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Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity
by David Allen
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List Price: £10.99
Our Price: £3.00
Your Save: £ ( % )
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: Piatkus Books
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 158
EAN: 9780749922641
ISBN: 0749922648
Label: Piatkus Books
Number Of Pages: 282
Publication Date: 2002-01-24
Publisher: Piatkus Books
Studio: Piatkus Books
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: An unnecessarily long read
Comment: This book makes a number of valuable contributions concerning how to manage time more effectively. Unfortunately, this is lost in a sea of psycho-babble. Where as most authors spend the first one or two chapters promoting their techniques before moving on to explaining them, David Allen continuously promotes his techniques throughout the entire book. This extra overhead makes the book rather difficult to read.
Personally, I found it difficult to maintain interest when reading this book, which is a shame really because the author does seem to know what he is talking about. If anyone can suggest a more concise alternative then please let me know.
Customer Rating:
Summary: No More Clutter!
Comment: I am so inspired by this book! My filing system at work and at home has never worked as efficiently as it does now, after reading this book. Author David Allen's detailed system helps clear the 'clutter' in my mind as I have adopted his system of writing down what needs to get done so the task is either written on my calendar or on my to-do list. I don't have to try to "remember" what I need to do next, wasting time and energy thinking and getting lost in my thoughts. If something can be done in two minutes I do it, I file it, I make the phone call. My desk stays in order and I feel more at ease. I love feeling organized and clear in my life.
Another book which clears "the clutter" in my mind is Working on Yourself Doesn't Work: The 3 Simple Ideas That Will Instantaneously Transform Your Life by Ariel & Shya Kane. This book teaches how to live in the moment without getting lost in the conversation of my thoughts. The Kanes have a yearly "Time & Project Management" course and "Transformation in the Workplace" seminar in New York City. These courses and their books have brought ease and inspiration to my workplace.
As a banker in New York City, I highly suggest checking out David Allen and Ariel and Shya Kane. You will discover a stress free environment in the workplace and at home.
Customer Rating:
Summary: 5th generation time management
Comment: This is a seminal book, which has in some ways been superseded by its own children. If you survey the Mac and PC software applications that offer help with time management, by far the most popular system implemented is Getting Things Done, or GTD for short.
GTD has been criticised for being no more than common sense. In a lot of ways this is both untrue, and unfair. More accurately, it's two simple ideas put together, and supported by a collection of useful ideas borrowed (with appropriate acknowledgement) from elsewhere. The two ideas are the idea of 'stuff', and what you do with it (collect, process, organise, review, do), and the idea of using (and relying on) a reliable filing system. It's backed up with other good ideas like brainstoming, mind-mapping, the 50,000 feet perspective, and other notions that you may have encountered in their original contexts, or in programmes like TQM.
GTD is less revolutionary than the 4th generation time-management that Stephen Covey introduced in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. However, it's more powerful for most of us in the sense that you can implement it easily on a computer or a PDA. David Allen makes the most of the power of easy storage of information. If you're a computer user (and if you're reading this on Amazon, then chances are that you are), then this is by the far the most practical system, whether you use a specialist piece of software like Omnifocus, or just make the most of the built-in functions of Outlook or iCal.
This is the strength, and the weakness of this book: get one of the many software packages, read the help-file, and you may not need to read the book at all.
Just one more thing about Getting Things Done. As the author points out, this is really a book for people on the fast-track to improve their personal organisation. It's not going to make a great gift for someone else who you _think_ should get organised.
Customer Rating:
Summary: may be good for you but definitely bad for me
Comment: I've read this book three or four times around of May-June 2004, and then tried to implement into my work - without any significant success. Most probably this is book for inbox slaves and formal process worshippers, otherwise it might be not for your job-without-formal-description. In worst case trying to follow it took me actually spending _more_ time on things I used to do quicker. Most probably it might be valuable for you, but not for me, and I don't want to take inbox slavery job.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good For All
Comment: Any information on being more organised and reducing stress in our lives is worth reading. Even people who are generally organised will gain benefits fom this book. We all have areas of our lives that could be more productive, less cluttered and more stress-free. Definitely worth a read.
