David Allen
Founder and Chairman
David Allen Company
Making the right choices and ensuring their efficient execution have always been the key elements of success. But there is an art to implementation and application, and that is our frontier.
Winning at both life and work is not a matter of crossing some distant finish line. It is about internalizing a set of responses and behaviors that are consistently successful.
It's easy to understand the value of outcome thinking and next-action decision-making. The challenge is to make it the standard by which we process everything in life and work, so the right things happen easily, elegantly, and efficiently.
There are always new and bigger horizons to conquer. Getting there in style - a really effective and sustainable style - is a fabulous end in itself.
David Allen is an international author, lecturer, and founder and chairman of the David Allen Company, a management consulting, coaching, and training company.
In the last twenty years, he has developed and implemented productivity improvement programs for over a million professionals in hundreds of organizations worldwide, including many Fortune 500 corporations and U.S. Government agencies.
Having logged thousands of hours working with individual executives and senior professionals, David has developed a revolutionary, unique, and highly practical system for improving personal and organizational productivity.
He is the author of three books: the international best-selling book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (Viking: 2001), Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life (Viking: 2003) and - released in December, 2008 - Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life (Viking: 2008).
More than 150 of his original essays have been featured in his e-newsletter, "David Allen's Productivity Principles," with a global readership of more than 120,000 people. He is a popular keynote speaker on the topics of time and stress management, individual and team productivity, and high performance work practices.
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Getting Things Done to
Make It All Work
David Allen
Founder and Chairman
David Allen Company
I love maps. I refer to them often. I want to have a map with me anytime when:
- I am not sure where I am.
- I'm uncertain where I should go.
- I don't know how to get from here to there.
- I've hit a detour or unforeseen road block.
- I'd like to know more about the cool, interesting, creative opportunities I could take advantage of along the way.
In my experience working with thousands of people from all walks of life, I've found that we all encounter one or more of those conditions on our journey through life as surely as we do on a business trip or vacation. And so I wanted to come up with a road map for life - something that would provide guidance across the whole rich range of human experiences and challenges.
I call the road map Making It All Work. Its roots are the principles of Getting Things Done (GTD), my method for creating a personal, customized productivity system. The five keys to mastering workflow are:
- Collect
- Process
- Organize
- Review
- Do
These are more fully explained in the GTD book. GTD differs from other productivity approaches in several important ways:
- The concepts work in an understandable and logical way.
- They are easily implemented by anyone.
- They address universal problems that continue to grow.
- The model resonates with something deep and intuitive in the human psyche.
While implementing the basic techniques of GTD provides relief from the pain created by the overwhelming input and challenging contexts of highly active people, the issues are larger than that.
People asked me for a road map that would help them understand where they were, where they wanted to go, and how to get there in the most enjoyable, enriching and rewarding way, regardless of whether their challenges were in their personal or business life.
The two key ingredients to Making It All Work are control and perspective. Effective self-management requires that both be present. Optimal performance, the quadrant I call "Captain and Commander," requires a high level of each.
Getting control requires capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting, and engaging/action. Gaining perspective requires working through Six Horizons of perspective from 50,000 feet (purpose and core values) right down to the runway level of physical, visible, next actions.
So whether you are contemplating a big decision, like your long-term career plan, or a more immediate challenge like how best to apply what you learned in a leadership program, apply the principles of GTD, outcomes thinking and next action planning. Get control and maintain perspective, and you'll make it all work for you.
Ideas Into Action
- Put the GTD principles to work in your personal and professional life. Their potential to improve personal and professional environments is remarkable.
- Read Making It All Work for a more in-depth explanation of the principles touched on above and the roadmap for taking your life where you want it to go - and enjoying the journey.
- Join us at the GTD Summit. The Summit is designed to provide and inspire collaborative and productive conversation to help everyone leverage GTD to the max. It is also a place to spend time with inspirational, interesting, and thoughtful people, who share the common focus of getting things done in productive and sustainable ways.
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