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Getting Things Done
Allen's idea is to first look at the sources of stress. Whether you're working a cushy corporate job, are self-employed, or are still in college, what makes you feel frustrated and stressed? Unless you have had some major disasters in life, the answer will probably rotate around having too much to do and too little time to accomplish all the tasks. Moreover, people around you don't seem to realize how pressed for time you are as they keep coming up with every possible way to interrupt you.
Business people like to talk about multi-tasking. It fills one with feeling of self-importance, since it's obvious that if one multi-tasks, then he or she is involved in multiple projects, failure on most of which would probably result in the end of human civilization. But as Allen points out (his site contains a promotional WMV/QuickTime video), multi-tasking requires you to persist a bunch of projects (most of them unfinished) in your head.
If you count the time you spend on each actual project, and the time you spend switching between the projects, you'd be surprised how much time is spent on the overhead of going from one project to another. Basically (although Allen doesn't express it in these terms) we all would like to be Knoppix, with everything kept in RAM (our brains), nothing relegated to the hard drive (paper or information-management software), multi-tasking at its best. But as anyone would tell you, Knoppix can be quite resource-intensive, and you do not exactly get screaming speeds with it. We're all wired up like early DOS - single-tasking with everything else assigned to external storage, best at doing one thing at a time, if we're to do it well.
Allen develops a system to deal with projects and everyday interruptions accompanying them. Does the issue that came up require less than 2-3 minutes to respond to? Is it returning a call to confirm the dental appointment or e-mail to another developer saying you agree with his suggestion and would approve of it? If it takes you less than 2-3 minutes, do it right away. Do not file it under "Later," do not postpone it until lunch, because your brain keeps track of this stuff, and this unfinished while loop will be running in your brain, even if consciously you do not think about it every minute. In other words, keep the RAM clean.
Allen advocates the 3-D model, where the Ds stand for "Do it," "Delegate it," "Defer it" and advises all projects and small tasks to be processed in that order. The "Do it" part was described above for the tasks that take just a few minutes. The author promises you'd be surprised how much can be achieved by following this simple rule. At the same time, if the project just requires your approval, and you'd pass it to someone else after that, delegate it. But get it off your mind right away, because it's not yours and thus cannot occupy the precious RAM space. Delegate it -- send the e-mail, fax it away, or transfer it to another person in your organization. And if it's definitely a long task and it needs to be done by you, then defer it to the time slot when you're sure you can sit down and do it (by the time you get rid of all the doable and delegable, you will find yourself with plenty of time left to important projects).
Allen is pretty good at pointing out the various excuses that we come up with to excuse our lack of productivity. The rules sound simple, even simplistic, but that's the key to the efficiency of his system. I liked the author's approach, and adhering to his system seemed to bring a relaxed attitude into my daily schedule, since now I don't have a guilt trip over concentrating on a single task and refusing to multi-task. You can read an interview with an author at About.com. There's also an article about the methodology in Fast Company magazine with descriptive title You can do anything - but not everything. I would recommend this book to anyone who feels stress after work or someone who feels they are not at the top of their productivity and spend too much time doing inessential things.
In his spare time Alex enjoys reading business and technology books. He also keeps a list of free books for readers on a tight budget. You can purchase Getting Things Done from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
When you see stats that vary over 50% (for example 26% - 40%) you should pay them no heed.
And that linked web page... man, who at the gov is still using Frontpage '97 to make web pages?
We currently have a 40 hour work-week. If we cut 10 hours from it, get paid the same salary, we'd have more time for recreation and family. That would sure relieve stress. It would also decrease unemployment since employers would need to hire more workers.
What type of definition is this?
Job stress results when the requirements of the job do not match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the employee.
In other words it is completely your employers fault, not yours.
That whole page is an absolute bunch of garbage. F'en OSHA
I think a lot of stress comes from the pressure to do things in a different way we are not familiar with - something you've done dozens of times using procedure X gets pretty easy and routine. But when you're forced to now use procedure Z to accomplish the same task, suddenly it's unfamiliar, dangerous, uncertain, possibly will fail and what'll we do if it doesn't work, etc.
