July 21, 2005

Getting Things Done with David Allen

I had the incredible privilege today of attending a David Allen seminar entitled Getting Things Done: The RoadMap. For those of you who aren’t familiar with David Allen, the best description for him is probably a “personal productivity guru.” He has written a couple of best-selling books entitled Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything.

What exactly is a personal productivity guru you might ask? Well, David’s mission is to help people get “meaningful things done with truly the least amount of invested attention and energy.” In other words, rather than pumping people up to work harder, David is all about getting people to work smarter. Here is a sampling of some key things he said today:

“Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to concentrate and your ability to concentrate is directly proportional to your ability to eliminate distraction.”

“If you don’t give things that have your attention the appropriate attention, they will demand more of your attention than they deserve.”

“You can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing.”

The best description I could wrap around it would be “corporate Zen.” Indeed, Allen talks about the power of freeing up your psychic RAM. In tangible terms, let’s say that you know you have to stop by the cleaners on your way home from work. If you don’t write that down/put it in your Blackberry/etc. a portion of your mental bandwidth is consumed throughout the entire day by remembering that you need to go to cleaners. That doesn’s sound that bad until you realize that you probably have 200-300 similar things that you’re holding onto at any given time. And what that ends up meaning is that a significant portion of your mental energy that should be devoted to problem solving and creativity is focused on relatively pointless stuff like remembering that you need to go to the cleaners.

David has a methodology for getting all of this stuff out of your head and into a system that will help ensure that you’re using the minimum amount of pyschic RAM on mundane details. It’s a really effective system that has been used by thousands of business executives around the world.

If you’re interested in finding out more information about David Allen and the Getting Things Done system, check out the audiobooks we have available on LearnOutLoud.com. Here are the links:

Getting Things Done (CD, cassette, digital download)
Getting Things Done Fast (CD, cassette)
Ready for Anything (Abridged on CD, cassette, digital download)
Ready for Anything (Unabridged on CD)

For additional information on David Allen check out his website or this recent article in Wired Magazine.