David Allen

David Allen is an American productivity consultant who created Getting Things Done, or GTD, a method for organizing personal work. He set it out in 2001 in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and published a revised edition in 2015.

The idea behind GTD

Allen starts from a simple observation: the mind is good at having ideas and bad at holding them. Every commitment kept in your head, such as a call to return or a report to write, takes attention and adds to stress. With GTD, you move them all into a system you trust, outside your head, so you can focus on the work in front of you.

The five steps

The method runs in five steps. You capture everything that has your attention in an inbox. You clarify each item by deciding what it is and whether it calls for action. Anything that takes less than two minutes gets done straight away. You organize the rest into lists: next actions, projects, items waiting on someone else, someday ideas. You reflect with a weekly review that brings every list up to date. Then you engage, choosing what to do from those lists according to context, time and energy.

GTD takes steady discipline. People who struggle to keep it up often find that another method suits their way of working better.

Projects and next actions

Two notions from GTD have spread well beyond personal productivity. A project is any outcome that takes more than one action. A next action is the next physical, visible step that moves it forward, such as "email Paul the draft contract". Writing a task at that level of detail removes the hesitation that makes people put it off. Holacracy uses the same two notions to track the work of each role.