I like reading about organizing my life and being more productive, but I think the major lessons of this book could have been condensed in a page or two. Here are the things I remember:- 2 minute rule: if you remember to do something and it takes you less than two minutes to do it, just go ahead and do it- write things down in lists so that they don't float around your head and nag at you all of the time- check your lists frequently and often, actually doing the things on the list (or delegating...

Ironically, looking in to the GTD (Getting Things Done) system has been bouncing around in the back of my head as something to do for quite some time now. This approach to maximizing productivity is popular among the nerdegalian, probably because of its minimum bullshit approach to actually processing, classifying, and executing what the author David Allen calls "stuff to do." This book discusses the GTD system in its entirety and, more importantly, teaches you how to put it in place.What I real...

I bought this book, and I read some of it. It sat on a shelf unfinished. I read some more. It sat in my car unfinished. I eventually made the decision to never finish it. I think this is self-explanatory.[Later...]Now I'm reading 26 Reasons Not to Use GTD, and it does a good job of articulating the "ehhhh"ness that I felt while reading this.[Even later...]And if you think GTD's followers are a little cult-like (see, for instance, the comments on this review), check this out: When David Allen say...

I feel like this book borders on being too outdated to be helpful in 2020. While there are still some tips that are useful and can be translated to modern day, in my opinion there aren't enough to warrant reading this whole book to hear them. Also this is way more of a book on 'organisation' (especially organising your work area) than a guide on how to be more 'productive' If you're anything like me; someone who knows how to plan properly but has trouble actually executing tasks and completing t...

I'm a big geek, and here's proof (if you needed it). I learned about GTD from Merlin Mann's 43 Folders site, and became an instant convert. Because I love folders, lists, diagrams, flow charts, of course, but most of all because with GTD, you have to have a labeller. I love my labeller. I love making labels for my files, and admiring them in their serried ranks, all neat and labelly.And I do actually seem to be getting more done, even when I factor in all the time I spend labelling.

Probably the best self-help book I ever read - in any case the one I most adapted to the organization of my life. It does not have an annoying religious aura to it like 7 Habits or the selfish haberdashery spirit of How to Win Friends and Influence People, but is down to earth and highly practical. I was able to get to Inbox Zero and have held on to that principal for years now. If folks are interested, I can repost here my own adaptation of the techniques. Still for me a reference!My advice: th...

If you find yourself turning a little moist and your pulse quickening with pleasure when you read words and phrases such as:-High-performance workflow management-Family commitments-Priority factors-The ability to be successful, relaxed, and in control during these fertile but turbulent times demands new ways of thinking and working-key work tool-assembly-line modality-workforce-values thinking-desired results-ups the ante in the game-deal effectively with the complexity of life in the twenty-fir...

This book should have been a 3,000-word article. It was full of useless details (e.g. listing the types of materials out of which an inbox might be made), redundant to the point of making me crazy, and overflowing with multi-step systems for this, that, and the other (seriously, keeping the 3- or 4- or 6-step filters straight would require flashcards).While it had some useful tips, I can't imagine anyone having the free time to implement the system fully. Clearly, though, I am wrong in this, jus...

David Allen's smirking white male face on the cover of this book may convince that he's successful...but the man should reserve his smirk for one on one business dealings. The biggest issue with this book is, I couldn't get it done. Getting Things Done is written for a non-existent audience: a procrastinator with enough motivation to actually plow through Allen's dry instruction manual.

With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow,""mind like water," and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance./ Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever...

I have not had much success applying strategies from productivity gurus. I am referring to books like "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" by Steven Covey, and other books which share use top-down strategies to order our lives. There are two reasons why these have not worked for me. The first is technical: day-to-day life happens on the level of "stuff". The myriad of small tasks of varying importance and in multiple contexts hampers the effectiveness of top-down approaches. The second

This is one of those optimistic books in which YOU THE READER can gain control by your own unaided (well almost unaided, you are meant to delegate) efforts, and which doesn't take account of that your workflow might very well be determined by things entirely outside of your control.Not to mention if your working space isn't under your control at all (for example with hot desking) or is very limited (if you are in a drone-zone) then physically some of the ideas here will be impossible. And of cou...

Time-ManagementThis is the best Self-Help Productivity book ever written. Well, I think so and I’ve been using it for 13 years. It has had such a profound impact on my working life that to this day, it is a part of my daily practice. I have the GTD apps on my phones and tablets, and it is a default webpage I load automatically in my browser. The greatest fear we have when we’re dealing with so many projects or issues or people is that item that we forget because our brain is maxed out with every...

A friend of mine at work asked me to read over this and tell him what I made of it. Years ago I worked with a woman who is now my home state’s attorney general – you really couldn’t meet a nicer person – but she was perhaps also the most organised person I’d ever met. Given that she is Victoria’s attorney general, you’d have to say that being organised hasn’t particularly hurt her progress through life. I’m just not sure I’m the sort of person who can really do the kinds of hyper-organisation st...

