Getting Things Done – Dave Allen

Penguin/Putman
2001
If last year’s “Most Important Book” was City Comforts, this year’s has got to be Getting Things Done, by productivity guru Dave Allen. My personal path to Allen was this: wondering what shareware/freeware apps were essential once I had my G5/OSX…Phil sending me a selection of links…one of those links being the blog 43 Folders…them recommending (nay, internalizing) Getting Things Done, or GTD as the hep cats call it…the library having a copy.
I have since turned into a prosyletizing GTD-head, turning on my friends Jon and Jeff to its tips and tricks, and on a bigger level, making large adjustments in thinking to handle the amount of tasks the creative person has. So many ideas we have, we artists, so little time to do them. Allen writes for the executive, but his system of lists and folders, and his mental system of prioritizing (the classic triple Ds of “Do Defer Delegate”) and solving tasks is for everybody, and has already paid off for me in big ways. The desk at home remains clean…every night. Small tasks, like phone calls, emails, and the like get taken care of right away. Large tasks and projects are broken down into smaller to-do lists. The email has been sorted out and in one night I took care of an Inbox that was spilling over with 450 emails. There’s nothing so edifying as crossing out completed tasks one after the other.
I haven’t done everything (yet) suggested in the book, and not everything applies or is of use. For example the “43 Folders” idea that the blog has taken for its name would be good if I was an executive with many paper-based projects and a big filing cabinet (the 43 includes a folder for every day of any particular month and one each after that for each following month). But I’m not, so that can wait. I still need to clear my desk of crap (mostly magazines), and I still want to have a proper sorting out of the filing cabinet and toss out old bills. (This sort of talk would lead to a sarky quote from Jon: Ted! You’re not Getting Things Done!!!)
In conjunction with the book (which I have now bought, because it’s something you want to have around), I am using the “hipster PDA,” an idea that grew out of the geeks who champion GTD. It’s a daytimer made out of 3×5 index cards and a metal clip. Totally customizable, and requires no batteries, stylus, or expensive software. You also don’t feel like a twat if you lose it. The missus is embarrassed about this because she thinks it’s a cry for help (or a least a cry for her to buy me a PDA), but I assure her that it’s not. Jon now has one, to which his sister responded, “Hipster here means poor, you know that, right?” So we are now calling our HPDAs the iStack. (Jeff recommends pStack, as there’s nothing “i” about it, but I don’t know.) You can see a photo of mine here.
43 Folders also has a rough summary of the book here, but the book is so dense, it might not make too much sense (or have the necessary impact).