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Introduction to the Revised Edition

WHAT FOLLOWS IS a total rewrite of the first edition of Getting Things Done, originally published in 2001—well, a sort of rewrite. I actually retyped the original manuscript, start to finish, with the goal of identifying and revising content and language that was either incomplete, outdated, or otherwise not optimal for keeping the book functional as a continuing and “evergreen” manual, one that would be useful globally and remain relevant and applicable for the twenty-first century and even beyond. I also wanted to incorporate the most significant and interesting things I’ve seen and learned about the methodology that Getting Things Done introduced as I’ve continued to be involved with it, in myriad ways, since the book’s first publication. That includes my own deeper understanding of its power, subtlety, and range of application, as well as how it has been received as awareness of it has spread around the world.

What didn’t need to change as I reassessed the book were its fundamental principles and core techniques. As I crafted this new edition, reacquainting myself with what I wrote then was a gratifying acknowledgment that the principles of stress-free productivity I described and even most of the best practices of how to apply them haven’t wavered, nor will they, in the foreseeable future. In order for a space exploration team to land on Jupiter in 2109, they will have to employ the same principles for maintaining control and focus as anyone does today. They’ll still need some version of an in-tray (explained later) to capture potentially meaningful inputs they didn’t expect, in order to trust their choices about what to focus on during their first excursion. And next-action decision making will always be critical for successful execution of any task, whatever its scope.

Because many elements of the way we live and work have changed since the first edition, though, I’ve made appropriate recalibrations in the fundamental material and will share my thoughts here about things that I consider new and interesting in this arena, offering relevant advice to both those new to this methodology and the GTD* aficionados who may be reading this edition and want to keep abreast of the latest developments concerning it.

What’s New

Here are some of the key areas in the “what’s new” category that have influenced my revision:

The Rise of Digital Technology

The continuing manifestation of Moore’s Law (digital processing power increasing exponentially over time), along with the social and cultural ramifications of the expansion of the digital world into our daily lives, never fails to surprise, delight, and overwhelm us. Because Getting Things Done deals primarily with the content and meaning of what we need to manage, irrespective of how it shows up or gets organized—whether in digital form or on paper— advances in technology are to some degree irrelevant to the essence of its methodology. An e-mail request means essentially the same thing and has to be processed the same way as a favor asked of you at the coffee machine.

But the wired/wireless world has both enhanced and exacerbated how we can apply the core practices of capturing, organizing, and accessing what’s meaningful. While we now have access to lots of supertools and apps that show up on an almost daily basis and do really great stuff, that plethora of options can easily blow our productivity fuses. Staying on top of and leveraging ever-evolving technologies adds significant pressure to getting one’s appropriate workflow methodology right.

I’ve accordingly changed some of my earlier emphases on types of tools that are best suited to particular tasks and acknowledged the ubiquity of our new digital and mobile world. I’ve also eliminated most of my references to specific software applications that appeared in the first edition. The rate of innovation in this area means that any specific software program can easily be outdated, upgraded, or undermined by the next new thing by the time you read about it.

I’ve essentially hopped out of that fray, opting instead to provide a general model for how to evaluate the usefulness of any tool.

For this edition I grappled with how much attention to continue to devote to paper-based tools and materials (especially for capturing, reference filing, and incubating), as many in the younger generations have come to believe they don’t have to deal with paper at all. At the risk of dating myself, I decided to leave most of those instructions from the first edition intact here, as many of the potential readers of this new edition around the world will still be at least partially paper based. Ironically, there is a growing resurgence of interest in the use of paper among the most sophisticatedly digital. Time will tell whether we can ever truly get rid of that in-your-hand, in-your-face medium.

By the way, as I write this, I’m in the middle of a move to Europe from the US, attempting to reduce my physicals possessions to a bare minimum. So I scanned and digitized everything in my physicals tech file which I have used for 30 years, described later. Already I’ve been frustrated several times with things that would have been much more easily handled had I kept the Physicals version.

The 24-7 World

I’m often asked what new advice GTD can offer to the mobile, connected, and always-on world.

