Foreword

BOOK CATALOGS ARE full of listings for volumes that offer advice on how to improve your work habits, your health, your productivity, and your overall success in life.

Some of what they say is typically dressed-up common sense. A fraction of it is baloney. Much of it is worth reading one time, if that, and is forgettable hours or days after you have put the book down.

This book is different. It has sold steadily, in large numbers, since its first appearance, and the audience for David Allen’s programs and philosophies has grown in size and international reach. Speaking for myself, I can say that this is a book I read carefully when the original version came out, that I have revisited every year or two since then, and that I was very glad to learn was coming out in the updated and revised version you are reading now.

What makes Getting Things Done different? In ascending order of importance, I would list these three qualities, each evident in nearly every chapter.

One is its practicality, by which I really mean its modular and forgiving approach. Many self-improvement schemes work from an all-or-nothing, “everything must be different, starting tomorrow” premise. If you want to lose forty pounds, take control of your financial destiny, straighten out your family, or have the career of your dreams, you have to embrace a radical top-to-bottom change in every aspect of your life.

Occasionally people do make these radical leaps: in programs for sobriety, in commitments to new diet-and-exercise plans after serious health scares, or even going into the monastery after a life in the business world. But for most people, most of the time, approaches that are incremental and forgiving of error are more likely to pay off in the long run. That way, if there is one part of the approach you forget or fall behind in, you don’t have to abandon all the rest.

David Allen’s ambitions for his readers are in a sense even grander than those of most other books. His goal is nothing less than helping people remove stress and anxiety from their work and personal lives, so they can match every moment of their existence to the purposes they would most like to pursue. Yet with a very few exceptions—for instance, his sensible insistence on developing a “capture” habit, so that you are sure to write down or otherwise record every commitment you make or obligation you accept rather than torture yourself trying to remember them all, and the related insistence on having one central, trusted repository where you keep such data—a great advantage of his system is its modular nature. This book is full of advice that works better if embraced in its totality but is still useful when applied piece by piece.

For instance: If you haven’t gone all the way with David Allen’s GTD system, you can still find value in his “two-minute rule” for disposing of obligations now rather than putting them off. (From chapter 6, the two-minute rule: “If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it’s defined.”) Or his emphasis, explained throughout the book, on relying on an “external brain”—that is, tools that can do routine categorizing and remembering for us, from simple folders in which to store receipts to established places in which you will always put keys, glasses, or other things you don’t want to hunt for each time.

This is advice from a man who clearly understands that people are busy and fallible. He is writing to offer them additional helpful tips, rather than to give them extra reasons to feel guilty or inadequate. The book is also written with an understanding that life consists of cycles. Things go better, and then get worse. At some points we fall behind; at others, we catch up, or try to. When episodes occur, as they will for anyone, in which we are overwhelmed or unable to cope, the book suggests achievable day-by-day steps toward regaining a calm sense of control.

A second virtue of the book is its open-ended adaptability. Through the decades since David Allen first began conceiving his approach to work and life, some practical aspects of personal organization have remained constant. There are only so many hours per day, even as we push back the frontiers of sleeplessness. There are only so many people with whom we can maintain serious connections, only so many things we can do at a time. Yet other aspects of the working life have changed radically. When the first edition of this book came out, e-mail was still an exciting new technology rather than a limitlessly guilt-inducing source of work still to be done. One of David Allen’s first technological projects was a program called “Actioneer,” a task-management system for the early PalmPilot. Now the Palm company and its once-revolutionary Pilot are gone; iPhone and Android smartphones have taken its place; and others now unimagined are sure to follow.

In this new edition of the book as with its predecessor, David Allen is fully conversant with the technology of the moment. But unlike other management books that are closely tied to hardware or software of an era—Filofaxes in the 1980s, spreadsheets or PowerPoint decks more recently— Getting Things Done refers to but does not depend on any specific external systems. David Allen has updated the advice in this book to reflect what is different in modern technology and also (in fascinating detail) what modern brain science has revealed. But his outlook is always tied to timeless principles of how people manage their attention, emotions, and creativity. If this book is still being read a dozen years or more from now, as I think it will be, people in that era will be able to skip past the inevitably outdated references to technology to recognize the still-relevant insights into human nature.

Third is a quality I have come to appreciate firsthand, as I have gotten to know David Allen and his wife Kathryn as friends, and that I think other people must have intuited from David’s work without ever meeting him. That is the wholeness and authenticity in David Allen’s recommendations, the connection between the person and the message he is delivering.

As I learned when writing a profile of David Allen for the Atlantic in 2004, he has had a wide variety of careers and levels-of-luck in life. He has been a schoolboy actor, a debating champion, a karate practitioner and teacher, a waiter and a taxi driver and a manager of a lawn-service agency—and all of this before his decades of success as a consultant and productivity adviser. Echoes from that range of experience come through in David Allen’s advice, and his manner, not only in the real-world examples he can cite but also in his quite notable lack of self-importance.

There are times when we overlook the personal traits of a creator when assessing the importance of his or her work. For instance: by all accounts Steve Jobs was more admirable as a design pioneer than as a model of personal conduct. In other cases, the integral connection of a person’s life and thought add to the power of that person’s message. I can attest from personal experience with David and Kathryn Allen something that many readers might guess and most would hope: that he is doing his best to be honest about what he has learned from life.

Some people will think they don’t “need” this book, and in a literal sense that is obviously true. Around the world and through the eons many people have led successful and satisfying lives in total ignorance of the “Getting Things Done” approach. But most people I know who have read this book have benefitted from the time they’ve taken to absorb its messages and their implications. Two of my tests for a book are whether I remember it a month or two after I have read it, and whether it affects my view of the world. By both tests Getting Things Done is, for me, a success. I am glad it is being introduced to a new generation of readers.

—James Fallows

James Fallows is a national correspondent for the Atlantic magazine and author of ten books, most recently China Airborne . He first wrote about David Allen in a 2004 article for the Atlantic called “Organize Your Life!”