David Allen - Getting Things Done | Page 5

a p lan for "next
actions" that you can implement or renegotiate at any moment.
This book offers a proven method for this kind of h igh-
performance workflow management. It provides good tools, tips,
techniques, and tricks for implementation. As you'll discover, the
principles and methods are instantly usable and app licable to
everything you have to do in your personal as well as your profes-
sional life.* You can incorporate, as many others have before you,
what I describe as an ongoing dynamic style of oper ating in your
work and in your world. Or, like still others, you can simply use
this as a guide to getting back into better control when you feel
you need to.
The Problem: New Demands,
Insufficient Resources
Almost everyone I encounter these days feels he or she has too
much to handle and not enough time to get it all do ne. In the
course of a single recent week, I consulted with a partner in a
major global investment firm who was concerned that the new
corporate-management responsibilities he was being offered
would stress his family commitments beyond the limits; and with
a midlevel human-resources manager trying to stay on top of her
150-plus e-mail requests per day fueled by the goal of doubling
the company's regional office staff from eleven hun dred to two
thousand people in one year, all as she tried to protect a social life
for herself on the weekends.
A paradox has emerged in this new millennium: peopl e have
*I consider "work," in its most universal sense, as meaning anything that you
want or need to be different than it currently is. Many people make a distinc-
tion between "work" and "personal life," but I don' t: to me, weeding the garden
or updating my will is just as much "work" as writi ng this book or coaching a
client. All the methods and techniques in this book are applicable across that
life/work spectrum—to be effective, they need to be .

CHAPTER 1 | A NEW PRACTICE FOR A NEW REALITY
enhanced quality of life, but at the same time they are adding to
their stress levels by taking on more than they hav e resources to
handle. It's as though their eyes were bigger than their stomachs.
And most people are to some degree frustrated and p erplexed
about how to improve the situation.
Work No Longer Has Clear Boundaries
A major factor in the mounting stress level is that the
actual nature of our jobs has changed much more dra -
matically and rapidly than have our training for and
our ability to deal with work. In just the last half of
the twentieth century, what constituted "work" in t he
industrialized world was transformed from assembly-
line, make-it and move-it kinds of activity to what
Peter Drucker has so aptly termed "knowledge work."
In the old days, work was self-evident. Fields
were to be plowed, machines tooled, boxes packed,
cows milked, widgets cranked. You knew what work ha d to be
done—you could see it. It was clear when the work was finished,
or not finished.
Now, for many of us, there are no edges to most of our proj-
ects. Most people I know have at least half a dozen things they're
trying to achieve right now, and even if they had t he
rest of their lives to try, they wouldn't be able to finish
these to perfection. You're probably faced with the
same dilemma. How good could that conference
potentially be? How effective could the training pr o-
gram be, or the structure of your executives' compe n-
sation package? How inspiring is the essay you're
writing? How motivating the staff meeting? How
functional the reorganization? And a last question:
How much available data could be relevant to doing those proj-
ects "better"? The answer is, an infinite amount, easily accessible,
or at least potentially so, through the Web.
On another front, the lack of edges can create more