The necessity of dealing with frequent and complex barrages of potentially significant data was probably true in the past for remarkable individuals such as Napoleon as he marched through Europe, or Bach as he composed, or even Andy Warhol as he decided what to paint or show in a gallery. Now, though, the entire world’s digitally connected literate population is the recipient of an explosion of nonstop, potentially “important”—or at least relevant— information. The ease with which it can be accessed through technology has made it simultaneously rewarding in its opportunities and treacherous in its volume, speed, and changeability. If you are by nature fascinated by what may be going on when you hear sirens in your neighborhood or wonder what a group of people across the room at a party is excitedly talking about, then you are ripe for becoming a victim of the endless and powerful distractions your personal technology dishes out to you. Whether your experience with it is ultimately positive or negative depends primarily on the application of the practices in this book.

The Globalization of GTD Methodology

I’m often asked if the GTD process can translate into other cultures, and my answer has always been a resounding, “Of course.” The core message of the book is so inherently relevant to the human condition that I’ve yet to experience any cultural bias—nor frankly any gender, age, or personality-type differentials —in the applicability of the methodology. The awareness of the need for it and what purposes it will serve will, of course, be different for each individual. But that is more a function of one’s station in life, the nature of one’s work, and one’s interest in self-improvement than it is any of the other factors. In actual practice you will potentially have more in common with many hundreds of thousands of people around the world in your resonance with GTD than you will with your next-door neighbor or even your cousin Rafael!

Since its initial publication, awareness of the Getting Things Done message has spread worldwide. The first edition has been translated into more than thirty languages, and our company has established franchises in many countries to provide training programs based on its content. While I was relatively confident about the cross-cultural coherence of this methodology when I wrote the book, the ensuing years have simply validated that confidence, in spades.

An Approach That Is More Inclusive of a Larger Population of Readers and Users

The primary impetus for my writing Getting Things Done was to craft a manual for the methodology that I had formulated, tested, and implemented, mostly in the corporate training and development world. In its examples, style, look, and feel (I wore a tie on the cover!), the book was initially and principally addressed to managers, executives, and higher-level, fast-track professionals. While I already knew that the material could be equally valuable for homemakers, students, clergy, artists, and even retirees, it was professionals who at that time were the most aware of the need for the kind of help I was seeking to provide, as a means both to advance their own development and productivity as well as to stay sane in the process. They were at the front lines, the advance guard, in engaging with the impending flood of information and rapid and significant change the business world was experiencing, and also had access to resources to tackle these issues.

Today there is a much more universal interest in the results that can be achieved with relaxed, focused control, and the realization that it is not just a one-shot recipe of “time management” tips simply for business professionals, but in fact a lifestyle practice, necessary to deal with the new world most all of us are experiencing. I regularly receive testimonials from a diversity of people around the world in an infinite variety of situations about the life-changing value they have experienced applying GTD principles. This validation of the growing need across the planet for such a model has inspired me to reframe many of my examples and the focus of that text to support it.

From that perspective I have to acknowledge that even the title of this book can be somewhat misleading, giving many the impression that I am somehow advocating working harder and longer to get more done. Productivity, unfortunately, does have connotations of both business and busy-ness. In truth, this book is not so much concerned with getting things done as it is championing appropriate engagement with your world—guiding you to make the best choice of what to do in each moment, and to eliminate distraction and stress about what you’re not doing. The resulting clarity and psychological space can benefit a much broader range of people than simply professionals on a corporate career track.

Some of the most interesting endorsements of the value of applying the Getting Things Done principles and techniques have come from unexpected quarters. The head of the world’s largest finance organization, a popular American comedian, the most listened-to U.S. radio personality, the CEO of a major European conglomerate, one of the most successful Hollywood directors —all have attributed huge benefits in their life and work to GTD. Feedback from the clergy of many different religions has also been fascinating. While they’re responsible for handling otherworldly matters, they’ve been starved for ways to focus more in that realm with their flocks by freeing themselves of the distractions of the day-to-day business aspects of leading a congregation.

Students, designers, doctors—the list of self-identified GTD advocates is endless.

Over the years I’ve discovered that we’re all in this game together; it’s now great to have the opportunity to frame an outreach to encompass the full breadth of GTD users.

