From Clutter to Clarity
by Marshall Allen

My e-mail Inbox contained 1,253 messages and counting. Every day, dozens more arrived – personal messages, freelance- writing inquiries and companies offering “special offers” – and I don’t even get spam! Important messages that demanded thoughtful replies often got lost in the shuffle, and every time I needed to find one, I had to mentally wade through mounds of electronic debris.

I never considered e-mail a source of stress until I read Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen. Allen, who is not related to me, has spent decades as an executive coach and management consultant. His goal is to help people manage their lives so they achieve more without losing their minds, or sacrificing their personal values.

Allen wants to turn everyday mortals into gurus of productivity. He expects his devotees to complete every unfinished task. The messy workspace you’ve been meaning to clean? The phone call you were supposed to make a month ago? He wants to take these items that constantly pop into our heads and help us finish them, so we enjoy the psychological satisfaction of stress- free efficiency. Sound impossible? Well, let’s just say that Allen has a system – a detailed super-system – to make it happen.

Getting Things Done explains that old-school time management tactics are irrelevant in today’s “knowledge-based” society. We live in a world where the number of tasks has increased exponentially. In the old days, work was tangible – fields were plowed, machines tooled and boxes packed. Now work has no clear boundaries and people are trying to accomplish multiple projects at once – writing essays or memos, attending staff meetings or making decisions about conferences to attend. And with each task, infinite information is available on the Internet for doing things “better.”

Allen’s background and terminology reflect his experience in the corporate world, but his advice has broad applications. We all live in the knowledge-based world – college students, stay-at- home-moms and professionals alike. In my case, I’m married, a father of three children ages 3 and under, and a journalist who also freelances on the side. I need all the productivity help I can get!Getting Things Done provides tangible guidelines for sorting the information so nothing is lost, efficiency is increased and more is accomplished.

To keep track of our tasks, we often rely on short-term memory, which functions like a computer’s RAM, Allen says. While our focused mind thinks about two or three things, all the incomplete items we have yet to accomplish are still filling the short-term memory. “Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams,” he writes. “They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own mental overload.”

No one teaches us how to manage our new challenges – like the dozens of e-mails I receive daily. Enter David Allen, who has helped thousands of people turn overflowing e-mail inboxes, desk drawers and garages into portraits of proper organization. Some of you free-spirited messy ones may be rolling your eyes: This guy sounds uptight, obsessive and humorless. Doubters beware – Allen has an infectious can-do attitude.

“You can train yourself, almost like an athlete, to be faster, more responsive, more proactive and more focused in knowledge work,” he says. “You can think more effectively and manage the results with more ease and control. You can minimize the loose ends across the whole spectrum of your work life and personal life and get a lot more done with less effort.”

The disheveled doubter might shrug and retort: Who cares? According to Allen, we should care because when we operate in the “zone” – the state of stress-free productivity – we accomplish more with less effort, giving us more time to do the really important things in life. We become more trustworthy at work and in personal relationships, he says. Others will notice and will praise and promote us accordingly.

Getting Things Done is nothing more than “advanced common sense,” Allen says, but somehow his advice is counterintuitive. He wants us to think about things. He says we should proactively consider every obligation to decide the next necessary action to complete a task. “What’s the next action?” is the key question in knowledge work. New behaviors, not new skills, are what we need to increase productivity.

Allen believes the key to success is managing actions instead of stuff. We must make appropriate choices about what we do with our time, information and focus. “Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time,” he writes. “They get stuck because the doing of them has not been defined.”

Getting control of your life requires learning the five stages of mastering workflow. We collectthings that command our attention; process what they mean and what to do about them; organizethe results, which we review as options for what we choose to do.

Collecting involves “capturing and organizing” 100 percent of life’s projects, responsibilities, tasks and obligations – personal and professional, urgent or not – on paper, or in a device like a Palm Pilot. Much like making a giant to-do list, Allen says we need to free our psychic RAM by doing a brain dump.

Once the “stuff” is gathered, we need to first determine if it’s actionable. If not, we should immediately trash it, or put it in a tickler file (hold for future review), or file it as reference. If action is necessary, we need to ask Allen’s favorite question: “What’s the next action?” If a single action will accomplish the task – like answering an e-mail – we should do it immediately if it will take less than two minutes. If it takes longer, we should delegate it or defer it for later by putting it on our calendar or list of “next actions.” When the task is part of a larger project, he emphasizes planning and reviewing action steps toward completing the venture. To be sure, this system is invasive. Allen knows it isn’t for everyone, so he suggests that people who don’t want to become full productivity converts just borrow a few of his tricks.

Several of those tricks are worth the price of the book. For example, before I read Getting Things Done I treated my e-mail inbox as a giant archive. I was afraid to delete many messages because I was never sure when I’d need them. This practice “rapidly numbs the mind,” Allen says, because it forces an e-mail user to reassess every item in the inbox every time he glances at the screen. This made sense to me; what could I do differently?

Allen takes a radical approach to the e-mail inbox – getting it to empty. He suggests creating a few additional subfolders to handle the workflow. The ACTION folder contains messages that require more than a two-minute response (quick replies will be taken care of immediately). The WAITING FOR folder holds e- mails that indicate something I need to track. Other subfolders still store non-actionable messages. Responsibilities are clear with his method. I tried Allen’s method and quickly noticed less brain strain. I no longer had to mentally sort through dozens of messages every time I glance at my inbox.

When I read Getting Things Done for the first time, four years ago, I wasn’t ready to plunge into the whole system. Still — though I only implemented a few of his tricks — my approach to productivity changed dramatically. When I reread the book recently, I applied his e-mail suggestions and they radically improved my workflow. Now I need his system more than ever. With a growing family and career, I’m ready to move from always doing to done.

Marshall Allen is a journalist in Pasadena, Calif.

Copyright © 2005 Marshall Allen. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. The complete text of this article is available at http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001056.cfm