Book Review: David Allen's "Making It All Work" (Part 1 of 3)

Dec saw the release of David Allen's Making It All Piece of work:Winning at the Game of Piece of work and the Business of Life, Allen's long-awaited follow-upwards to his classic Getting Things Done (Ready for Anything, published in 2004, acts more as a companion to Getting Things Done than a sequel). Making Information technology All Piece of work seems to have been written with the primary goal of addressing some of the the most common criticisms of Allen's GTD methodology, and clarifying its office outside of the workplace.

To that finish, Making It All Piece of work focuses much more than extensively on the most glaringly underdeveloped office of GTD: really doing things. For near people, the biggest stumbling block in GTD is its lack of prioritization, which leaves GTD'ers often at a loss about what item from their extensive next action lists they should be working on at whatsoever given moment.

Allen thankfully avoids adding a simplistic prioritization scheme to his method; instead, he spends a considerable amount of time expanding on the horizons of focus – woefully curt-shrifted in Getting Things Done – and integrating the different levels of awareness with his original process. For Allen, the clarity that comes of working from a trusted system rather than in our heads frees us upwards to more effectively trust our intuitions almost what we should be working on in the rut of the moment.

Add to this a renewed attention to focus and perspective, and Making Information technology All Piece of work provides a valuable addition to Getting Things Washed. It's not by whatsoever means a replacement for the before book – and, unfortunately, information technology lacks the earlier works plain-spokenness and simplicity – simply anyone looking to deepen their understanding of and comfort with GTD will find a lot to recollect well-nigh in Making It All Piece of work.

In this two-part review, I will highlight some of the main features of Making It All Work, beginning with the foundations of GTD equally a framework for effective action in today's post, and continuing with an in-depth look at the work's major new contributions to GTD in part 2.

Making it all work

As the subtitle, "Winning at the Game of Piece of work and the Business of Life" suggests, Making Information technology All Piece of work is committed to escaping the bounds of the business world and bringing GTD into our non-piece of work lives. The title'due south double play suggests Allen'due south core message: extend the principles of GTD throughout your life, treating all your tasks, projects, and goals every bit part of the vocation of living.

Allen is relying heavily on the assumption that we won't read besides much into the idea of "work" – that is,that we'll avert the discussion'south unpleasant connotations of sacrifice, labor, and hardship. Clearly he doesn't intend for us to consider taking our significant other out for a romantic evening on the boondocks as the same kind of chore as, say, arranging a structure crew to repair your office edifice's sewage lines.

What he does intend is for GTD'ers to apply the aforementioned principles they utilise to their least appealing tasks throughout their life – that is, that nosotros should consider every action as part of our steady march towards some greater life purpose and, on a practical level, rely on our concrete system of lists, calendars, and weekly reviews to assure nosotros make the nigh of all our tasks no matter how emotionally significant.

Pay attending to what has your attention

Allen has argued repeatedly that GTD is non a fourth dimension management system merely an attention management system, and he hammers on this theme repeatedly in Making It All Work. GTD is, Allen insists, a framework for helping the states focus our attending where it belongs at any particular moment – and once nosotros've achieved the clarity that a trusted system allows, we can trust our instincts to guide us to the best and most important thing to be paying attention to.

The culling is scattered attention, lost focus, and ultimately minimal productivity. When our attending is misplaced, all the things nosotros should be doing or might be doing or want to retrieve most doing or aren't doing but wonder if we ought to exist doing – and on and on – conspire to steal our attending away from the task at paw.

With a solid set of lists and triggers, and strong habits for capturing and processing thoughts as they occur to you lot for review after when you can give them the attending they deserve, we can release the concord over united states that everything we're not doing tin exercise, knowing that nosotros'll give information technology its due at the appropriate time and in the appropriate style.

Where the rubber meets the road

Although "mind like h2o" references are less common in Making It All Work than in Allen's before books, that is still the ultimate goal – to institute a set up of habits and practices that allow one to respond gracefully to new inputs and to instinctively place 1'south attention where information technology will practice the most good. With that kind of trust and clarity, priorities go irrelevant – nosotros will naturally piece of work on whatever task is most meaningful for us right at present, and know that other tasks volition get their turn at the moment when it's best to tackle them.

These are non new ideas for followers of Allen'south work, just they are given new context and new importance in Making It All Work. In function 2 of this review, we'll expect at some of the most pregnant departures from or additions to the GTD methodology.

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Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/book-review-david-allens-making-it-all-work-part-1-of-2.html

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