If you're confident that your other commitments or to-dos are safely stored away somewhere and will not be lost or buried out of sight, you can devote all your attention, time, and mental energy to one thing before knocking it out and moving on to the next. Dumping everything out of your short-term memory allows you to do something that's very critical to productivity: focus on one thing at a time. In short, GTD focuses on getting 'stuff' -commitments, to do items, reminders to gather information, requests for information or actions, etc.- out of your short-term memory and into a physical, highly organized system that will remind you of the right stuff at the right time. Allen gets touchy-feeling in a few places (such as discussing prioritization or project definition) but the vast majority of the book takes a very practical approach to digging yourself out of whatever mountain of commitments you've gotten yourself under and how to stay on top of it once you get there.

I don't need nor want that, so you can cram it with walnuts, buddy. To those authors I'd like to say the following: No. It seems like other self-help books in this vein that I've perused are all about inspiration, defining values, motivating yourself, getting in touch with your inner being and letting loose the full potential of you.

What I really liked about Allen's work is that it's very straight forward and focused on implementation. This approach to maximizing productivity is popular among the nerdegalian, probably because of its minimum bullshit approach to actually processing, classifying, and executing what the author David Allen calls 'stuff to do.' This book discusses the GTD system in its entirety and, more importantly, teaches you how to put it in place. Ironically, looking in to the GTD (Getting Things Done) system has been bouncing around in the back of my head as something to do for quite some time now.

David allen productivity