26-11-2012, 05:44 PM
GETTING THINGS DONE
David Allen - Getting Things Done.pdf (Size: 2.13 MB / Downloads: 27)
David Allen has been called one of the world's most influential
thinkers on productivity and has been a keynote speaker and
facilitator for such organizations as New York Life, the World
Bank, the Ford Foundation, L.L. Bean, and the U.S. Navy, and
he conducts workshops for individuals and organizations across
the country. He is the president of The David Allen Company
and has more than twenty years experience as a management
consultant and executive coach. His work has been featured in
Fast Company, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Getting
Things Done has been published in twelve foreign countries.
David Allen lives in Ojai, California
Welcome to Getting Things Done
WELCOME TO A gold mine of insights into strategies for how to have
more energy, be more relaxed, and get a lot more accomplished
with much less effort. If you're like me, you like getting things
done and doing them well, and yet you also want to savor life in
ways that seem increasingly elusive if not downright impossible if
you're working too hard. This doesn't have to be an either-or
proposition. It is possible to be effectively doing while you are
delightfully being, in your ordinary workaday world.
I think efficiency is a good thing. Maybe what you're doing is
important, interesting, or useful; or maybe it isn't but it has to be
done anyway. In the first case you want to get as much return as
you can on your investment of time and energy. In
the second, you want to get on to other things as fast
as you can, without any nagging loose ends.
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 way to live and
work, at elevated levels of effectiveness and efficiency. It's also
becoming a critical operational style required of successful 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 command
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 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 done. 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 hundred to two
thousand people in one year, all as she tried to protect a social life
for herself on the weekends.