Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

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Average customer rating 5 (3 comments)

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I'm reading this through a second time right now while implementing the changes that David Allen recommends. It has been a big help, a career-saver and a life-saver. I have been looking for a book like this my whole life. I have read countless "get yourself organized" books, attended seminars, purchased planners, PDAs, and on and on. . . Whew! The harder I try to implement the advice in these things the more disorganized I get. These always seems to be a gremlin or gargoyle lurking in my subconscious whose mission is to sabotage my best intentions. And this gremlin always succeeds. But David Allen is the Gremlin Slayer. He is the only get-organized guru who seems to understand this hidden gremlin and provides solutions to neutralize him. I highly recommend this book to anyone suffering from hidden gremlin sabotage.

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Most of my friends and clients describe me as highly organized, but I have never felt that way. I have always felt as if I were spending far too much effort on being organized and far too little on accomplishing meaningful work. I had read and followed the traditional time management books. I thought they worked well, and that the problem was in my execution. Then, while looking at Firefox extensions, I ran across a Gmail organizer based on David Allen's Getting Things Done. I installed it and played with it. Within a few hours, I actually had an empty inbox and was getting things done. At that point, I realized there were ideas here that were new to me. I read the book. Since then, I've seen some very critical reviews of the book by people who either missed Mr. Allen's point or whose lives are not complicated enough to require a lot of organizing. I do marketing work for 10-12 book publishers at any given time, so my life is busy, and I have to get a lot done while quickly shifting from project to project. I like Getting Things Done. It works for me, and it works for my friends in engineering as well as for my friends in marketing. It works for people who have a lot to do. The worst criticism I have seen of GTD is that it is obvious and too simple, but for those of us who enjoy life by taking on more work than we can handle and by always pushing ourselves, it's great. I highly recommend it, and actually am on the Powell's site so I can have copies shipped to some friends.

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This was my favorite book of 2007. I recommend it to all my clients - from individual artists to executive directors of multi-million dollar companies. It is the most straightforward step-by-step way to get organized so that nothing falls through the cracks, but still allows for the "but I don't WANNA" factor when planning your day.