David Allen: Getting Things Done

David Allen: Getting Things Done

From the UK Guardian, on Wednesday 28 September 2005  --  "Meet the man who can bring order to your universe: Time management guru David Allen has established a cult following. Devotees of his Getting Things Done manifesto claim it has the power to change lives. Ben Hammersley is a believer"

I met my saviour in Marylebone. It wasn't a shock. Like many of the 300 people at David Allen's "Getting Things Done, The RoadMap" seminar at London's Landmark Hotel earlier this month, I was already a convert to his personal productivity system. I've read the book, made the lists, and lived with an empty inbox for six months now. For me, as with the hundreds of thousands around the world who press the book into their friends' hands with fire in their eyes, Allen's ideas are nothing short of life-changing. Getting Things Done - GTD to us converts - is as close to a cult as a to-do list can get.

But Allen isn't your usual prophet. A dapper, friendly man in his late 50s, he's closer to a favourite professor than the usual big-teethed stadium-rocking personal development guru. Allen doesn't talk elusive nonsense about self-esteem, crossing chasms or searching for excellence, and there's no chest-beating, walking on hot coals, or team-building exercises. Rather, we attendees have paid $595 each to learn how, with a simple system of lists, folders and a labelling machine, we can get more stuff done.

In an ever busier world of constant communication and reinvention, Allen's low key approach is increasingly popular. "Every one of you probably has mission critical stuff you could be doing today," Allen says, as the audience settles down and tries to hide their email-checking Blackberries under the desks. We are all too busy and we all need a salvation - and Allen, after two decades of personal coaching and management consultancy, thinks he has the answer. The world is starting to agree.

His books - Getting Things Done and Ready For Anything - are international bestsellers, his company provides one-on-one coaching for senior executives worldwide, and his seminars are sold out across the globe. Customers from Goldman Sachs to the US Airforce put their senior colleagues through the training, with some firms having it as a pre-requisite for further advancement.

GTD, when Googled, gives over two million hits. There are online forums for every aspect of the system: from Palm users reviewing software, to tips on the best sort of ball-point pen to make your to-do lists with. In certain circles, the GTD system is an obsession in itself, the system pored over, debated, and optimised to the final degree.

Which is all somewhat strange and pleasing for the man from Shreveport, Louisiana, whose personal journey to the GTD technique began when, aged five, he learnt some magic tricks. From then on, Allen says, he was fascinated by "how the invisible affects the visible". Moving to California in the late 60s, attending, and then dropping out of, the University of California at Berkeley at the height of the hippie era, Allen spent the next decade looking for meaning. "I was studying people who had enlightenment and wanted my own," he says.

But while many people sort "truth" through a "rice bowl and cave, I preferred women and chardonnay". A preference that led to wandering through odd jobs and careers in everything from landscape gardening to martial arts, learning lessons that would later serve him well. Allen is a black belt in karate, and some of the key GTD concepts are a sort of Zen-lite derived from his teaching the discipline.

Things in their wrong place

By the time he was 35, Allen's portfolio of careers, combined with his increasing fascination with the personal growth movements of the 70s, suggested only one career: management consultancy. Allen synthesised his own thinking with those of his mentors and colleagues, and with a two-day workshop in 1983 to 1,000 employees at the American aerospace firm Lockheed, launched the Getting Things Done concept.

The problem we all face, says Allen, is of things in their wrong place. There's always too much to be done and never enough time to do it in. The stress we feel isn't because we're overwhelmed with tasks, but with "stuff". That amorphous mess of "Anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step."

This collection of uncompleted actions and stray stuff - open loops in the GTD lingo - does nothing, according to Allen, but create stress and block thinking. It rattles around in our heads and gets in the way. As we run from fire to fire, email to voicemail, meeting to meeting, modern life seems to be nothing but a fight against the rising tide of distracting stuff. We're too busy trying to stay on top of what we have to do, that we don't get to do any of it. Too worried about remembering that our brains are too tired to be creative or relax. It's a vicious circle: the more things to do, the slower we're able to do them, and the more they pile up. Sound familiar?

The answer, Allen points out with forehead-slapping clarity, is to get all of this stuff out of our head and into a trusted system. Once you've written down everything you need to do, and have a system that you know you can trust to contain every necessary task, the freshly GTDed mind will be free to actually get the stuff done. "The truth is, it takes more energy to keep something inside your head than outside," says Allen.

Getting everything you need to do down on paper is called a Mind Sweep. It can be both traumatic and oddly liberating. The recommended technique involves going through your entire house, office, car and anywhere else in your life, and gathering together all of the objects and papers that need something doing to them. First time GTDers find that this can take one or two days, and produce lists stretching to hundreds of items. But that's the point, according to Allen. The brain can't tell the difference between an unimportant task it once set itself, and something urgent that's just popped up. At some level, all of that stuff is dragging you down. Only by collecting it together, and processing it by working out what it is, and what you're going to do about it, can we get the stuff out of our head. We all have a psychological drive to complete things

Once you know what you're going to do with something, the technique is simple: if it will take less than two minutes, you do it straight away. If not, you add it to a to-do list by writing the very next physical action you will need to do to move the situation forward.

According to Allen, it's only by thinking of the next physical action that we can truly get something out of our heads.

But more than that, Allen points out, the next physical action is the only thing we can do. No matter what the project is, and a project is really anything that takes more than one step to complete, from Christmas shopping to putting a man on the moon, it's not the project that gets completed.

"The common complaint that 'I don't have to time to' is understandable because many projects seem overwhelming - and are overwhelming - because you can't do projects at all," Allen says. "You can only do an action related to it. Many actions require only a minute or two, in the appropriate context, to move a project forward."

But faced with a to-do list of inordinate length, how do we work out what to do? Allen suggests we don't try to order our lists by priority. Instead, he says, we should make different lists for different contexts. A list for when we're at home, one for the computer, one for when we're out shopping, and so on. Given a few minutes between meetings, and a free telephone, you can get something done if you have your by-the-telephone to-do list to hand. Your next actions, sorted by context, are all you need to move all of your projects along.

It all seems very simple. And in many ways, it is. But like all the best systems, GTD's simplicity hides a considerable amount of sophistication. What looks like a mundane system of lists and calendars actually ties together to make something far more powerful.

It creates, says Allen, a whole new psychology: "'What does this mean to me?', 'What do I want to do about it?', and 'What's the next step required to make that happen?'. These are the cornerstone questions we must answer, at some point, about everything," says Allen.

Feelings of empowerment

So deep does the psychology go, that people have walked out of their jobs because of their new habits and feelings of empowerment. Many actively avoid working with people who don't have the same training. Mention doing business with someone without the GTD training to Allen, and he shudders in his chair, "you tend to notice when people aren't writing things down," he says.

Allen explains the popularity of his technique as the first one to give a coherent model for everything you have to do in your life.

Geeks, for example, love it, because it's a system, a framework that anything can be hung from. This universal usefulness is stretching out of the business world, too: the books are popular with at-home parents and students. Doctors treating patients with attention deficit disorder have found the mind-sweeping and list-making technique offers relief by ridding the mind of distractions. GTD, it seems, might well be the next big idea whose time has come. After all, as Allen says: "You're born an open loop; we're all on the planet to finish something."  (source: UK Guardian)