Book Review: David Allen’s “Making It All Work” (Part 2 of 3)

Note: I decided that I'd ameliorate brand this three parts instead of the originally-planned 2. Allen's piece of work is, of grade, key to the whole field of personal productivity, so information technology's worth really diving into it. Don't miss Part 1 here.

At the center of Making Information technology All Work is a renewed emphasis on control — effectively managing the work in your life — and perspective — aligning your work with your greater life goals and purpose. Allen lays these out along two axes, control and perspective, developing a set up of 4 quadrants that are surprisingly resonant with Stephen Covey's urgent/important quadrants (urgent = depression control, of import = loftier perspective). For Allen, the ideal place to be is i where you have a peachy bargain of control and a great deal of perspective — that is, where you're working as efficiently as possible on tasks of corking importance and with minimal stress.

Getting Control

The control axis in Making It All Piece of work essentially rehashes and expands the core GTD methodology from Allen's earlier work, with some slight changes in terminology" Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Appoint. Because that this territory is already well covered in his earlier work, it might be surprising that Allen devotes 125 pages to it here — but every bit it is the chief doable function of GTD, the role that you can set the volume downward and utilize immediately, it seems worthwhile to revisit it. And Allen's thinking has evolved somewhat, peculiarly in the "Do" ("Engage") part, where he devotes much more attention (thus addressing a big criticism of GTD, that information technology spends a lot of time helping us gear up to do stuff only stops merely at the point where we actually do do stuff).

GTD is noted for its simplicity, and information technology's the simplicity of this office of it that earns it the nearly adherents and yields the greatest tangible benefit. To start GTD, yous walk through the five steps: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage. To maintain your system, you practise the aforementioned: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage. To get back on track after the inevitable skid-ups: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage.

• Capture: GTD is all about attending, and capture is all nigh, in Allen'southward words, "paying attention to whatever has your attention." Our minds are imperfect, and unfortunately not in anticipated means. We will forget things that are of utmost importance (like our wedding ceremony), and obsess over trivial matters (like remembering to pick up milk on the manner dwelling). Capture functions at two levels — both the thorough "mindsweep" when we get started with GTD and again during each weekly review, where we inventory every possible matter that has our attention, no matter how significant or minor, and the incidental capture of fleeting thoughts so that nosotros can go them into our system without seriously interrupting whatever task we're currently focusing on.
• Clarify: Capture is meant to be indiscriminatory — if it has your attention, you capture it. Calrification is the process of deciding what to practise with the "stuff" y'all've captured. This is the stage of processing your inbox, going over coming together notes and letters, sorting all the notes in your Moleskine. The first question to ask is, "Is it actionable?" If it is, then yous determine what action needs to be taken (create a adjacent action, commencement a new project, defer to someone else) and add that to the relevant list or your calendar. If information technology isn't actionable, you need to determine if information technology'due south reference cloth to exist filed away, something to mull over and defer until later (which means it goes into your tickler file), or nothing at all (and can exist tossed).
• Organize: Organisation is at the heart of the "organisation" role of GTD — it's where all your next actions, projects, goals, reference materials, so on are kept and made available. Allen outlines vi categories of "things" that need organizing:
  1. Outcomes: High-level personal statements like your vision of yourself in v-x years, your principles, a list of your areas of focus, and low-level functional material like your projects listing.
  2. Actions: The lists and other fabric that drive your daily activities, including your adjacent actions sorted by context (due east.k. @habitation, @function), your "waiting for" list to remind you of piece of work deferred to others, and your calendar detailing what needs to become washed when.
  3. Incubating: Projects and actions that you lot aren't ready or willing to take on at the moment, or that you're not sure you want to have on at all. These proceed your "someday/perhaps" list.
  4. Support: All your planning documents and collateral textile that are needed to work on your agile projects.
  5. Reference: All documents, research material, articles, and other stuff that is not needed for current projects just which may prove useful for future projects.
  6. Trash: Everything that doesn't accept a place in your life right now.

• Reverberate: Chosen "Review" in Allen's earlier books, the new term reflects a more active and artistic approach to looking over existing commitments and generating new project and ideas. The key is still the Weekly Review, a regular "time out" from the hustle of day-to-twenty-four hour period work in society to bring your organization up to date and look frontwards into the time to come.
• Engaging: The selection and execution of tasks from your next action lists in the appropriate context. What's new here is Allen's head-on arroyo to priorities. For Allen, the unabridged purpose of all the other stages is so that at any given moment, you tin focus fully on the ane task that, given where you're at and the time available to you, is the single most important matter you could exist doing right now. The piece of work of defining, scheduling, assessing, and preparing for the actual activeness is already taken care of — leaving you free from moment to moment to pursue the particular activity that is well-nigh appropriate for that moment.

In the side by side and (hopefully) last part of this review, we'll expect at the other axis, perspective. Allen's take on perspective is centered around the Horizons of Focus (10,000 feet, xx,000 feet, etc.) that he introduced in Getting Things Done, but which here are described in far greater depth than before. We'll begin in the side by side post where nosotros end in this one, with activity, the "rail" level where doing occurs. See you then!

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Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/book-review-david-allen%e2%80%99s-making-it-all-work-part-2-of-3.html

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