Stress-free productivity does exist

According to The Threefold Model for Evaluating Daily Work defined by David Allen, a person may be held in one of these three types of activities at any time during a normal workday (1):

You may want to reform your home, develop an iPhone application or write a good article to post in your blog. The fact is that you have decided to start a new project and you really want to get down to work on it, but it is still somewhat fuzzy in your mind. You don’t know exactly how to do it or even where to start.

Why do we procrastinate even knowing that this behavior will bring us problems? Why is it so hard to quit a job or a career that gets us nowhere? Why do we continue to do (or not to do) certain things, even though we know that the fact of doing (or not doing) them hurts us?

One of the greatest advantages of GTD is that it allows, from the beginning, to separate actionable stuff from things that have value but do not require doing anything, at least right now. This results in a much more clear and unclogged work area.

Personal productivity—and GTD in particular—is largely a matter of habits. No matter how functional, fast and enjoyable is your personal productivity system; if you still use your head as a storage tool, do not make decisions about everything that concerns you and do not review your system regularly, the best software in the market won’t be of help.