Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity pdfdrive com

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.
And 
whatever
you’re doing, you’d probably like to be more relaxed, confident
that whatever you’re doing at the moment is just what you need to be doing—
that having a beer with your staff after hours, gazing at your sleeping child in his
or her crib at midnight, answering the e-mail in front of you, or spending a few
informal minutes with the potential new client after the meeting is exactly what
you 
ought
to be doing, as you’re doing it.
The art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is
probably one of the secrets of our great men.
—Captain J. A. Hatfield
Teaching you how to be maximally efficient and relaxed, whenever you need
or want to be, was my main purpose in writing this book.
I have searched for a long time, as you may have, for answers to the questions
of 
what
to do, 
when
to do it, and 
how
to do it. And after twenty-plus years of

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developing and applying new methods for personal and organizational
productivity, alongside years of rigorous exploration in the self-development
arena, I can attest that there is no single, once-and-for-all solution. No software,
seminar, cool personal planner, or personal mission statement will simplify your
workday or make your choices for you as you move through your day, week, and
life. What’s more, just when you learn how to enhance your productivity and
decision-making at one level, you’ll graduate to the next accepted batch of
responsibilities and creative goals, whose new challenges will defy the ability of
any simple formula or buzzword-du-jour to get you what you want, the way you
want to get it.
But if there’s no single means of perfecting personal organization and
productivity, there 
are
things we can do to facilitate them. As I have personally
matured, from year to year, I’ve found deeper and more meaningful, more
significant things to focus on and be aware of and do. And I’ve uncovered
simple processes that we can all learn to use that will vastly improve our ability
to deal proactively and constructively with the mundane realities of the world.
What follows is a compilation of more than two decades’ worth of discoveries
about personal productivity—a guide to maximizing output and minimizing
input, and to doing so in a world in which work is increasingly voluminous and
ambiguous. I have spent many thousands of hours coaching people “in the
trenches” at their desks, helping them process and organize all of their work at
hand. The methods I have uncovered have proved to be highly effective in all
types of organizations, at every job level, across cultures, and even at home and
school. After twenty years of coaching and training some of the world’s most
sophisticated and productive professionals, I know the world is hungry for these
methods.
Executives at the top are looking to instill “ruthless execution” in themselves
and their people as a basic standard. They know, and I know, that behind closed
doors, after hours, there remain unanswered calls, tasks to be delegated,
unprocessed issues from meetings and conversations, personal responsibilities
unmanaged, and dozens of e-mails still not dealt with. Many of these
businesspeople are successful because the crises they solve and the opportunities
they take advantage of are bigger than the problems they allow and create in
their own offices and briefcases. But given the pace of business and life today,
the equation is in question.
On the one hand, we need proven tools that can help people focus their
energies strategically and tactically without letting anything fall through the

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cracks. On the other, we need to create work environments and skills that will
keep the most invested people from burning out due to stress. We need positive
work-style standards that will attract and retain the best and brightest.
We know this information is sorely needed in organizations. It’s also needed
in schools, where our kids are still not being taught how to process information,
how to focus on outcomes, or what actions to take to make them happen. And
for all of us individually, it’s needed so we can take advantage of all the
opportunities we’re given to add value to our world in a sustainable, self-
nurturing way.
The power, simplicity, and effectiveness of what I’m talking about in 
Getting
Things Done
are best experienced 
as
experiences, in real time, with real
situations in your real world. Necessarily, the book must put the essence of this
dynamic art of workflow management and personal productivity into a linear
format. I’ve tried to organize it in such a way as to give you both the inspiring
big-picture view and a taste of immediate results as you go along.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 describes the whole game,
providing a brief overview of the system and an explanation of why it’s unique
and timely, and then presenting the basic methodologies themselves in their most
condensed and basic form. Part 2 shows you how to implement the system. It’s
your personal coaching, step by step, on the nitty-gritty application of the
models. Part 3 goes even deeper, describing the subtler and more profound
results you can expect when you incorporate 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 promise 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 validate 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 inspire
you to put all this into a new behavior set that will blow your mind.
Throughout the book I refer to my coaching and seminars 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
productivity coaching and conducting seminars based on the methods presented

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here. I (and my colleagues) have coached more than a thousand individuals,
trained hundreds of thousands of professionals, and delivered 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 this program it 
saved
my life . . . when I
faithfully applied them, it 
changed
my life. This is a vaccination against day-to-
day fire-fighting (the so-called urgent and crisis demands of any given workday)
and an antidote for the imbalance many people bring upon themselves.”

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