Getting Things Done
Time Management
Penguin Books
March 17, 2015
Paperback
352
For more than 20 years, David Allen has been a management consultant and executive coach. Allen’s first book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, published in 2001, became a National Bestseller. Allen has been called a personal productivity guru whose work has been featured in Fast Company, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
Getting Things Done is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides an outline for getting control of your life through the five stages of mastering workflow: collection, processing, organizing, reviewing and doing. Part 2, which is well over half the book, repeats a lot of what is said in Part 1, but provides much more detail on the application of Allen’s methodology. Part 3 explains why Allen’s methods work and the benefits to be gained from using his approach.
Kevin’s Review …
This book has changed my life! It’s almost as though David Allen wrote it for me. I’ve said it hundreds of times over the years … you can tell how I’m doing by the number of e-mails that are in my inbox and how my desk looks. When things are going well, I have very few e-mails waiting on my attention and my desk is clean. When “the wheels are coming off,” so to speak, the e-mails are numerous and my desk is a bit cluttered.
In these times, I’m constantly “worried” that I’m going to forget about something. I may have a few lists going, but I’m constantly burdened by the possibility that I don’t have something critical written on a list somewhere and I’m going to forget about it. Never mind any creativity that I might be capable of.
Regardless, life is different now after reading this book. I suggest it to all of my coaching clients and now list it as one of the “top 5” I’ve read in recent memory. Check it out!