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Summary: A breath of fresh air!
Review: Over the years I have been looking for a practical approach to manage both my personal and professional life. With David Allen's approach the mystery has been solved. In easy to understand terminology, David helped me to make sense of all the information I need to manage and how to keep track of it so that I can more effectively complete what is important to me. I feel like I have more control over my life. Until now, I didn't realize how simple it could be to feel so great!
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Summary: I love this book!
Review: I'm not even that far into the book and with each chapter I advance light years in understanding why everything I've been doing in regard to "organization and time management" can't and won't work.Helps me ask the right questions, summarize and finalize. I realize how far behind I am when I get organized, but at least something is being done in the right direction. Even if that's all I end up getting out of this book, it's worth the price of admission!
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Summary: He's right, this is a new practice for a new reality.
Review: Wow! The power of next action decision making and David Allen's extraordinary next action techniques makes this book a true winner. The simple power of his key principles about how to get things done really make sense to me. I loved chapter 9 about Making the Best Action Choices. Do yourself a favor, treat yourself to this one. You will thank yourself and when you give this to anyone else they will thank you.
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Summary: Make it Up and Get it Done
Review: Is the methodology from Getting Things Done the silver bullet? Does David Allen's system really differ from other "time management" systems? I would say an unqualified yes based on my experience with the GTD process so far. In the one week since the book's been out I have made more progress with regard to collecting my stuff than previous attempts I have made in the past 6 years. I have actually started a filing system. More importantly, I am starting to deal with the "stuff" in my life faster and more efficiently. Just learning how to deal with "stuff" is a pretty big deal to me. My problem is that I have obsessive compulsive disorder, and it shows up in my life as compulsive hoarding. Couple the hoarding with attention deficit disorder and you have the ingredients for potentially disastrous living. In short, I have a damn difficult time staying on top of things and tend to struggle at times. David's method offers a practical yet elegant solution to staying on top of things. It starts with collecting the stuff, or as David calls it the "incomplete" and getting them out of your head into an external system that can be trusted. Then you process what's collected and then you organize it. Trust me, collecting and processing stuff is tough, really really tough for someone like. me. I am not used to making decisions on things that I collect. Now I am collecting the clutter and making decisions on it. More importantly, I am learning to let go of stuff I don't need and taking action on things I need to deal with. I have a long road to travel, but thanks to the common sense wisdom David Allen shares, I am on the road to a more sane way of living.
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Summary: The Best Advice You'll Ever Receive . . .
Review: David Allen's approach to managing yourself and your world may well be the best advice you'll ever receive on how to be more productive and satisfied. This book is filled with practical, hands-on ideas, tips, tools, and techniques for more effective self-management. His ideas just plain work! Many of us feel overwhelmed and out of control in today's fast-paced world. This book is a great way to get a handle on all that "stuff" in our lives and figure out how to better manage the flow of information that never seems to stop. If you read only one book this year, this is it! Five stars all the way!
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Summary: The Best Advice You'll Ever Receive . . .
Review: David Allen's approach to managing yourself and your world may well be the best advice you'll ever receive. Practical, realistic, hands-on, and superbly focused tips, tools, and techniques for improving personal productivity and individual satisfaction. I found his approach to managing your "stuff" and actually getting things accomplished to be worth its weight in gold. This book is no re-hash of time-worn prinicipals that don't work in today's fast-paced world; "Getting Things Done" is perfect for anyone who is busy, feels a bit out of control or overwhelmed, and wants an approach that really works! Five Stars for sure!
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Summary: I looked like I was OK but my cupboards were full of junk
Review: I was one of those people who looked like I had things under control, and wasn't far from it, but my cupboards, drawers and email files were full of junk and felt like a ball and chain. I heard about this book at an Optimal Thinking seminar and decided to buy it. I knew it was in my best interest to clean up the junk and proceeded with Dave Allen's system. If anything took less than two minutes to resolve, I did it on the spot. I have to say that almost everything is in place now. I feel free of a huge load and am proud that I took control of it. This is a terrific book. I recommend it if you want a simple system to get things done. If you want to learn how to make the most of your thinking to achieve emotional mastery and get the most from every situation, read Optimal Thinking-How To Be Your Best Self too.
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Summary: DAM! (David Allen Method).
