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

The Old Models and Habits Are Insufficient
Neither our standard education, nor traditional time-management models, nor the
plethora of organizing tools available, such as personal notebook planners,
Microsoft Outlook, or Palm personal digital assistants (PDAs), has given us a
viable means of meeting the new demands placed on us. If you’ve tried to use
any of these processes or tools, you’ve probably found them unable to
accommodate the speed, complexity, and changing priority factors inherent in
what you are doing. The ability to be successful, relaxed, and in control during
these fertile but turbulent times demands new ways of thinking and working.
There is a great need for new methods, technologies, and work habits to help us
get on top of our world.
The winds and waves are always on the side of
the ablest navigators.
—Edward Gibbon
The traditional approaches to time management and personal organization
were useful in their time. They provided helpful reference points for a workforce
that was just emerging from an industrial assembly-line modality into a new kind
of work that included choices about what to do and discretion about when to do
it. When “time” itself turned into a work factor, personal calendars became a key
work tool. (Even as late as the 1980s many professionals considered having a
pocket Day-Timer the essence of being organized, and many people today think
of their calendar as the central tool for being in control.) Along with
discretionary time also came the need to make good choices about what to do.
“ABC” priority codes and daily “to-do” lists were key techniques that people
developed to help them sort through their choices in some meaningful way. If
you had the freedom to decide what to do, you also had the responsibility to
make good choices, given your “priorities.”
What you’ve probably discovered, at least at some level, is that a calendar,
though important, can really effectively manage only a small portion of what
you need to organize. And daily to-do lists and simplified priority coding have
proven inadequate to deal with the volume and variable nature of the average

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professional’s workload. More and more people’s jobs are made up of dozens or
even hundreds of e-mails a day, with no latitude left to ignore a single request,
complaint, or order. There are few people who can (or even should) expect to
code everything an “A,” a “B,” or a “C” priority, or who can maintain some
predetermined list of to-dos that the first telephone call or interruption from their
boss won’t totally 
un
do.

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