2.65 stars.I've used a mutated version of this for years, but thought I'd try the original text. I was disappointed. I felt it gave equal weight to parts of GTD that are a cakewalk (emptying your mind onto a page) with parts that sound easy but are complex (deciding on next actions).Also I thought the weekly/quarterly review needed more focus. Allen talks about the 20,000/50,000 foot view, but without enough detail on how to accomplish these.I'd recommend reading through a summary instead of the...

I'm listening to this because I need to get a grip on my life. I can't even focus enough to listen about how to get my life together, much less do it.

Before I justify the five-star rating, there are a couple of qualifications:1. This book is written toward a certain audience: well-to-do people, mostly business executives, mostly men, mostly older. The large majority of examples mentioned are male corporate leaders. There is the occasional nod to a housewife using the system to get her chores done (I kid you not), and a single reference that I can remember to someone whose work is purely creative. I feel that if you know this coming in, it wil...

The advice presented in GTD is not bad. It's pretty good, actually. If I was reviewing the GTD system I'd probably give it 4 stars.This is a book review, though, and while the system may be good, the book is terrible. It's extremely repetitive. I'm convinced the entire 267 pages could be condensed down to less than 10, but I guess nobody would pay $15 for a 10-page leaflet. Having to slog through the huge amount of redundancy made reading this book a real chore. Even the diagrams are repetitive....

I'm really glad my wife and I read this book together. It's already been very helpful in getting us to look at the reason so many things never get done on time or sometimes not at all. The book is well written. The writing is very clear, with lots of examples, though it's a bit dry in the middle and a little flowery on the ends. (That sounds like a description of a scone or something.) We're still working on getting our system set up (I mean filing cabinets for reference material) so I might nee...

This is my go-to productivity book. Since reading it a few years ago, I’ve followed GTD in much of my professional and personal life. I highly recommended it to those who want to regain control of their time and become efficiently productive.It teaches how to be “maximally efficient and relaxed” by avoiding “the so-called urgent and crisis demands of any given workday.” Allen says that “if we planned more about our projects and lives, we’d relieve a lot of pressure on our psyches and produce eno...

A bit too detailed for my taste, but there are some magnificent principles involved here. I learned a lot.

nicely done & read - wish he'd bring out an updated edition ...

I don't know how I missed this productivity classic in all the years since it was published. Turns out there's a GTD cult to go with the book, it's SO popular. The book is all practical, all realism. It has nothing to do with thinking about your goals; it leaves that up to you. It's all about how to organize your stuff and your lists to get them done.It's been criticized for being both too general and too detailed, but the generality accommodates complexity, and the details are an essential comp...

I need all the help I can get!

Oy, this guy.If you are a disorganized mess, his book does not have enough step-by-step to help you. If you have a hint of what you're doing, he is quite vague with no actual hands-on tips.Here are his main ideas:-- Your mind is always keeping a running to-do list in the background while you're doing other things. This noise distracts you from what you're doing and makes you feel worried that you should be doing something on that list. Shut out the running to-do list and you can focus on one thi...

Recall the last time you went on a significant vacation from work: before you left you cleared all your to-dos, emptied your inbox, tied all the loose ends, and organized the things you'd tackle when you came back. Felt pretty good to leave that last day, right?David Allen teaches you how to live your life this way: take all your to-dos, projects, etc. then organize them out into Projects, Next Actions, Someday/Maybe projects, Read and Review, and more if you want. Take the Next Actions and eith...

Tried the print and the audio and just couldn't grasp the system which would enable me to get lots and lots of stuff done in an easy manner without struggle. I guess once you get through the book, nothing else seems like as much of a struggle. I should have known it wasn’t for me, when the author said “stop making to-do lists.” I mean, really, what would I do with all the cute sticky note pads I have?

Five stars for the content, two or three for the way it was delivered. But I suspect the purpose of this book wasn't to write beautiful prose, so I'll cut it a break.Since this is a book about an organizational system I'll talk a little bit about what I've tried to incorporate and how mine works. Hopefully doing so will help me to become more conscious of how I can improve it. In a former life - a stupider one, I tried to capture everything in my head. This had results ranging from moderate succ...

I'd heard about David Allen and his "Getting Things Done" system in the past, but I never paid it much attention. I decided to investigate further a little while back, and finally picked up the book two weeks ago. And now I've read it; and I expect I'll go back and re-read this book in a couple months. I may revise my rating at that time.The things that irritate me in this book are exactly the things I expected might irritate me. There are plenty of the obligatory breezy anecdotes about the clie...

A colleague recommended this book to me because I was seeing an adult client with ADHD. He also shared that he used the principles in this book to run a skills-teaching group for teens with ADHD, and that he uses this system himself. This recommendation came at a time when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed and overloaded at work, so I figured I would try to see if there was anything here that I could adopt so as to better inform my client about how it works while engaging in my own self-imp...