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Welcome to Getting Things Done

WELCOME TO A gold mine of insights into strategies for how to have more energy, be more relaxed, with more clarity and presence in the moment with whatever you’re doing, and get a lot more accomplished with much less effort. If you’re like me, you like getting things done and doing them well, and yet you also want to savor life in ways that seem increasingly elusive, if not downright impossible, if you’re working too hard. This doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. It is possible to be effectively doing while you are delightfully being, in your ordinary workaday world.

I think efficiency is a good thing. Maybe what you’re doing is important, interesting, or useful; or maybe it isn’t but it has to be done anyway. In the first case you want to get as much return as you can on your investment of time and energy. In the second, you want to get on to other things as fast as you can, without any nagging loose ends.

And whatever you’re doing, you’d probably like to be more relaxed, confident that whatever you’re doing at the moment is just what you need to be doing—that having a beer with your staff after hours, gazing at your sleeping child in his or her crib at midnight, answering the e-mail in front of you, or spending a few informal minutes with the potential new client after the meeting is exactly what you ought to be doing, as you’re doing it.

Teaching you how to be maximally efficient and relaxed, whenever you need or want to be, was my main purpose in writing this book. And after many years of sharing this information and set of best practices around the world, in the most varied environments and with the widest range of people of all types and ages, I can unequivocally attest: it works.

How do you know that what you’re doing is what you ought to be doing at any point in time? No software, seminar, cool notebook, smartphone, or even personal mission statement will give you more than twenty-four hours in a day, simplify its content, or make this often tough choice for you.

Used appropriately, those kinds of tools can provide support for your decisions, but they don’t in and of themselves get you in control and focused.

What’s more, just when you learn how to enhance your productivity at one level, you’ll graduate or be forced to the next accepted batch of responsibilities and creative goals, whose new challenges will defy the ability of any simple formula, buzzword du jour, or new digital mobile device to get you back “on your game” for your next stage in work and life. You may have established personal habits and tools that work for a while, but a major change, such as a big shift in your job, a first baby, or buying a home, will test their sustainability and likely create serious discomfort (if not havoc!).

But if there’s no single technique or tool for perfecting organization and productivity, there are very specific things we do to facilitate them. Over the years I’ve uncovered simple processes that we can all learn to use that will vastly improve our ability to deal proactively and constructively with the mundane realities of the world, while still feeling connected to our more meaningful priorities. And those practices have proven to be viable universally across time.

They apply if you’re trying to manage your homework at age twelve and if you need to regroup about your corporation’s strategies after your last board meeting . . . and to everything in between.

What follows is a compilation of more than three decades’ worth of discoveries about personal and organizational productivity—a guide to maximizing output and minimizing input, and to doing so in a world in which work is increasingly voluminous, ever shifting, and ambiguous. I (and many colleagues) have spent hundreds of thousands of hours coaching some of the brightest and busiest people you can imagine, “in the trenches” at their desks, in their homes with their doors closed, helping them capture, clarify, and organize all of their work and commitments at hand. The methods I have uncovered have proved to be highly effective in all types of organizations, at every job level, across cultures, and even at home and school. After years of coaching and training some of the most sophisticated and productive professionals (along with their kids!), I know the world is hungry for these methods.

Executives at the top are looking to instill a standard of ruthless execution in themselves, their staffs, and their cultures, as well as how to keep their personal lives appropriately in balance and in play. They know, and I know, that behind closed doors, after hours, there remain unanswered calls, tasks to be delegated, unprocessed issues from meetings and conversations, senior-level accountabilities not yet clarified and under control, personal responsibilities unmanaged, and dozens of potentially important e-mails amid their hundreds (or even thousands) still not dealt with. Many of these businesspeople are successful because the crises they resolve and the opportunities they take advantage of are bigger than the problems they allow and create in their own offices, homes, and briefcases. But given the pace of business and life today, the equation is often in question.

