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A review by apike
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
4.0
The first time I tried to read this book, I bounced off of it. It spends a lot of time talking about filing cabinets and sheets of paper, and the author acknowledges digital systems but doesn't think in terms of them. There is a bunch of eyeroll-inducing stuff in here. BUT. But.
There are some really useful ideas in this book. If you feel like you have so many things to do that it's stressing you out, there are likely useful ideas described in here that you could put to use.
My recommendation to people is to first start by reading a summary article of the Getting Things Done system that gets you started. Try an app like Things that lets you set up a system for tracking what you're going to get done. Get some practice actually doing it first.
Once you've experimented with some of these ideas – how you capture your tasks, how you phrase them, how you organize them – then come back to this book, maybe a year or two later, and then give it a read. Gloss over the parts about filing cabinets and label makers, but give some thought to the proposed ways of thinking about how you spend your time and attention, and pull out some of them to try out.
For me, at least, it was useful. I feel like I have a calmer, more focused sense of how I spend my time than I did before reading it – filing cabinets aside.
There are some really useful ideas in this book. If you feel like you have so many things to do that it's stressing you out, there are likely useful ideas described in here that you could put to use.
My recommendation to people is to first start by reading a summary article of the Getting Things Done system that gets you started. Try an app like Things that lets you set up a system for tracking what you're going to get done. Get some practice actually doing it first.
Once you've experimented with some of these ideas – how you capture your tasks, how you phrase them, how you organize them – then come back to this book, maybe a year or two later, and then give it a read. Gloss over the parts about filing cabinets and label makers, but give some thought to the proposed ways of thinking about how you spend your time and attention, and pull out some of them to try out.
For me, at least, it was useful. I feel like I have a calmer, more focused sense of how I spend my time than I did before reading it – filing cabinets aside.