Books by author: David Allen

I recently came across a link on TJIC's blog to a set of notes on how alpha geeks keep their lives organized . It's a mess of a text file, but there are some decent hints there. Getting Things Done is recommended at the end, and after checking the reviews on Amazon, I bought a copy.

I've flirted with getting organized several times over the years, but until recently, my life was simple enough to mostly keep in my head, so I never stuck with any particular tools or schemes for schedules and project details. My relative laziness with regard to organization changed recently with the addition of new responsibilities at work and some upcoming changes in my home life. For the first time, I have more things going on than I can keep track of without help.

Happily, David Allen's book has some solid techniques for dealing with the potential insanity of multiple projects. The central tenet of the book is "get everything out of your head and into a trusted system so that you can focus on the task at hand". This makes perfect sense, and Allen presents a simple, proven system for accomplishing it.

As a strategy, I give it enthusiastic thumbs-up. As a book, I'm not so pleased. Getting Things Done is much longer than it needs to be (I think it could be credibly summarized in twenty pages), yet Allen misses the opportunity to give detailed examples of how to use a PDA or computer-based PIM to embody his techniques. There is enough detail that it's not too hard to fill in the blanks, but in the week or so that I've been using the process, I've discovered several PDA tricks that could easily merit a chapter in the book.

Sometimes I read books not to learn anything new but to reinforce something I should have learned already. When I read David Allen's Getting Things Done back in March, I took several of its precepts to heart, and I even wrote a piece of software to help me implement the system. I recently picked up Ready For Anything to remind me of some of the details of the process, and I hoped to gain some new insights and techniques. Well, I succeeded in the former, but was disappointed in the latter.

Ready For Anything is a collection of David Allen's email newsletters turned into 52 mini essays on various aspects of the Getting Things Done system. It reaffirmed for me the importance of the Weekly Review and helped me realize that I wasn't being sufficiently rigorous about writing down the next physical action for each project in the system. With those tweaks, my personal implementation of Getting Things Done is improved, and therefore, it was useful for me to read the book, but I can't recommend it to a general audience. It's a bit too long-winded and meandering.