It’s 11:58 pm. After finishing of some paper work you’ve brought home from the office, you jump into bed, feeling exhausted but smug that you’ve accomplished something. A good night’s rest, whatever is left of it anyway—but sleep sounds good.

You fall asleep quickly. Thirty minutes later, you sit up wide awake with the stark realization that you promised your son that you’ll take him to the Knicks game tomorrow and you have not bought the tickets yet. Then your brain starts to churn out numbers, memos, budgets and other things that have been lurking just behind your conscious thought.

The psychic RAM is full.

In his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity, David Allen presents a different approach to the field of personal and professional productivity. Instead of focusing on time management and priorities, his principle is “dealing effectively with internal commitments - the open loops and incompletes - anything pulling at your attention that doesn’t belong where it is, the way it is.”

The merger you are working on, the pep talk you will give to your sales and marketing staff, the door in your office that needs some oiling, the PTA fundraiser you are heading, that new Wii game your son has been talking about, and up to the porch light that needs to be replaced – all these continually go in and out of your stream of consciousness, nagging and jostling for a piece of the action. You know, “stuff” which he defines as “anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step.”

In other words, it’s mainly about managing what’s on your mind, your psychic RAM, more specifically.
To manage “stuff” in your head, Allen lists three essential requirements.  Anything unfinished must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind that you can go back to regularly and sort through.

Clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it. Once you’ve decided what to do, keep reminders organized in a system you review regularly.

To achieve these requirements, the author outlines the five phases in his system:

  • Collect. Gather everything in your desk, in tray, or inbox. Walk around your office slowly and write down everything that bothers you, anything that you want changed or replaced. Jot any and all ideas you have, little or grandiose.  Include everything, up to the deepest recesses of your mind. Personal, professional, social. Everything.
  • Process. If it is not actionable, throw, tickle or file as reference. If it is, do now, delegate or defer.
  • Organize. Group the processing results into categories: Projects, Next Action, Calendar, or Waiting For.
  • Review. Go over your calendar and actions list daily. Do a weekly review do clean up, maintain or update. For long-term goals, visions, etc, review as required to make them current or complete.
  • Do. Base your actions on context, time, energy, and priorities.

It sounds very simple, yet it’s not easy. Things like these never are. Mastering this system is not an overnight task.

Aside from the promise of less stress, you can immediately reap the benefits of the productivity nuggets found in the book. Small things like putting reference materials within swivel distance, asking the question “What is the next action?” 20 minutes before the agreed end time of a meeting, the “two-minute rule” - doing an action immediately once identified, if it will take less than two minutes. These tips alone can do wonders for your work flow.

Should you decide to give this a try, be prepared for undoing some old habits like procrastination and develop new ones like keeping a recorder of your thoughts or ideas on hand all the time.

If you have tried the traditional time management methods and productivity tools and they didn’t work for you, this one might.