Truth Collective

Dave Allen's Getting Things Done

Since I took on a new job in September with a producer role, my life has become increasingly busy. Managing my social commitments, personal hobbies, school work and professional responsibilities has likewise become increasingly difficult and stressful.

Recently, I have been searching for ways to organize my life to sort out the clutter. Luckily, my boss recommended an excellent book on the subject: Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done. Allen has an enormous following (the GTD community), and preaches a relatively straightforward system of getting things off your mind by storing it all in an external memory system. The theory is simple: things you need to do will constantly weigh on your mind, but your mind does not remind you at the right times, so the result is a lot of wasted mental effort (otherwise known as worrying). By capturing and organizing all your commitments, you can clear your mind and use 100% of it to focus on the task at hand.

I have been employing some of the principles in the GTD system with the excellent Things application for the Mac and iPhone. Since I started a month ago, I have literally forgotten nothing. Every book I say I want to read, every article I want to follow up on, every casual social commitment and professional agreement has been processed. The system is not so much about time management as it is about capturing absolutely everything you want/need to do and then organizing it so you can forget about it, and get reminded when you can do something about it.

For me the experience has been very positive, and the book is highly recommended, especially to people who tend to forget things, or never get around to them, or feel like they just don’t have enough time. That is probably most of you, so give it a shot!