Category: “Getting Things Done - GTD”

GTD is a personal productivity system that allows us not only to get things done efficiently, but also eliminates the stress coming from the excessive commitments we all acquire too often. David Allen, creator of GTD, does know that this over-commitment, although overwhelming, is not the real culprit of our distress.

Horizontal focus is the key to a relaxed control over your daily activities. It is about clearly defining the outcomes you want—your projects—and the next actions required to achieve them, and creating reminders on a trusted system that you review regularly.

One of my favorites David Allen’s statements is that you cannot do projects, you can only do action steps. In the end, a project shows up as done after doing a lot of small, physical and visible actions that make the world fits with what you had in mind.

Normally we go through a five-stage workflow method to deal with our work. We (1) capture things that catch our attention, we (2) clarify what they mean and we (3) organize the results, which we (4) reflect on frequently to choose which thing to (5) engage with next.

You usually feel bad when you do not get things done that you had committed to do, but this feeling of anxiety and guilty is not because of the many things you have to do. Frustration comes up when you break an agreement that you have made with yourself.