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Book Review: Getting Things Done
Wednesday, 13 December 2006 05:07 pmIt always starts somewhere small. I just wanted a better todo list. That search, around when I started my new job, led me to this book.
Getting Things Done by David Allen, a California business-coach and consultant, is a 250-page quick read (I skimmed it in three days) on improving one's self-organization and work management. It was an enjoyable read: the writing style is clean, there are lots of examples of the methods in action, and I get the clear sense the book is a distillation of thousands of clients' experiences.
It would be appropriate to describe his methods as holistic, minimally intrusive, and... well, Californian. If you start from his premises, I can see how it could lead to a clearer, more stress-free mind, and possibly more efficient work. I know for a fact that it's helped me organize my own work better.
There's nothing revolutionary in the methods- it's a matter of emphasis. A few points:
* get stuff out of your mind, into a system that you trust. "Stuff" is "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."
* "discipline yourself to make front-end decisions about all the 'inputs' you let into your life so that you will always have a plan for the 'next actions' that you can implement or renegotiate at any moment"
Geeks are big on GTD for some self-evident reasons, and it was nice to see a book on this topic that was compatible with my own proclivities of writing about and categorizing things, without learning complicated rules.
My complaints about this book are few: he uses pull-out quotes, about one a page, which are just enough to bug me. (He does have some great quotes, including one from Lily Tomlin: "I always wanted to be someone. I should've been more specific".)
More seriously, there is an assumption, throughout, that his methods are one size fits all. I suppose this lets him keep the book short and clean; but it would be nice if there was a chapter on variations (and perhaps their disadvantages). Maybe there's a wiki for that. But at least he does single out potentially standalone tips, which is good, with a few instances of "if you take one thing from this chapter..."
I'll have more to say later about how this is working for me. But now I have a bus to catch.
Getting Things Done by David Allen, a California business-coach and consultant, is a 250-page quick read (I skimmed it in three days) on improving one's self-organization and work management. It was an enjoyable read: the writing style is clean, there are lots of examples of the methods in action, and I get the clear sense the book is a distillation of thousands of clients' experiences.
It would be appropriate to describe his methods as holistic, minimally intrusive, and... well, Californian. If you start from his premises, I can see how it could lead to a clearer, more stress-free mind, and possibly more efficient work. I know for a fact that it's helped me organize my own work better.
There's nothing revolutionary in the methods- it's a matter of emphasis. A few points:
* get stuff out of your mind, into a system that you trust. "Stuff" is "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."
* "discipline yourself to make front-end decisions about all the 'inputs' you let into your life so that you will always have a plan for the 'next actions' that you can implement or renegotiate at any moment"
Geeks are big on GTD for some self-evident reasons, and it was nice to see a book on this topic that was compatible with my own proclivities of writing about and categorizing things, without learning complicated rules.
My complaints about this book are few: he uses pull-out quotes, about one a page, which are just enough to bug me. (He does have some great quotes, including one from Lily Tomlin: "I always wanted to be someone. I should've been more specific".)
More seriously, there is an assumption, throughout, that his methods are one size fits all. I suppose this lets him keep the book short and clean; but it would be nice if there was a chapter on variations (and perhaps their disadvantages). Maybe there's a wiki for that. But at least he does single out potentially standalone tips, which is good, with a few instances of "if you take one thing from this chapter..."
I'll have more to say later about how this is working for me. But now I have a bus to catch.
