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Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity Paperback – Illustrated, March 17, 2015
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"A completely revised and updated edition of the blockbuster bestseller from 'the personal productivity guru'"—Fast Company
Since it was first published almost fifteen years ago, David Allen’s Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business books of its era, and the ultimate book on personal organization. “GTD” is now shorthand for an entire way of approaching professional and personal tasks, and has spawned an entire culture of websites, organizational tools, seminars, and offshoots.
Allen has rewritten the book from start to finish, tweaking his classic text with important perspectives on the new workplace, and adding material that will make the book fresh and relevant for years to come. This new edition of Getting Things Done will be welcomed not only by its hundreds of thousands of existing fans but also by a whole new generation eager to adopt its proven principles.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateMarch 17, 2015
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.8 x 8.4 inches
- ISBN-100143126563
- ISBN-13978-0143126560
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive
“Getting Things Done offers help building the new mental skills needed in an age of multitasking and overload.”
—Sue Shellenbarger, The Wall Street Journal
“I recently attended David’s seminar on getting organized, and after seeing him in action I have hope. . . . David Allen’s seminar was an eye-opener.”
—Stewart Alsop, Fortune
“Allen drops down from high-level philosophizing to the fine details of time management. Take a minute to check this one out.”
—Mark Henricks, Entrepreneur
“David Allen’s productivity principles are rooted in big ideas . . . but they’re also eminently practical.”
—Keith H. Hammonds, Fast Company
“David Allen brings new clarity to the power of purpose, the essential nature of relaxation, and deceptively simple guidelines for getting things done. He employs extensive experience, personal stories, and his own recipe for simplicity, speed, and fun.”
—Frances Hesselbein, chairman, board of governors, Leader to Leader Institute
“Anyone who reads this book can apply this knowledge and these skills in their lives for immediate results.”
—Stephen P. Magee, chaired professor of business and economics, University of Texas at Austin
“A true skeptic of most management fixes, I have to say David’s program is a winner!”
—Joline Godfrey, CEO, Independent Means, Inc., and author of Our Wildest Dreams
“Getting Things Done describes an incredibly practical process that can help busy people regain control of their lives. It can help you be more successful. Even more important, it can help you have a happier life!”
—Marshall Goldsmith, coeditor, The Leader of the Future and Coaching for Leadership
“WARNING: Reading Getting Things Done can be hazardous to your old habits of procrastination. David Allen’s approach is refreshingly simple and intuitive. He provides the systems, tools, and tips to achieve profound results.”
—Carola Endicott, director, Quality Resources, New England Medical Center
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Revised edition (March 17, 2015)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0143126563
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143126560
- Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.4 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11 in Time Management (Books)
- #15 in Personal Time Management
- #140 in Motivational Self-Help (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