The trick is to get the right balance of old comfortable with the new & improved, and different people can tolerate different levels of each. Forcing someone who has trouble internalizing new procedures quickly will be stressed in a fast changing environment, while someone who can learn fast will quickly become bored in a repetitive, slowly changing environment.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Like most business books this book suffers from unneeded verboseness. The ideas are simple and could fit in a book quarter the size and yet he keeps constantly repeating himself hoping to fill more pages.
Honestly you can reduce this book to someting like 10 pages.
BTW for most people the problem is not organizing things it actually doing them. When faced with your daily mountain of mindless, repetitive, do nothing, corporate bullshit work it's hard to get yourself motivated to anything. Instead you could organize all that work get a feeling of accomplishment.
evil is as evil does
The central idea of this book, which was not really covered in the Slashdot review, is that you should not be using your brain to remember things about work. Every time you have a thought relevant to work -- an idea, a task to accomplish, a goal to achieve -- you should have some kind of information management system in place so that your thought gets recorded for future review and action.
I married Allen's advice with a cheap digital voice recorder and with a great piece of free Windows software called Keynote. Keynote is a tabbed outliner, where each of the main ten or so components to my life each get their own outline (in my case: speaking dates, website development, to do's, etc). It's really the only software that is keeping me using Windows. I use my Mac for nearly everything else.
Getting Things Done is perhaps the only business book that I intend to re-read. If you feel stressed about your work, and have this lingering feeling you're not as effective as you need to be, I really suggest a weekend with this book. Just know that you should be joining its advice with a software solution like Keynote, plus a (real-world) filing cabinet, as you seek to empty the stuff in your brain into its appropriate places.
Oh, and one more thing. Getting Things Done is a great piece of writing. And how often can you say that about a business book?
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
It's called "Das Kapital", you weenie.
Of course it's adversarial. It's also based on factory-thinking, that "productivity" is something you can stack like bricks.
So. Go read up on the IWW (aka the Wobblies), or get job that involves creativity, OR, suck it up.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
...so you can quit your job and rake in the cash from all suckers who are still working.
Make sure your self-help book includes lots silly catch phrases for ordinary things and contains cheesy flow diagrams. Really, how is this book any different that "Seven habits..." and all the other ones? This steaming pile will end up collecting dust in the bookcases of thousands of self-absorbed wannabes along with all the others.
The real stress in today's job environment comes from job insecurity, not the difficulties of time management. Everyone I know is constantly worried that they won't have a job next month.
Here's a short list of reasons why people are worried about job security: jobs relocated to cheap labor markets, canceled projects, corporate mergers, getting replaced by cheap young workers and/or by H1Bs & L-1s workers, short-term cost cutting so the executives can get their bonuses, the incompetent schmuck in the next cubical is a better ass-kisser than you, four years of anemic job growth, etc.
Combine that with the skyrocketing cost of housing, energy and health care and you have discovered the real cause of stress in our society.
I have a simple solution when I'm given more tasks than I can complete in a particular period of time. I tell my boss I already have too much to do, so those other things will have to wait. Pretty simple, huh? Do you think I could stretch that one sentence time-management concept out to fill an entire book? I could make millions!
I know this attitude will mean I'll never be invited into executive management, but I've never had the desire to be an incompetent, soulless, ass-licking, mafioso-like dickhead anyway. Time with my kids is more important than a house on the country club golf course.
I guess that attitude is considered "un-American" in today's political environment, but screw it, I'm not wasting my one-and-only life on this planet running around like a chicken with it's head cut off so that the elite of our society can rake in more stock profits and brag about productivity gains.
-- You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you. --
Link for the lazy...
http://www.43folders.com/
43Folders is an excellent blog, covering mainly Macs and Moleskines, but well worth subscribing for anyone interested in GTD or productivity. It's not been going long, but Merlin's already made a big impression.
PigPog.