when you incor-
porate the methodologies and models into your work and your
life.
I want you to hop in. I want you to test this stuff out, even
challenge it. I want you to find out for yourself that what I prom-
ise is not only possible but instantly accessible to you personally.
And I want you to know that everything I propose is easy to do. It
involves no new skills at all. You already know how to focus, how
to write things down, how to decide on outcomes and actions, and
how to review options and make choices. You'll vali date that
many of the things you've been doing instinctively and intuitively
all along are right. I'll give you ways to leverage those basic skills
into new plateaus of effectiveness. I want to inspi re you to put all
this into a new behavior set that will blow your mi nd.
Throughout the book I refer to my coaching and semi nars
on this material. I've worked as a "management consultant" for
the last two decades, alone and in small partnerships. My work
has consisted primarily of doing private productivi ty coaching
and conducting seminars based on the methods presen ted here. I
(and my colleagues) have coached more than a thousa nd indi-
viduals, trained hundreds of thousands of professionals, and deliv-
ered many hundreds of public seminars; This is the background
from which I have drawn my experience and examples.
The promise here was well described by a client of mine who
wrote, "When I habitually applied the tenets of thi s program it
saved my life . . . when I faithfully applied them, it changed my life.
This is a vaccination against day-to-day fire-fight ing (the so-
called urgent and crisis demands of any given workd ay) and an
antidote for the imbalance many people bring upon themselves."
Getting Things Done
part
The Art of Getting
Things Done
A New Practice for a New Reality
IT'S POSSIBLE FOR a person to have an overwhelming number of
things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a
positive sense of relaxed control. That's a great w ay to live and
work, at elevated levels of effectiveness and efficiency. It's also
becoming a critical operational style required of s uccessful and
high-performing professionals. You already know how to do
everything necessary to achieve this high-performance state. If
you're like most people, however, you need to apply these skills in
a more timely, complete, and systematic way so you can get on top
of it all instead of feeling buried. And though the
method and the techniques I describe in this book
are immensely practical and based on common sense,
most people will have some major work habits that
must be modified before they can implement this
system. The small changes required—changes in the
way you clarify and organize all the things that co m-
mand your attention—could represent a significant
shift in how you approach some key aspects of your day-to-day
work. Many of my clients have referred to this as a significant
paradigm shift.
The methods I present here are all based on two key objec-
tives:(1) capturing all the things that need to get done—now, later,
someday, big, little, or in between—into a logical and trusted sys-
tem outside of your head and off your mind; and (2) disciplining
yourself to make front-end decisions about all of me "inputs" you
3
Anxiety is caused
by a lack of control,
organization,
preparation, and
action.
. — David
4
THE ART OF GETTING THINGS DONE | PART ONE
let into your life so that you will always have
Continue reading on your phone by scaning this QR Code
Tip: The current page has been bookmarked automatically. If you wish to continue reading later, just open the
Dertz Homepage, and click on the 'continue reading' link at the bottom of the page.