How To Keep Your Man: And Keep Him For Good
Real Life Dramas - Volume One: 1
Darren G. Burton
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Editorial Reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: An unnecessarily long read
Comment: This book makes a number of valuable contributions concerning how to manage time more effectively. Unfortunately, this is lost in a sea of psycho-babble. Where as most authors spend the first one or two chapters promoting their techniques before moving on to explaining them, David Allen continuously promotes his techniques throughout the entire book. This extra overhead makes the book rather difficult to read.
Personally, I found it difficult to maintain interest when reading this book, which is a shame really because the author does seem to know what he is talking about. If anyone can suggest a more concise alternative then please let me know.
Customer Rating:
Summary: No More Clutter!
Comment: I am so inspired by this book! My filing system at work and at home has never worked as efficiently as it does now, after reading this book. Author David Allen's detailed system helps clear the 'clutter' in my mind as I have adopted his system of writing down what needs to get done so the task is either written on my calendar or on my to-do list. I don't have to try to "remember" what I need to do next, wasting time and energy thinking and getting lost in my thoughts. If something can be done in two minutes I do it, I file it, I make the phone call. My desk stays in order and I feel more at ease. I love feeling organized and clear in my life.
Another book which clears "the clutter" in my mind is Working on Yourself Doesn't Work: The 3 Simple Ideas That Will Instantaneously Transform Your Life by Ariel & Shya Kane. This book teaches how to live in the moment without getting lost in the conversation of my thoughts. The Kanes have a yearly "Time & Project Management" course and "Transformation in the Workplace" seminar in New York City. These courses and their books have brought ease and inspiration to my workplace.
As a banker in New York City, I highly suggest checking out David Allen and Ariel and Shya Kane. You will discover a stress free environment in the workplace and at home.
Customer Rating:
Summary: 5th generation time management
Comment: This is a seminal book, which has in some ways been superseded by its own children. If you survey the Mac and PC software applications that offer help with time management, by far the most popular system implemented is Getting Things Done, or GTD for short.
GTD has been criticised for being no more than common sense. In a lot of ways this is both untrue, and unfair. More accurately, it's two simple ideas put together, and supported by a collection of useful ideas borrowed (with appropriate acknowledgement) from elsewhere. The two ideas are the idea of 'stuff', and what you do with it (collect, process, organise, review, do), and the idea of using (and relying on) a reliable filing system. It's backed up with other good ideas like brainstoming, mind-mapping, the 50,000 feet perspective, and other notions that you may have encountered in their original contexts, or in programmes like TQM.
GTD is less revolutionary than the 4th generation time-management that Stephen Covey introduced in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. However, it's more powerful for most of us in the sense that you can implement it easily on a computer or a PDA. David Allen makes the most of the power of easy storage of information. If you're a computer user (and if you're reading this on Amazon, then chances are that you are), then this is by the far the most practical system, whether you use a specialist piece of software like Omnifocus, or just make the most of the built-in functions of Outlook or iCal.
This is the strength, and the weakness of this book: get one of the many software packages, read the help-file, and you may not need to read the book at all.
Just one more thing about Getting Things Done. As the author points out, this is really a book for people on the fast-track to improve their personal organisation. It's not going to make a great gift for someone else who you _think_ should get organised.
Customer Rating:
Summary: may be good for you but definitely bad for me
Comment: I've read this book three or four times around of May-June 2004, and then tried to implement into my work - without any significant success. Most probably this is book for inbox slaves and formal process worshippers, otherwise it might be not for your job-without-formal-description. In worst case trying to follow it took me actually spending _more_ time on things I used to do quicker. Most probably it might be valuable for you, but not for me, and I don't want to take inbox slavery job.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good For All
Comment: Any information on being more organised and reducing stress in our lives is worth reading. Even people who are generally organised will gain benefits fom this book. We all have areas of our lives that could be more productive, less cluttered and more stress-free. Definitely worth a read.
How To Keep Your Man: And Keep Him For Good
Real Life Dramas - Volume One: 1
Darren G. Burton
With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow", "mind like water", and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance. Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-dos clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organised, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Company has dubbed "the personal productivity guru", suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech sabre known as the mobile phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.) As whole-life-organising systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk. The next step is to write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket". That's where the processing and prioritising begin; in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's common sense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment. Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belaboured, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to football mums (who, we all know, are more organised than most CEOs to start with). --Timothy Murphy
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