David Allen is widely recognized as the world’s leading expert on personal and organizational productivity. His thirty-year pioneering research and coaching to corporate managers and CEOs of some of America’s most prestigious corporations and institutions has earned him Forbes’ recognition as one of the top five executive coaches in the U.S. and Business 2.0 magazine's inclusion in their 2006 list of the "50 Who Matter Now." Time Magazine called his flagship book, "Getting Things Done", “the definitive business self-help book of the decade.” Fast Company Magazine called David “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” in the arena of personal productivity, for his outstanding programs and writing on time and stress management, the power of aligned focus and vision, and his groundbreaking methodologies in management and executive peak performance.
David is the international best-selling author of "Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity"; "Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life"; and "Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life".
He is the engineer of GTD®, the popular Getting Things Done® methodology that has shown millions how to transform a fast-paced, overwhelming, overcommitted life into one that is balanced, integrated, relaxed, and has more successful outcomes. GTD’s broad appeal is based on the fact that it is applicable from the boardroom to the living room to the class room. It is hailed as “life changing” by students, busy parents, entrepreneurs and corporate executives. David is the Founder and Chairman of the David Allen Company, whose inspirational seminars, coaching, educational materials and practical products present individuals and organizations with a new model for “Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life.” He continues to write articles and essays that address today’s ever-changing issues about living and working in a fast-paced world while sustaining balance, control, and meaningful focus.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2016
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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Getting Things Done, or GTD, is a productivity methodology based on a few deceptively simple concepts. Now, I’m still very new to GTD, but this is how I see it. One of the fundamental ideas behind GTD is that the human brain is excellent at processing ideas and being creative, but not a great storage facility. A key part of GTD is getting all ideas, projects and commitments out of your brain and into a trusted system or external brain.
There are five activities to GDT: Capture, Clarify, Organise, Reflect and Engage. If I can take from the GTD website, this translates to:
Capture: Collect what has your attention. For me, this means adding all my ideas, commitments and to-dos in my list manager application of choice, Todoist. I really love this application and regret that I don’t have it at work. I try to capture everything from my doctor’s appointments, to buying cat food for Lushka to a reminder to ask my husband if we have picture hooks. I’m planning a trip to Europe this summer, so any time I think of something like oh, I must remember to get Swiss francs, into Todoist it goes.
Clarify: Process what it means. Here I can’t be any more concise than or as clear as the workflow diagram on the GTD website:
Gtd
Honestly, if I take away nothing more from my experience with GTD than the two minute rule (if you can do it in two minutes, do it now, otherwise delegate it or defer it) and the discipline to define the next physical action to move a task along it will have been worth it.
Organise: Put it where it belongs. This is probably the area of GTD that’s least intuitive for me – I’m not very organised! At the very least, I try to put any appointments on my calendar, any tasks in the appropriate section of Todoist, and potentially relevant non-actionable information in Evernote. One interesting aspect of GTD is the use of contexts. This means organising your tasks not by priority but by the tools, location, and/or person you need to be able to complete them successfully. So, for example, in my Taxes 2016 list I have an item; pick up tax receipt from pharmacy. I tagged that as “pharmacy” along with other items like pick up Polysporin and drop off new prescription. So when I go to the pharmacy I just check that tag to be reminded of all the things I have to accomplish while I’m there. Similarly, while planning my trip to Europe I have a context of Susanne, the friend I’m visiting. Any time I think of something I need to ask her, I add it to that list of things to discuss next time I call or email her.
Reflect: Review your to do list and calendar frequently. The idea here is to keep your “external brain” current with everything that you need to accomplish. If you don’t add to it or clear our stale items, your real brain will no longer trust your system and it will break down. Most GTDers do a review at least once a week.
Engage: Simply do. Pick the tasks that are available to you based on your contexts and get cracking!
The book itself is very well written and the edition I have was updated in 2015 to include discussion of new technology (not specific applications) and how it impacts the GTD workflow.
if you are interested in improving your productivity and generally getting things done you could do a whole lot worse than to check out this book.
I gave Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free productivity five stars out of five.
I purchased the original in March 2001 for use with my Palm Pilot. I subsequently purchased the Outlook add-in around 2007; and my company had a GTD consultant onsite and provided us access to GTD Connect in 2008. I've found the workflow and methodology useful. The underlying original strength of GTD is that the book not only states "what" has to happen, but through a specific methodology also "how" to make it happen.
I was so excited about this 2015 update, with my expectations of entry to the digital age that I pre-purchased in Nov 2014. Just received the book today and I'm sorry to say that David is essentially punting on digital-age specifics in favor of generalities. Further, David admits that this is not a rewrite (though he did "retype the original manuscript").
I'm actually fine with the retype vs rewrite though - as he states, the core ideas and methodology of GTD remain the same. But the reason I went to GTD in the first place was that it provided specific workflows incorporating paper and pencil and Outlook and PDAs - he had done the work to figure out what works and I was happy to adopt his recommendations.
Since the original release there has been a profound shift in the use of technology - hardware, software, mobile and cloud. 2015 finds us in much more diversified and integrated data input/output environment than what the Palm and MSOffice suite offered in 2000, and so there is a very good reason to update the "how" part of the equation to manage this new information capture and task-list ecosystem.
In the new edition, the author provides some digital guideline feature specifics (software outline program should allow for sub-headings, expand/collapse ability), even more generalities, but mostly just derails the digital conversation of any 'how' by sweeping particulars under the carpet with a few ambiguities of "what" needs to be done, not "how" to do it, "Make sure you create comfort with the [computer] applications ["used for developing and capturing project plans and collateral"]. It will behoove you to do regular reviews and updating of this content and keep it current with consistent purging and reorganizing."
Punting on digital specifics of today's workflow world because, in his words, “the rate of innovation in this area means that any specific software program can easily be outdated, upgraded, or undermined by the next new thing", and that he has admittedly "hopped out of the fray, opting instead to provide a general model for how to evaluate the usefulness of any tool" is, for me, not useful. I *know* there is a plethora of digital tool options, and I wanted him to do the work and figure out what works. Fine, publish a revision when the tools change, I'll buy it. That's why he and his team get paid the big bucks. But if I wanted to spend my time figuring the complexity of tools out myself I'd have done that from day one. To me, this would be like Lonely Planets back-peddling on restaurant and hotel reviews. "Oh, there are just sooo many these days, let us tell you what to look for instead,,,, try to find a restaurant with lots of people in it, and look for a hotel with clean sheets." Uh, yea.
The original methodology and task-driven workflow remains true in the 2015 book as in the original. The "psycap" and other psychological drivers and underpinnings are interesting in the new book. But whereas I was confident that I had a pretty holistic system set-up as a result of the original book (and actually, as much a result of a smaller digital footprint, and I know I'm not the exception), I now feel, with this "completely updated" edition, that I have half a system with a digital divide, a "black hole" as the author even alludes.
I understand all the high reviews, the methodology is still very good as described, and yes, freshened. My rating of this book is as a version updated for what we would all agree is an increasingly digital world and unfortunately, whereas the "what" might be explained, I find the book lacking on the "how". I agree that it has helped me refine my thinking about how to use GTD in the digital age,,, i.e., I now think that I cannot rely just on this one book as a holistic model of how to get it all done ;)
For anyone new to GTD, go ahead and buy this 2015 version, or save some money and buy the paperback original for a $1.50 and you'll learn the essentials that have not changed. For anyone versed in GTD, I offer David's statement from this new book: "...whenever anyone loops back through the material, they invariably have a response like, "Oh my God, this is totally different information and perspective" than what they had remembered from earlier, "it was a totally different book each time!" So if you have an earlier GTD book? Just reread it and you'll likely get the same "new" experience and fresh perspective as from this 2015 book, particularly given that there really are no digital age specifics that many of us were hoping for.
Top reviews from other countries