Review: The real gist of this book is this; First, tangibly ALL your thoughts to do something must be somewhere in order for you to PHYSICALLY apply it. Hence, you must write them down or put them all (stuff) somewhere, notes, post-it, napkins, etc., ANYTHING, just make it physically tangible. This is the only way for us to now LOGICALLY apply it. Because we are physical creatures, we must see our thoughts physically also. Down one. Number two: when all of this is done, get the little ones out of the way, hence the "two-minute rule". Anything under two minutes DO IT NOW. DAM! (David Allen Method) yeah!!! That's basically the "d.a.m." (pardon the pun) method. For details and even a better understanding buy or borrow the book. When you think about it, it's all about logic. Delineate the process, divide, then conquer. Sort of like eating a big steak, you have to cut it to make it chewable, then taste, and decide to swallow, chew, or just spit it out, and before you know it, it's gone! It's funny we never applied this logic to our business, maybe below will explain why! One thing that bugs me is that if something takes 2 minutes and we now need to do it now, there is one section about a guy going through 800 e-mails. If each one took two minutes, the e-mail "project" then took more than 26 hours!!! He didn't mention that in the book! Should he then delegate it, defer it, dump it, or simply call the waiter??? Note: vomiting is NOT an option!
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Summary: It changed my life
Review: David Allen is considered to be one the top five Management consultants in North America according to a Forbes article. I now understand why. The basic concepts in his book are simple enough and are represented by a flow chart, but there are so many other golden nuggets of "best practice" information within this book that you have to study it to get them all. I've read the book and listened to his second (audio) book "Ready for anything" four times in a row just to reinforce the great points within this book. The result of implimenting his structure of workflow has suprisingly allowed me to act with more freedom and creativity in my job and a reduction in stress. I can even find stuff easily since setting up my folders and buying a label making machine (his recommendation). He's really on to something big with his "next action" thinking approach (chapter 11) and his two-minute rule. One of the best books I've read in the last three years.
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Summary: Excellent Insights, Lots of Padding
Review: Fifty years ago, having a simple to-do-list would put you at the top of the productivity charts. Thirty years ago, paying attention to time management would do the same. Today, looking at workflow gives us the next step in the evolution of effectiveness.
The book, Getting Things Done, is divided into three parts. The first is called "The Art of Getting Things Done." This is where the author, David Allen, lays out the basics of mastering workflow and getting projects creatively underway.
The key to getting control of your life is mastering that workflow. Once stuff shows up in your "inbox," what do you do with it? Allen gives you a straightforward way to process what's in your "inbox" without getting bogged down.
His key insight is to concentrate on the next necessary action for any project you might be working on. That's especially powerful. Procrastination often comes from not knowing what the next action to take should be. Using the action list that Allen recommends, you should cut down your procrastination significantly.
I should note here that action in Allen's sense doesn't mean "deciding" or any other such activity, unless it results in something visible. That keeps us out of the action list that are filled with things where you start to prepare to begin to get ready to do things, and moves you right on to the doing itself.
Allen covers this material in twenty-five pages, and it is the core and key value of this book. If you buy the book for the workflow system and the insights that Allen has into it, you'll get more than your money's worth.
Alas, on page fifty-four in my edition, Allen starts talking about getting projects creatively underway. I found this material to be pretty garden-variety stuff. No big insights. In fact, it suffers from what lots of other material on planning suffers from, the idea that planning is a straight-through process without an iterative looping around as you would adjust goals and plans.
Once the early material on project management wraps up Part One, you could move on to Part Two. Part Two is about Practicing Stress-free Productivity. Actually, it's not about that at all. What it is about, in one hundred plus pages, is how to get this entire system started. We get recommendations down to the file folder level. This may be helpful to you. I found it useless padding in the book.
At the end of this section, he loops back to the workflow diagram that he'd covered a hundred pages earlier.
Part Three takes us back to the Power of Key Principles, and it's worth reading as a review, as well for several specific tips that are embedded in it.
Now, it may seem from my comments just above, that I don't think this book is worth the money. That would be inaccurate. This is simply one of the best, and most helpful books, I've ever read on organizing. For me, the value was in the workflow process and the things around it. I didn't need the stuff on Getting Started, and I didn't like the stuff on Project Planning.
We each come to books like this with different backgrounds and needs, and so if your needs are different than mine, you may find other pieces of this book valuable. One thing I'm sure of - if you buy the book, you'll find value in it.
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