Getting Things Done

I've been renewing my acquaintance with the concepts of David Allen's excellent productivity book "Getting Things Done"


At El Paso, some of the executives went through the training with David Allen personally, and liked it so much they put our whole group through the training. We had one of the trainers from David's company put on a three-day course, and I won't be able to do the program justice by describing it here, but it is the most common sense method to approach personal productivity that I have ever experienced. It's less mystical than programs like "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey, although it is complementary, and I have been applying principles from both programs, using Seven Habits to decide what things to do, and GTD (Getting Things Done) to get them done.



The book allows paper-based systems or computer-based systems or both, and the trainer gave me dozens of tips about Outlook, handling email, using the calendar and task lists more efficiently, shortcuts for creating and tracking tasks and events. The principle of Inbox Zero made sense to me but I could never really achieve it until I fully surrendered to the concept of trusting my task list. Now, I have no (zero, zilch, nada) emails in my Notes inbox (yes, Enbridge is a Notes shop, meh), my Outlook inbox (yes, I still use Outlook for my personal email accounts), no voice-mails in my office, home or mobile phones. Boo-yaa! Unfortunately, my physical inbox is still not zero.