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.