A Greater Awareness of the Time and Energy Required for the Full Implementation of the GTD Process, and the Behavioral Changes Required to Maintain It Alas! As easy as it is to actually do what I suggest as best practices in this book, I have been rudely awakened to these two phenomena: (1) the amount of information and suggested activities here can easily be perceived as too overwhelming for someone to even begin to implement them; and (2) making some of the fundamental practices habitual can take quite a while for most people.

Because I have continued to resist “dumbing down” this model and its details, I’m not sure I can ever overcome the objection of “too much to absorb.” The first edition of Getting Things Done included detailed instructions and recommendations about how to fully implement its methodology in your life and work—and I have retained them here. I now know that for many who are new to this game, this will seem more than comfortable or possible to incorporate all at once. But I cannot with integrity hold back the instructions about how to really integrate this method into your everyday life, if you want to “go for it.” If you were interested in learning to play tennis, I wouldn’t want to hold back at least a blueprint of the game, including a vision of excellence and the levels of learning and practice involved to get there. In the newly added chapter 15, I’ve sought to illuminate the depth and breadth of the game I’m introducing, and to make it more comfortable for you to take what you can and will from what you read and make it OK for you to simply glean and implement whatever you might from it, for now. I have attempted in this version of the book to add more graciousness to respect the potentially daunting task of rearranging your personal practices and systems. It’s really all about one step at a time.

In every case, however, a key challenge is applying and sustaining these practices as an ongoing set of habits, to the point that they will require the minimal application of conscious focus, or “juice,” and merely become an everyday part of keeping one’s mental and physical environment in good order. I cannot pretend to be an expert in how to change one’s habits—I’ve been much more invested in figuring out and refining the practices of stress-free productivity. An excellent resource in this area is Charles Duhigg’s book, The power of habit. The behavioral ingredients of GTD are actually relatively simple and familiar to everyone. How hard is it to write something down, decide what the next step is to move it forward, record the reminder of that on a list, and review the list? Most everyone admits he or she needs to establish a practice like this, and few do it consistently enough to feel good about it. How challenging it is for someone to internalize the need to consistently keep every unnecessary distraction out of his or her head has been one of my biggest surprises over the years.

Information from Cognitive Science Research That Has Validated the Efficacy of the GTD Methodology

I no longer feel as much like “a voice, crying in the wilderness” as I did at the turn of the century, for since then scientific data has emerged validating the principles and practices prescribed in this book. The new chapter 14 here (“GTD and Cognitive Science”) features an examination of some of this research.

If You Are New to This . . .

. . . and if you’ve gotten this far in this Introduction, you’re probably interested in jumping in at some level of engagement. I’ve structured Getting Things Done as a practical manual—much like a cookbook that frames the basic principles, presents many layers of what cooking and serving a meal is all about, and gives enough specific recipes to enable you to make an infinite number of future dinners. If I’ve done a decent job in crafting this new edition, you can just start at the next chapter and take it from there, as you feel so moved. GTD principles, as they are laid out in the book, have been verified by many as a powerful experience to work through and apply. Or you can simply jump around—skim the text, randomly dive into a paragraph or two. The book has been written to serve you in that way as well.

If You Already Have Some Getting Things Done

Experience . . .

. . . this will still be a new book. Over the many years that this information has been available in multiple forms, whenever anyone loops back through the material, they invariably have a response like, “Oh my God, this is totally different information and perspective than I could recognize and absorb when I read it earlier.” Even people who have reread the original edition of GTD as many as five times have professed to me, “It was a totally different book each time!” The experience is very much like reading a software manual a year later, after you’ve gotten the basics on “cruise control.” You’ll be amazed and enthused about all the cool stuff you realize you could be (and could have been) doing, right at your fingertips, but that you couldn’t recognize and implement, given the other major issues that needed to be addressed to set things up.

No matter when or how many times you might have read an earlier version of Getting Things Done, or participated in any of the seminars, coaching, webinars, podcasts, or other presentations of this material, you will experience a novel and absorbing level of engagement in this revised edition. I promise you that. What will open up in the following pages is a new universe of ideas to incorporate, within the structure and tools you likely already have in place.

Engaging with this book and the information within it will consistently provide a positive and productive mind-set about the aspects of your life and work that genuinely matter.