What I Have Learned From GTD

Some time ago I have come across the classic book "Getting Things Done" written by David Allen.
The book was about time management and organization. It contains a practical approach for people who want to get the best from the time they have. The approach itself is rather comprehensive; it suggests organizing and tracking every little aspect of a person’s life. Whether you find this acceptable for you at the present moment or not, there are some useful practical advises in this book that would be helpful for everyone.

Below is the brief overview of the book, and what I have learned after reading it.

The idea of the book is that each person's life consists of many things, many projects going on in everyday life – work, hobbies, family life, vacations, purchases to make, deals to close and so on and so forth. For each life aspect there are some actions you would like to make to achieve the desired state of that aspect. "I need to plan our honeymoon", "Okay, when do we launch that new web site?" and so on. And unless you are a very well organized person, all of those things persist in your head and your subconsciousness thinks of them and worries more than of the thing you are doing at the present moment. Which means you can’t get 100% concentration on current problem, and you are much less productive than you could be.

What’s the solution for that problem? That is what you may find in David Allens book.
Here are the main points of the approaches, simplified:

1. To get the 100% concentration you should achieve a state of mind called "still like water", which means that your mind perception is at maximum, and it reacts to every thought or idea that comes in.
2. To achieve that state, you should organize yourself in a proper way, so you would know that you collect every thing in your life you should worry about, and that you are going tackle all that problems in an appropriate order. If you do that, your subconsciousness will have nothing to worry about, and will help you concentrating on a problem you are working on right now.
3. To do that you should: Collect: write down every aspect of your life you would like to work on. Organize: keep all the aspects in a place you have access to. For every aspect write down actions that will bring you closer to achieving the goal. Those actions have to be concrete and be doable right away (“Call John, ask the price for the house”). Make the list of those actions. Act: Do those concrete actions one by one, in the order they are written down.
   

What I have learned from the book is mostly practical tips that help me in better organizing of my activities:

• You can be much more organized and productive. You should give it a try and use the experience of smart people who tackle the time management and self organization problems.
• You can’t do a project. You can do actions that take the project closer to the completeness. When you do all simple doable actions your project will be done.
• You should write down everything you need to do.
• If an incoming action takes less than 2 minutes you should do it right away.
• You should set up the environment in a way that it would help you doing what you do.
• Take a large selection of paper sheets, notepads, pens, pencils, white boards, stickers, etc. so you know you have everything you need to collect, organize and store.
• Take out of sight everything that doesn’t belong to what you would be doing.
  

Conclusion. Personally I don’t use pure GTD all the time, however I have taken many simple and practical things from the approach on board. When I feel overwhelmed with problems and can’t concentrate on the task at hand – I know, that’s the moment I need to sit down, collate the goals and projects I have, and write down simple actions I need to do. I know: after I’ve completed my list I will be able to use 100% of my productivity.

Links.
The Book
The definition of Getting Things Done on the David Allens site