The key ideas

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

David Allen, 2001

Your mind reminds you of things to do at three in the morning and goes quiet when you could actually do them. Consultant David Allen created the GTD system to move every task out of memory and into lists you can trust. This book is about how to capture, clarify and keep in order everything that needs your attention, and free your mind for the work itself.

Who it is for

For anyone whose tasks live in their head, their chats and on sticky notes all at once, and who is tired of the feeling that something has been forgotten. For anyone who wants to work more calmly, not more.

Things rarely get stuck for lack of time. They get stuck because no one has decided what doing them looks like.

Three in the morning, and no present

Picture Olga. She goes to bed on time, but at three in the morning she wakes up with a thought: tomorrow is her mom's birthday, and she has no present. Next comes the email she never sent, then the internet bill, then the promise to call a friend. Not one of these things can be done right now, yet her mind keeps cycling through them until morning.

For many years David Allen taught company executives to handle the flood of things to do, and in 2001 he described his method in a book. Its title, Getting Things Done, long ago shrank to three letters, GTD, and a revised edition came out in 2015. This book doesn't teach you to work more or faster. It teaches you to move tasks out of your head and into a system you can trust, so your head is free for the work itself.

Allen took the book's central image from karate: mind like water. Toss a pebble into a still pond, and the water responds with exactly the force of the pebble's fall, then grows calm again. It doesn't overreact, and it doesn't underreact. That, in Allen's view, is how a person can work too, when hundreds of unfinished tasks aren't getting in the way.

From here you'll walk through his whole system. You'll see why unfinished tasks steal your attention, how to gather them in one place, how to turn a vague “I should really” into a clear step, and how to keep it all in order once a week.

Why you remember the batteries everywhere but the store

Allen paints a picture almost everyone knows. Every time you pick up a flashlight with dead batteries, your mind reminds you: buy new ones. But in the store where you could buy them, it says nothing. Memory brings up a task exactly when you can't do anything about it.

Allen has a name for unfinished tasks: open loops. An open loop is any promise to yourself or to others that hasn't been kept yet, from a dripping faucet to a career change. As he observes, every such loop takes a little piece of your attention, even if you aren't consciously thinking about it. The mind can't tell the small from the important, and it holds everything with the same anxiety.

In the revised edition, Allen cites experiments by the psychologists E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister. In them, thoughts about an unfinished goal stopped interfering with other work once a person made a concrete plan for dealing with it. Actually reaching the goal wasn't necessary.

This leads to the central move of the whole book. Your mind needs proof that the task is written down somewhere reliable and has a next step. Then the reminders fade, even though the task itself isn't done yet.

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About the author

David Allen is an American personal productivity consultant and the founder of the David Allen Company. By his own account, he had thirty-five jobs before he turned thirty-five, including magician and karate teacher.

All books by this author: David Allen

Terms from the book

  • Baumeister
  • Context
  • GTD: Short for the book's English title, Getting Things Done. It is also the name of Allen's system itself.
  • Mind like water: An image from karate that Allen makes the goal of his system: a calm mind responds to each event with exactly the force it calls for, then grows calm again.
  • Open loops: Allen's term for any unfinished task or promise to yourself or others that is held in memory and takes up part of your attention.
  • Masicampo: E. J. Masicampo, an American psychologist. In 2011, together with Roy Baumeister, he published experiments showing how a plan of action eases intrusive thoughts about unfinished goals.
  • Inbox: In Allen's system, the place where everything new lands first: a paper tray, an email folder, a note on your phone. It is emptied regularly.
  • Next action: Allen's key concept: the very first physical, visible step that moves a task forward and needs no more thinking. For example, call, write or buy.
  • Someday, maybe: Allen's list for ideas and wishes you aren't acting on yet but would like to return to. It is looked through during the weekly review.
  • Reference material: Information that requires no action but may come in handy. Allen advises keeping it separate from your to-do lists.
  • Two-minute rule: Allen's rule: if the next action takes less than two minutes, do it right away, because storing and tracking it takes longer than doing it.
  • Waiting-for list: A list of tasks handed off to other people: what was delegated, to whom and when. That way you don't have to keep other people's promises in your head.
  • Project: In Allen's system, any desired outcome that takes more than one step and can be reached within about a year.
  • Hard landscape: Allen's image for the calendar: it holds only what has to happen on a specific day or at a specific hour, not wishes for the day.
  • Weekly review: A regular hour at the end of the week when, in Allen's system, you empty your inboxes and check all your lists and your calendar. Allen sees it as the condition without which the system falls apart.
  • Horizons of focus: Allen's scheme of six levels for looking at your affairs: from current actions to purpose and values in life. It is the author's own scheme, not a scientific model.

All terms

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