The Art of Stress-Free Productivity: David Allen’s Getting Things Done

Here is Getting Things Done author David Allen talking about ‘The Art of Stress Free Productivity.’

For those of you who are not familiar, Getting Things Done (or GTD) is a very popular and very effective time-management method whose core premise is simple:

Our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax.

According to Allen, it’s only “when you can clear your mind and organize your thoughts that you can truly achieve effective results and unleash your creative potential.”

Once you get what you need to do out of your head and down on paper (or your iPad, iPhone, or iSEEit), you can then focus on prioritizing your tasks and breaking them down into actionable work items.

In this way, we eliminate the stress and struggle of remembering the million things we need to do and allows us instead to focus on what matters most.

(This, by the way, was a key principle behind the design of iSEEit’s task manager. Our goal was to create a tool that would allow a user to break down even the most complicated deal-related tasks and see with clarity what the next step is.)

After publication, reviews of David Allen’s GTD method have ranged from simply positive to almost obsessive, with a number of people calling GTD “nothing short of life-changing.”

For myself, I know from experience how much relief comes from having an overview of what I need to do and when, and David Allen’s GTD method is a solid method for doing just that.

You can buy his book on Amazon for less than 9 bucks. It’s a great tool in your arsenal for improving your personal and professional productivity and, in my opinion, definitely worth purchasing.