Winston Churchill once compared his mother to the Northern Star: She shined brightly for him but at a distance. I know what he meant, not in terms of my mom, but to a wildly popular book. Bloggers I admire endorse David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Yet try as I might by reading summaries and listening to a podcast featuring Mr. Allen, I could not appreciate its principles to personal productivity.

Now that I read the book, I appreciate one principle. Mr. Allen urges readers to “capture” or collect ideas in their heads and transfer them onto paper or screen. As he wrote,

There is no real way to achieve the kind of relaxed control I’m promising if you keep things only in your head. As you’ll discover, the individual behaviors described in this book are things you’re already doing. The big difference between what I do and what others do is that I capture and organize 100 percent of my stuff in and with objective tools at hand, not in my mind. And that applies to everything—little or big, personal or professional, urgent or not. Everything.

How to be more productive in one easy step

The idea had the force of revelation for me. Not the concept, because my longtime friend John Pelayo advised me to “write things down because you will remember it better” in the late 1990s, but the idea of writing Every. Single. Thing. Down.

My head had had ideas and thoughts and commitments and worries and desires and dreams, spinning around like damp clothes in a dryer. While I recorded some on scraps of paper or a calendar notebook, many were stuck there. They weren’t productive necessarily and weren’t organized efficiently certainly. Now they are, or I hope they are.

I write down obligations, errands, and tasks. My calendar notebook has 50 percent more entries each day than earlier this year. As I write, I am looking at three sheets of yellow legal pads taped to a wall and an in-box tray with to-do lists. My administrative life has become like a classic 1988 Billy Ocean song: Get the idea out of my head and into my notebook.  

The goal is not busyness for its own sake. The goal is to eliminate distractions to focus on essential work. “Mind like water” is the simile Mr. Allen uses: Just as water reacts the right way when a pebble drops, you should react with calm to changed circumstances. Think of a basketball player who can’t miss a shot. He or she is said to be in “the zone” or “unconscious.”

Any self-respecting writer yearns for this spiritual and emotional state. Since the advent of the internet 25 years ago, the task has been more difficult. As two academics, Francis Heylighen and Clement Vidal, wrote in a paper on Getting Things Done, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Give credit to Mr. Allen for devising an ingenious method for regaining attention and concentration in a digital age.

 The five key concepts of Getting Things Done

Mr. Allen describes his principle of capturing information in the book’s first 30 pages. In the remaining 270 pages, he describes the other four principles in his system — “clarify,” “organize,” “reflect,” and “engage.” As he explained,

If you’re planning to cook dinner for friends, but you come home and find the kitchen a total mess, how do you get on top of it? First you identify all the stuff that doesn’t belong where it is, the way it is (capture); you then determine what to keep and what to throw away (clarify); you put things where they need to go—back in the refrigerator, in the garbage, or in the sink (organize); you then check your recipe book, along with the ingredients and utensils you have (reflect); and you get started by putting butter in the pan to start melting (engage).

The effect these principles had on the professional classes is difficult to overstate. Mr. Allen was called “the Henry Ford of the Information Age” and his principles “Taylorism for Knowledge Workers.” Some writers said the book had “cult-like” devotion, and the main image on Mr. Allen’s website suggest the description was apt.

The reasons you shouldn’t read the final 90 percent of GTD

Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t understand the appeal of the other four principles. Anyone who has browsed a book on productivity is familiar with clarifying, organizing, reflecting, and engaging with information. These may have been fresh to some people when the book came out in 2001. Now they are stale.

Besides, Mr. Allen uses too much jargon to justify your attention. He writes like the business consultant he has been for 40 years. You read about “components of input management,” are urged to “enhance vertical focus,” and told the importance of “outcome visioning.” As a rule, he writes in levels three and four on the ladder of abstraction, the two most abstract levels no writer can stay too long without losing readers.

The most important productivity principle in GTD

The book’s first 30 pages resonate not only because of the originality of the capture principle, but also because it is rooted in objective reality. Memory really is as faulty as Mr. Allen claims. As the two Belgian academics noted,

Unlike a computer program, the neural network structure of the brain is very good at identifying patterns, at associating perceived patterns with the appropriate actions, and at storing patterns and associations in long-term memory. However, it is very poor at simultaneously keeping several such patterns actively in mind while reasoning because the corresponding patterns of neural activation tend to interfere with each other.  

Moreover, activation quickly decays because of diffusion and neuronal fatigue. Finally, while long-term memory is very effective at recognition, it is rather poor at recall, i.e. reviving memory patterns without perceptual stimulation. This is illustrated by the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon, where a fact, such as a colleague’s name, cannot be recalled—even though you know the memory is there. In that sense, human memory is much less reliable than a computer memory for retrieving a fact outside of the concrete context that reminds you of that fact.

To be sure, since the classical age the learned have devised an elaborate system for memory retention known as the “memory palace,” one that can be put to good use in their day as in ours. Yet unless you are willing to learn the skill you are stuck with the next best thing: developing a “second brain” or “external brain” in the form of writing things down or putting them into your smartphone. As the two Belgian academics, again, wrote,

One of the key insights of the new cognitive sciences is that cognition is necessarily situated and embodied. This means that a cognitive system, such as the human mind, is always interacting with its environmental situation via its bodily sensors (eyes, ears, touch …) that perceive, and effectors (hands, vocal chords …) that produce actions. The complexity of the real words is dealt with not by manipulating abstract internal representation, but by manipulating the world itself—i.e. by performing actions and monitoring their results via perceptions …

This shifts most of the burden of memory and reasoning from the brain to the environment. Instead of having to conceive, predict, and remember the potential results an action, the action is simply executed so that its actual results can be read off from the environmental situation.

You might say GTD is a system for getting things out of your head and into the world. In an age of information overload, that’s more valuable than ever.

Computer scientist and blogger Cal Newport argues that Mr. Allen’s system applies to “shallow” tasks such as doing errands, more than the “deep work” of extended ruminating. This may be a fair criticism of Mr. Allen’s idea of the “two-minute rule”: any task that takes less than two minutes should be done rather than written down.

Yet I see no reason why capturing ideas in your head and transferring them onto paper or the screen cannot help journalists on deadline or authors writing a book too.

Mr. Allen had one great idea. We should all be so blessed.

What does everybody think?

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