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Getting Things Done

There are only a few books I can point to and say, "That changed my life." David Allen's Getting Things Done is the latest. It's a very Zen and common sense approach to increasing your productivity and lowering your stress levels, and it has helped me tremendously.

The secret is to organize in a simple way, and empty your mind of all the things you need to do by putting them down on paper or PDA. The point is to have an uncluttered mind so that when you turn your attention to something, you can turn your entire attention to it. The system you set up enables you to not worry about forgetting this or that important thing, which really does lower your stress levels.

It's made me realize, once again, that the simplest answers to problems are the best and often the most profound.

The book has spawned an entire subculture and influenced numerous websites, my favorite of which is Lifehacker, which I read daily. Lifehacker feeds you a continuous stream of tips to help "hack" your life and make it better, embracing the concept of Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD is how Lifehacker refers to it). They, in turn, pull from a whole group of other sites that are dedicated to the same thing.

If you're stumbling through life juggling 40 things in your head, and keep forgetting half of them, and never seem to have the time to do any of it -- and stressing out because of that -- then I highly recommend taking a close look at GTD. It worked for me