Book Review: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity (David Allen 2002)

When I asked myself, “what do I need to do, for me to able to focus on those things I am passionate about?”, the answer that immediately popped-out of my head is to de-clutter my mind. Get things done on time if not early, so that you could have the time for those things you love to do.

Let’s admit it, 99% of us work for a company which eats up at least 1/3 of your day(8hrs), while for some, up to more than 2/3 (16hrs) of their day, and the worst is that your work is far from what you are passionate about. After a grueling hard days work, you would then say to yourself that you need more time to finish all of the things you need finish at work. The question I asked myself is when will all these work get finished for me to have time for myself and do the things I’d love to do? The answer is NEVER! My work is an unending stream of something or someone that needs my attention. Your work will never ever end! (and ofcourse you don’t want it to end, because if it does, you’d be laid-off from your company ).

Work at the office will never end, so what I needed to do was to keep getting things done on time if not early. Not because I wanted to get a good appraisal every year, but because I owe it to myself to have time to do the other things I’d rather be doing than work. So off I went to National Bookstore to find myself some self-help books on time management. Fortunately, I ended up with David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity”.

Allen immediately caught my attention on the first few pages of the book, when he started describing the things I had in my mind: 100 plus emails a day at work, additional responsibilities, commitments with the family. Stupidly enough, I started nodding my head alone in agreement to what he was saying. Think of Joey Tribbiani, Matt Le Blanc’s character in Friends, with big round eyes and nodding his head every time he gets a realization of things around him, that’s how stupid I looked when I was reading the book.

I have seen myself many times buy a sticky note (or post-its), a small calendar planner, filofax (not just because it was a fad before) and even to the extent of buying a Palm Organizer just to get things done. At first instance that I got hold of these things, I immediately made good use of it by jotting down things I needed to do, assigning dates, etc. Probably the first time you got hold of a sticky note, you immediately jotted your To Do list, posted them by your cubicle walls and at the end of the day, you had a wall to wall carpet of post-its. But all of these attempt at organizing my work and life all wanes and then ends up into nothing. They did not work for me because it is only now that I realized that all of those tools are sometimes insufficient at capturing some of the things that comes into your life.

Allen’s strategy for getting things done is not necessarily time management, but more on getting a system in place that is applicable not only to your work, but to your life as well. It is more of a workflow management where you would have to categorize and decide on things as they come into your work or life’s “In Box”. It incorporates some of the common things you have previously used, like, post-its, calendars, planners, PDA, emails and use them in a system that would fit your needs.

One of the things that definitely worked well for me is his strategy of capturing all the things that comes into your mind and getting them out of your head and into some system that would work for you. Leaving those things in your mind is definitely a big NO. Allen advocates that you write that thing down on a piece of paper. If you leave that thing in your mind, you’d either a.) forget that thing when a more important issue occupies your mind or b.) your mind would constantly pop-up that reminder and eventually stress your mind out blocking other important issues that you’d need to focus on.

The book goes on further explaining the strategy that can be a framework for your system. Allen goes on to the detail of every step in the workflow management that he is pitching and towards the end of the book, he gave some real life examples of how he used these techniques. There are some parts of the book that I skipped, because I think Allen overly explained some categories that are already self-explanatory.

The book has lots of one-liner quotes on the side pages that are actually fun to read, but are generally distracting for me so I had to dismiss them from my sight for me to be able to concentrate on the meat of the book.

Overall the book is in the category of easy reading and is very effective. I found myself reading half of the book in one sitting considering that I don’t really like books with no pictures . The price of the book is P629.00 in National Bookstore, quite pricey in my opinion. But I also think that reading this book is better than attending some lecture/seminar program on time management that costs more than a thousand Pesos. If you’re buying from Amazon, it costs $9.12 (x 48= P437.76), costs less, but I’m not sure if it would cost the same as with National Bookstore if you factor in shipping costs to the Philippines.

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