dealing with things that show up spontaneously - much too easily, and let the other slide. Like many other authors, such as Steven Covey, have noted it is important not to let the (seemingly) urgent crowd out all the truly important tasks in your life. It's easy to get sucked into the "busy" and "urgent" mode, especially when you have a lot of unprocessed and relatively out-of-control work on your desk, in your email and on your mind. If you let yourself get caught up in the urgencies of the moment, without feeling comfortable about what you are not dealing with, the results will be anxiety and frustration.

However, if choosing to do work that just showed up instead of doing work you predefined is a conscious choice, based on your best call, then that is playing the productivity game as best as you can.

Another word of caution: Many people use the inevitability of an almost infinite stream of immediately evident things to do as a way to avoid the responsibilities of defining their work and managing their total inventory. It is way too easy to get seduced into non-quite-that-critical stuff that is right at hand, particularly if your in-basket and your personal organisation are out of control. To often "managing by wandering around" is an excuse for getting away from those amorphous piles of "stuff".

Your ability to deal with surprise is your competitive edge. However, at a certain point, if you are not catching up and getting things under control, staying busy with only the work at hand will undermine your effectiveness.

Based on: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, p.191-210.

Chapter 8 of "Getting Things Done" by David Allen - Book Summary/Review

This post summarizes chapter 8 called Reviewing: Keeping Your System Functional

The purpose of this whole method of workflow management is not to let your brain become relaxed, but rather to enable it to move toward more elegant and productive activity. In order to earn that freedom, however, your brain must engage on some consistent basis with all your commitments and activities. You must be assured that you're doing what you need to be doing, and that it is okay to not do what you are currently not doing. That's why it is so crucial to regularly review and update your personal organisation system.

As a general rule, you should spend as much time reviewing your system as is necessary for you to feel comfortable about what you are doing. In the daily grind of work life, this will probably be an accumulation of two seconds here, and three seconds there. You will probably want to review in the following order:

1. Your most frequent review will be your daily calendar, particularly those time-specific appointments that have to occur at a particular point in time.
2. Check your calendar for all day-specific commitments that need to be completed by the end of the day.
3. If 1. and 2. are taken care of, check your next action list to pick a new item, which needs to be completed "as soon as you get to it". It is also okay to glance over this list from time to time, to reassure you that no item has aged so much that it now has become an urgent priority.

The real trick to ensuring the trustworthiness of the whole organisation system lies in regularly refreshing your psyche and your system from a more elevated perspective. The Weekly Review is the magic key to the sustainability of this process; it is whatever you need to do to get your head empty and your system up-to-date at least once a week until you can honestly say "I absolutely know right now everything I'm not doing but could be doing if I decided to."

Practically, your weekly review could e.g. include the following items:

• Process all notes, loose papers and record any attached action items on your 'next actions' list
• Reduce your email inbox down to empty. Flag relevant items for follow-up and/or record any associated action items on your 'next actions' list
• Check this week's calendar for any items you might have missed
• Check next week's calendar to get an overview over what's ahead and address any issues, e.g. commitments you've made that are no longer possible.
• Review all your next action list to keep them current
• Review all 'follow-up', 'FU' or 'Waiting For' items and follow-up with people as necessary
• If you have sufficient time, review your someday/maybe list. It is ok to skip this item and only review it every 1-2 months.

From experience, it is important to schedule a regular time once a week for this (e.g. an early Friday afternoon is ideal for many people). When the reminder pops up, make sure that it includes the checklist of all the items you need to review.

At regular larger intervals (e.g. every 3-6 months), you might also like to review your higher-level life direction, asking you questions, such as "What is my life purpose?", "What are my current high-level focus areas?", "Am I really living a life that is aligned to my core values?". Set a regular reminder in your calendar and ideally do this review with one or more trusted friends.

Based on: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, p.181-190.

Chapter 7 of "Getting Things Done" by David Allen - Book Summary/Review

This post summarizes chapter 7 called Organizing: Setting Up the Right Buckets

Having a total and seamless system of organization in place gives you tremendous power because it allows your mind to let go of lower-level thinking and graduate to intuitive focusing, undistracted by matters that haven't been dealt with appropriately. But your physical organization system must be better than your mental one in order for that to happen. In this chapter, we'll study the organizing steps and tools that will be required as you process your in-basket.