And, more critically for many, people are not paying appropriate attention to their kids’ school plays, sports games, or going-to-bed questions about life, or they’re simply not able to “be here now,” anywhere, anytime. An ambient angst pervades our society—there’s a sense that somehow there’s probably something we should be doing that we’re not, which creates a tension for which there is no resolution and from which there is no rest.

On the one hand, we need proven tools that can help people focus their energies strategically and tactically without letting anything fall through the cracks. On the other, we need to create thinking habits and working environments that will keep the most caring and engaged people from burning out due to stress. We need positive work and lifestyle standards that will attract and retain the best and brightest in our organizations, and we need personal and home practices that foster clarity, control, and creativity for those we love and, most important, for ourselves.

We know this information is sorely needed in organizations. It’s also needed in schools, where the vast majority of our kids are still not being taught how to process information, how to focus on outcomes, or what actions to take to make them happen. And for all of us individually, it’s needed so we can take advantage of all the opportunities we’re given to add value to our world in a sustainable, self-nurturing way.

The power, simplicity, and effectiveness of what I’ll be presenting here is best experienced as an experience, in real time, with situations in your real world. As you read or skim the book, you will no doubt be motivated to think about how you would and could implement what I’ll be talking about. You’ll be greatly served by actually doing what you read about, as it occurs. That will take your understanding to a much deeper and more significant level. You’ll find it useful to understand the models; you’ll likely find it transformational to apply them.

Necessarily, the book must put the essence of this dynamic art of workflow management and personal productivity into a linear format. I’ve tried to organize it in such a way as to give you both the inspiring big-picture view and a taste of immediate results as you go along.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 describes the whole game, providing a brief overview of the system and an explanation of why it’s unique and timely, and then presenting the basic methodologies themselves in their most condensed and basic form. Part 2 shows you how to implement the system. It’s your personal coaching, step by step, on the nitty-gritty application of the models. Part 3 goes even deeper, describing the subtler and more profound results you can expect when you incorporate the methodologies and models into your work and your life.

There will be inevitable repetition in the content, in the three parts. The core methodology is relatively simple, but it can be expressed and understood at many different levels of depth and detail through the various lenses and lessons here.

I want you to hop in, test this stuff out, even challenge it. I want you to find out for yourself that what I promise is not only possible but instantly accessible to you personally. And I want you to know that everything I propose is easy to do. It involves no new skills at all. You already know how to focus, how to write things down, how to decide outcomes and actions, and how to review options and make choices. You’ll validate that many of the things you’ve been doing instinctively and intuitively all along are right. I’ll give you ways to leverage those basic skills into new plateaus of effectiveness. I want to inspire you to put all this into a new behavior set that will blow your mind.

From time to time in the book I refer to my work with people applying this material. I’ve been a management consultant, executive coach, and trainer for the past three decades—alone, in small partnerships, and as founder of a global training company. My work has consisted primarily of doing private coaching, conducting workshops, and giving presentations based on the methods presented here. I (and my colleagues) have now worked with thousands of people individually and trained hundreds of thousands in our in-house and public seminars around the world. We continue to engage with some of the best and brightest people all over the world. This is the background from which I have drawn my experience and examples.

I am a fellow student. I throw myself out of control and lose my focus, along with the rest and best of us. I equally must engage regularly with the practices I describe here, to keep myself clear with an optimal presence of mind. As I have described in chapter 15, this is a set of lifelong lifestyle habits that must be applied to engage in the world at more elevated and mature levels. I don’t share anything in this book I have not personally experienced and tested for its validity and that I don’t continue to use in some form.

The promise here was well described by a client of mine, who wrote, “When I habitually applied the tenets of this program it saved my life . . . when I faithfully applied them, it changed my life. This is the vaccination against day-to-day firefighting (the so-called urgent and crisis demands of any given workday) and an antidote for the imbalance many people bring upon themselves.”