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I’ve just finished reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. It’s a few years old now, but it’s just reached critical mass, with a lot of the more influential blogs singing its praises, explaining how following its rules and guides will turn your life around and have you achieving more than you ever imagined you could with the limited time resources you have at your disposal.

They’re probably right. If you methodically implemented everything in this book without deviation or lapsing into your old bad habits, then I’m sure your productivity would increase many-fold. The only trouble is, to get there you’re first going to have to read the book itself, and that’s a tedious task indeed.

Ignoring the proofing errors that have left errant words in odd sentences where they’ve been orphaned in the excising of earlier drafts, it is massively over-written. Do we really need to be talked through choosing a filing cabinet? Gathering all the papers off our desks, from our drawers, and from the various office crezendas? * Or have all of the points repeated several times throughout the various chapters?

No.

The theories are no doubt sound, and Allen closes the book by encouraging his reader to share the principles with their friends and co-workers which is admirable, considering he’d probably earn himself some extra royalties if he specifically forbade us from doing that so they’d buy their own copies.

So, in that spirit, I’ll quote from pages 22 and 23, where he makes a very apt comparison between the human brain and a computer. To understand why this is key to the whole process you need to understand his one basic premise: get everything out of your head. Everything. Try and store nothing in your mind, but instead put all of your jobs, tasks, and ideas on neatly filed paper. Here’s why:

The short-term memory part of your mind — the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganised ’stuff’ — functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much ’stuff’ you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at the right level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload…

< snip >

The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can’t do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need to do something, and store it in your RAM, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all of the time. Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do them both at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pin-pointed.

* I had no idea what a credenza was until I looked it up, as it’s not a word I’ve come across before. Seems it’s some kind of shelving unit.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.