This section of the Life Manager Pro web site features articles on Getting Things Done and organizing your life. The first article is below. More will be added soon.

What is Getting Things Done?

Getting Things Done succeeds because it first addresses a critical barrier to completing the tasks that we want to accomplish in a given day. That's 'stuff.' David Allen, creator of Getting Things Done says:

Here's how I define 'stuff:' anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step.

Stuff is bouncing around in our heads and causing untold stress and anxiety. Evaluation meetings, bar mitzvahs, empty rolls of toilet paper, broken lawn mowers, college applications, your big gut, tooth decay, dirty underwear and imminent jury duty all compete for prime attention in our poor, addled brains. Stuff has no 'home' and, consequently, no place to go, so it just keeps rattling around.

Worst off, we're too neurotic to stop thinking about it, and we certainly don't have time to actually do everything in one day.

So you sprint from fire to fire, praying you haven't forgotten anything, sapped of anything like creativity or even the basic human flexibility to adapt your own schedule to the needs of your friends, your family or yourself. Your 'stuff' has taken over your brain like a virus now, dragging down every process it touches and rendering you spent and virtually useless. Sound familiar?

So how does GTD work?

This is a really summarized version, but here it is, PowerPoint-style:

• Identify all the stuff in your life that isn't in the right place.
• Get rid of the stuff that isn't yours or you don't need right now.
• Create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values.
• Put your stuff in the right place, consistently.
• Do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment.
• Iterate and refactor mercilessly.

So, basically, you make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just get rid of. Everything you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment - both now and well into the future. This gives you an amazing kind of confidence that a) nothing gets lost and b) you always understand what’s on or off your plate.

Also built-in to the system are an ongoing series of reviews, in which you periodically re-examine your now-organized stuff from various levels of granularity to make sure your vertical focus (individual projects and their tasks) is working in concert with your horizontal focus (side to side scanning of all incoming channels for new stuff). It's actually sort of fun and oddly satisfying.

Based on an article in 43 folders: