We have mentioned GTD (Getting Things Done) by David Allen before, but we haven’t explained the methodology behind the world-famous “work-life management system.” GTD has inspired a plethora of software tools, books, apps, classes, websites, and seminars based on its methodology.
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity is the title of a bestselling book written by productivity guru David Allen, who was rated as one of the world’s most influential thinkers by Fast Company. Originally published in 2002, GTD is more widespread than ever, and continues to sell itself as an idea at the David Allen Company website.
Although GTD is multi-faceted and encompasses many details, the general idea of GTD is to plan ahead, prioritizing to-dos by importance and how quickly a task can be completed. GTD encourages thinking ahead of time so that more planning does not have to happen again later. One aspect of Getting Things Done is weekly reviews, in which you evaluate what is important to you in order to help plan and track priorities.
Again, GTD is more complex than a paragraph can explain, but I strongly urge all of you to take a look at the official GTD website or the Wikipedia entry on Getting Things Done. And if you are very interested in the concept, read the book by David Allen!
Book Cover for David Allen's Getting Things Done
For our previous posts on GTD and how to use it with Priority Matrix, see GTD Templates for Priority Matrix and Using Priority Matrix with GTD Methodology.
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Thanks Hai Le for posting your article on GTD. I am a big fan of GTD an downloaded your Templates. However, I figured out after reading that other people were having trouble also, that what was happening was that my Mac was appending .txt to the down load. Once I removed that I could import the .pmatrix file and everything worked. Please keep up the articles on GTD. The reason I purchased Priority Matrix was that it seemed the most compatible with GTD for about 1/10 the cost.
BTW, the other reason is I bought PMatrix is because I was at a meeting with the most organized human being I have ever met and he had just bought an iPad for the purpose of running Priority Matrix.
That’s an amazing story! Can you tell us a bit more about who your friend is, and how you are thinking of using Priority Matrix?