Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen - Animated Book Summary And Review

by Panzer
Imagine that you are walking back from work… excited that another successful day has gone
by… when all of sudden you realize you never called mike… he is your best friend and
today is his birthday… but you were so busy the whole day that you never had a chance
to call..
“no problem” you think to yourself - “as soon as I get home I’ll wish him happy birthday”
but when you get home, a pile of unopened mail greets you by the door, unwashed dishes
are calling your name and you get distracted by other exciting house chores…
The next morning, feeling like a horrible friend, you wonder “how can something so
important slip my mind”
The reason is simple - your brain is for having ideas, NOT for holding them.
With a never-ending stream of demands for you attention, both at home and at work, things
are bound to slip through the cracks.
Only when your mind is clear and your thoughts are organized can you achieve effective results.
This is where Getting Things Done, or GTD for short, comes into play.
It is a framework designed to help you keep track of tasks, ideas and projects.
The Getting Things Done system is made of 5 simple steps - capture, process, organize,
review and engage.
Everything begins with “capturing” all ideas, tasks, projects, to-do items and other
random bits of information that come your way every single day.
These are things like emails, letters, calls and action items that come from talking to
other people or they can be ideas and tasks that are born in your own creativity and imagination.
Wherever that information comes from, you need to capture it, or externalize it so you
don’t have to keep it in your brain.
Now that you have all this information captured, it is time to make sense of it so you can
actually move forward with your goals, instead of wanting to pull your hear out from the
information overload.
Step number 2 in GTD is processing.
For every item that you captured ask yourself the following question - is it actionable?
The possible answers are two - YES or NO.
If the item is actionable, like an email from a colleague asking you about an update for
the project you are working together on, ask yourself a followup question - would it take
2 minutes or less to complete?
If the answer is “yes”, go ahead and do it.
If the answer is “no”, you need to put this action off for later by adding them to
an action items list (more on that in step 3).
If it will take you 30 seconds to reply to your colleague’s email, it makes sense to
take care of it on the spot and move on.
If you need to have a 20-minute conversation on the topic, it is best to schedule it.
If the item you are processing is “not actionable” - like a confirmation of a payment you made