Book Review: Getting Things Done

For this review I'm going to delve into one of my favorite subjects - personal development. The trouble with most reviews of personal development books is that they are written right after the reviewer read the book. If you've ever read anything in the personal development genre you're probably familiar with the phenomenon of reading a book, thinking it was fantastic, inspiring, and has changed your life only to not be able to remember the title a few months later, let alone anything concrete that it has really done for you.

So we'll have none of that here on Groundlings. Today I'm going to review a book I read about a year ago and the good news is I can both remember the title, author, as well as tell you a few things it's done for me. The book is "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. The book is certainly all the rage in certain circles and has been on the best-seller lists and has become quite well known. The title is pretty accurate and is really about organizing all of the "stuff" in your life into a trusted system. The benefit of organizing all your stuff into a system is that now your poor little human brain that's evolution has not kept up with our non-stop internet culture with 300 e-mails/day, more blogs and web-sites than you could read in a lifetime, plus 200+ channels on satellite TV broadcasting 24 hours a day with TiVo to record anything you might have missed - and that's not even considering your job or work. David's contention is that only when you've fully captured all the stuff coming at you which you can quickly sort using a system of "discard, delegate, act now, act later" system can your mind really become still. When you know that everything you have to be done is captured into a system, it won't get lost, your mind doesn't have to remind you about it and then your mind be truly relaxed and creative and fully present to what you are doing right now.

The book gives really concrete processes and tools for processing the real-world deluge of information that almost all of us face. It covers the gamut of how to process e-mail, to how to label folders, down to even recommending specific brands of label makers.

Having read the book about a year ago I'll have to be honest and say that it's still something I am mastering, but the benefits were immediate for me and continue to get better. My inbox went from 2000+ e-mails to 0-100 at any given time. I stopped simply not responding to things and my mean response time to e-mails went from weeks to days to almost always within 24 hours. Many fewer things reach crisis stage without being handled, both professionally and personally for me. One of the key things is managing commitments, but it's much easier to manage commitments when everything is laid out in your system. When I'm following the system things definitely work much better.

All in all if you are like most people in modern society with way more things to get done than anyone could ever actually get done, I highly recommend Getting Things Done. It's the best book in this genre out there.