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

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.
A paradox has emerged in this new millennium: people have enhanced quality
of life, but at the same time they are adding to their stress levels by taking on
more than they have resources to handle. It’s as though their eyes were bigger
than their stomachs. And most people are to some degree frustrated and
perplexed about how to improve the situation.

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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 dramatically 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 the 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 had
to be done—you could see it. It was clear when the work was finished, or not
finished.
Time is the quality of nature that keeps events
from happening all at once. Lately it doesn’t
seem to be working.
—Anonymous
Now, for many of us, there are no edges to most of our projects. Most people I
know have at least half a dozen things they’re trying to achieve right now, and
even if they had the 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 program be, or
the structure of your executives’ compensation 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 projects “better”? The answer is, an infinite amount, easily
accessible, or at least potentially so, through the Web.
Almost every project could be done 
better,
and an infinite quantity of
information is now available that could make that happen.
On another front, the lack of edges can create 
more
work for everyone. Many
of today’s organizational outcomes require cross-divisional communication,
cooperation, and engagement. Our individual office silos are crumbling, and
with them is going the luxury of not having to read cc’d e-mails from the

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marketing department, or from human resources, or from some ad hoc, deal-
with-a-certain-issue committee.

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