There are some good ideas here but it’s hard to relate them to modernity. Its like reading Jane Austin for tips on using Tinder.
If you are a historian researching productivity methods of bygone eras then this would be a good purchase for you.

For instance, the author will describe some approaches to collecting information (e.g. pen and paper, whiteboards, whatever). But then immediately following will be ten dedicated sections discussing the minutiae of each of those methods. Some things don’t need expanding on!
However for me, the biggest issue was the outdated nature of the content. It’s been very lightly updated with references to “digital tools”, but I think it’s overdue a rewrite to reflect that digital tools are the norm now, not the exception. This would also cut out half the book.

One-liner: Getting things done is not about getting things done. It's about being appropriately engaged with a task or an activity in hand.
One-takeaway: In David's own words, Weekly Review is the “critical success factor” in making your GTD practise stick. So, do your Weekly Review.


Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 3, 2021
One-liner: Getting things done is not about getting things done. It's about being appropriately engaged with a task or an activity in hand.
One-takeaway: In David's own words, Weekly Review is the “critical success factor” in making your GTD practise stick. So, do your Weekly Review.


The book is heavy going though, I bought it in paperback, Kindle and upgraded the Kindle to audio too so that I could read it quickly.
An email workflow infographic would have been handy, I'm likely to create these for myself so that I can embed the theories quicker.
I also wanted to annotate both the Kindle and paper versions so that they'd make better reference materials.
