Summary: Getting things done - David Allen: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by Must Read Summaries

 This work offers a summary of the book “
GETTING THINGS DONE: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
” by David Allen. 

David Allen is president and CEO of David Allen & Co., a management consulting and training company. He has also developed and implemented management and productivity packages for a number of businesses, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential thinkers on productivity.

Your ability to be productive is directly proportional to your ability to relax. Only when your mind is clear and your thoughts are well organized can you truly unleash your creative potential. Thus, the key to being more productive is to develop realistic and sustainable ways you can relax more. And how do you become more relaxed? The answer is simple and direct – transform the way you work and the way you actually experience work by developing a trustworthy system to manage all the things you would ordinarily try and remember.

In this thoughtful guide, David Allen explains how to implement his workflow management plan. If you are always in a hurry, Getting Things Done will give you the keys for perfecting organizational efficiency or productivity in your professional and personal life.

29 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2011

Reviews

[Sara Housh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this summary because I had long heard about the method of the two minute rule to combat procrastination, and it has helped me in my life immensely within the last 6 monthes. it basically states that if a task can be accomplished in two minutes or less, you should just do it immediately to avoid mental clutter. This summary of the productivity book did offer some good tips, especially for coordinating short and long term goals. It basically gives you a method to organize an agenda, which I found helpful.

[Cheryl Klein]

Instructional non-fiction is not my thing, and organization comes fairly naturally to me (if I do say so myself). I definitely wouldn't have picked up this book if my boss hadn't assigned it. But it's not nearly as boring as it might have been (after all, it's designed to be quick and to-the-point for its busy target audience). There are some good tips in here for anyone who needs an organizational system, although I think systems work best when customized. The book also feels a bit outdated--although his principles can be easily translated to a more digital work environment, he's really into printing things out and writing, like, one sentence on each piece of paper.