There are seven primary types of things that you'll want to keep track of and manage from an organisational perspective:

• A "Projects" list (optional if, relative to many of David's CEO clients, you don't have THAT much to do.)
• Project support material
• Calendar actions and information
• "Next Actions" lists
• "Waiting For", "Follow-Up" or "FU" list
• Reference material
• "Someday/Maybe" list

It is critical that all of these categories be kept distinct from one another. Once you know what you need to keep track of (covered in the previous chapter on "Processing"), all you need is lists and folders for reference and support materials. You shouldn't bother to create some external structuring of the priorities on your lists that you'll then have to rearrange or re-write as things change. You'll be prioritising more intuitively as you see the whole list, against quite a number of shifting variables. The lists is just a way for you to keep track of the total inventory of active things to which you have made a commitment.

Calendar: There are two kinds of actions: those that must be done on a certain day and/or at a particular time, and those that just need to be done as soon as you can get to them. Your calendar should only show the "hard landscape" of the absolute essentials, around which you do the rest of your actions. What many people want to do, however, based on the old habit of writing daily to-do lists, is put actions on the calendar that they think they'd really like to get done next Monday, say, but that then actually might not and then need to be carried over (which is a significant psychological burden). Therefore, resist this impulse. You need to trust your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of your day's commitments, which should be noticeable at a glance while you're on the run.

Next action items should be organised by context reflecting the respective environment and/or tools that are required to complete the action. For example, you might like to consider the following possible headings/categories:

• "Calls"
• "At Computer"
• "Errands"
• "In Office"
• "At Home"
• "Agendas" (for people and meetings)
• "Waiting For", "Follow-Up" or "FU" (to track things you are waiting for to receive from other people)

This has huge practical benefits. While having a phone and a few minutes of free time, you can work through your"Calls" list or while having some spare time in the city after a meeting you might be able to complete your "Errands". You will also get a great feeling of relaxed control when you know that your "Waiting For" list is the complete inventory of everything you care about that other people are supposed to be doing.

Project support materials are not project actions and they are not project reminders. They are supposed to support your actions and thinking about projects. Therefore, do not use them for reminding, rather determine all "next actions" and record them in the appropriate lists so that your system offers a complete overview of everything you need to get done. Never leave action reminders just hidden in your project support materials. If you don't,then you'll actually go numb to the files and the piles because they don't prompt you to do anything and they simply create more anxiety.

Reference material is much of what comes across your desk and into your life in general. There is no action required, but it is information that you want to keep for a variety of reasons. The problem most people have psychologically with all their stuff is that it is still "stuff", i.e. they have not yet decided what is actionable and what is not. So, cultivate that habit of not leaving any items unprocessed.

Someday/maybe items are not throw-away items, but rather may be some of the most interesting and creative things you will ever get involved with. You may be surprised to find that some of the things you write on the list will actually come to pass, almost without your making any conscious effort to make them happen. If you acknowledge the power of the imagination to foster changes in perception and performance, it is easy to see how having a "Someday/Maybe" list out in front of your conscious mind could potentially add many wonderful adventures to your life and work. Ideally, you subdivide the list with a range of categories such as:

• Restaurant to try
• Clothing to buy
• Trips to make
• Skills to learn
• Hobbies to take up
• Books to read
• Movies to watch
• Party ideas
• Web sites to browse
• Ideas - Misc.

If you have an idea, which you like to review on a specific date, then putting it on your calendar as a day-specific action item is a great way of ensuring that you will do so on a particular day in the future. This will take the thing of the RAM in your mind and allow you to re-assess the idea when you need to. Go ahead and ask yourself: "Is there any major decision for which I should create a future trigger, so I can feel comfortable when I stop thinking about it now?" If yes, put some reminder in your calendar to re-visit the issue.

Similar to the someday/maybe list, you might also like to maintain a range of checklists for example in a convenient online location, such as Google Docs or Dropbox, so you can access them anytime anywhere:

• Personal Affirmations (i.e. personal value statements)
• Travel Checklist (everything to take on or do before a trip)
• Weekly Review (everything to review and/or update on a weekly basis)
• Focus Areas (key life roles and responsibilities)
• Key People in My Life/Work (relationships to assess regularly for completion and opportunity development)
• Buy New Clothing Checklist (noting down you current sizes for clothing items and any other important decision factors, such as questions to ask, when buying new clothing)

Based on: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, p.138-180.