David Allen is something of a legend amongst productivity nerds — his Getting Things Done model has been what's good for almost 20 years.
There's a lot going on in the modern world, says Allen, and our productivity is directly tied to our ability to find focus in the chaos. When we can relax, we do our best work.
If the goal is to organize our thoughts into a relaxed state of mind, then we should get distracting thoughts out of our head.
Allen suggests creating a system to capture actions and ideas into a trusted place for safekeeping. Then, when we're ready to deal with those things, we can dip into our trusted system and pick our a project.
Once we get things into a trusted system, we can relax, be our most creative selves, and focus.
The book explains how to do this using high-level ideas, and complex methods alike, covering both analog (paper inboxes) and digital (apps) — GTD is more of a philosophy than it is a process.
A classic productivity book.
Get a copy of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen from Amazon
When you make a purchase through the Amazon link above, I make a small commission fee. You can also get a copy from Apple Books or Barnes and Noble.Go deeper
Apps to install: once you're ready to get started with GTD, there are tons of productivity apps out there based around the GTD model, including Omnifocus, Asana, and Things (my personal favorite).
Podcast to listen to: I was fascinated by this interview that David Allen did on the Tim Ferriss show and highly suggest checking it out.
Tim Ferriss