Stress-free productivity does exist

One day in 1927 Bluma Zeigarnik, a Russian student of psychology at the University of Berlin, went along with several classmates and teachers to have dinner at a restaurant in town. When the waiter who served them took the order of all the diners with absolutely nothing to write in, as he did with the rest of the tables, she thought it was going to end badly. However, after a while the waiter served everyone exactly what they ordered.

Many of the things that fall into your hands do not require any action but contain valuable and useful information for some of your tasks or some future project.

Principles and rules can be understood in different ways, so in this article I will refer to principles as “fundamental ideas that govern someone’s thought or behavior”, and to rules as “that which must be complied with because it has been agreed within a community.”

The ultimate goal of the workflow defined by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done is to ensure that you’re always doing what you really need to be doing and, at the same time, you feel good by not doing what you’re not doing.

Do you feel that your productivity is lower than expected? You feel overwhelmed with that amount of tasks, “distracted” is your middle name and you still exceed deadlines.