Getting Things Done. The Art of Stress-free Productivity

Share anything of value you’ve gleaned from this with someone else. (It’s the fastest way to learn.)

Set aside time when you can tackle one whole area of your office, and then each part of your house. Gather everything into your system, and work through the Getting Things Done process.

Create a workable and easily accessed personal reference system—for work and home.

As cognitive scientists have validated, your mind is terrible at recalling things out of the blue, but it is fantastic at doing creative thinking about what it has directly in front of it to evaluate. When freed from the remembering function, the mind is a fabulous mechanism to put in play by putting things “in front of the door” so you don’t have to think too hard about what to think about.

project (any outcome requiring more than one step that you’re committed to achieve within a year), it

If you “get” nothing more than the two-minute rule, it will be worth its weight in gold. If you just write down a few more things on your mind than you would have previously, you’ll sleep better. If you clean up e-mail to zero at least every once in a while, you will have great cause for celebration. And if you simply ask, “What’s the next action?” of yourself or anyone else when you might not have otherwise, it will add to your stress-free productivity.

What is needed is a trusted plan that ensures forward engagement will happen.

your mind is designed to have ideas, based upon pattern detection, but it isn’t designed to remember much of anything!

When you start to make things happen, you begin to believe that you can make things happen. And that makes things happen.

There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.—John F. Kennedy

the question forces clarity, accountability, productivity, and empowerment.

one of the subtler ways many of them fall off the wagon is in letting their action lists grow back into lists of tasks or subprojects instead of discrete next actions.

intelligently dumbing down your brain by figuring out the next action. You’ll invariably feel a relieving of pressure about anything you have a commitment to change or do, when you decide on the very next physical action required to move it forward.

Doing a straightforward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity.—Robert Fulghum

Over the years I have noticed an extraordinary shift in energy and productivity whenever individuals and groups installed “What’s the next action?”

few people maintain a consistent and objective overview of all the relevant areas of their balanced life—family, fun, or finances—with a mind to execute on the gaps.

You need to assess your life and work at the appropriate horizons, making the appropriate decisions, at the appropriate intervals, in order to really come clean. That’s a lifelong invitation and obligation to yourself, to fulfill whatever your unfinished destiny or intentionality happens to be.

Again, getting “in” empty doesn’t mean you’ve handled everything. It means that you’ve deleted what you could, filed what you wanted to keep but don’t need to act on, done the less-than-two-minute responses, and moved into your reminder folders all the things you’re waiting for and all your actionable e-mails.

A Projects list Project support material Calendar actions and information Next Actions lists A Waiting For list Reference material A Someday/Maybe list The Importance of Hard

The biggest issue for digitally oriented people is that the ease of capturing and storing has generated a write-only syndrome. All they’re doing is capturing information—not actually accessing and using it intelligently. Some consciousness needs to be applied to keep one’s potentially huge digital library functional, versus a black hole of data easily dumped in there with a couple of keystrokes.

The big secret to efficient creative and productive thinking and action is to put the right things in your focus at the right time.

something automatic and extraordinary happens in your mind when you create and focus on a clear picture of what you want.

it makes sense to subdivide your Next Actions list into categories, such as Calls to make when you have a window of time and your phone, or Computer action items to see as options when you’re at that device. Nonactionable Items You

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.—Elbert Hubbard If It’s About a Project

It is better to be wrong than to be vague.—Freeman Dyson

We (1) capture what has our attention; (2) clarify what each item means and what to do about it; (3) organize the results, which presents the options we (4) reflect on, which we then choose to (5) engage with.

For example, in the past few minutes, has your mind wandered off into some area that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re reading here?

Most people, however, do that kind of list-making drill only when the confusion gets too unbearable and they just have to do something about it.

This consistent, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy.

There is one thing we can do, and the happiest people are those who can do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present. We can be all here. We can give our attention to the opportunity before us.—Mark Van Doren.

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.