Stress-free productivity does exist

Surely you know that the book written by David Allen in 2001, Getting Things Done, has become the manual of personal productivity for hundreds of thousands of followers. The great success of this method is that it has been used and validated empirically by a crowd of supporters.

Once you’ve captured everything that haunts you, the second stage of GTD is to clarify or process all that stuff, that is, to define exactly what each thing is and what the next step to achieve the end result is, if any.

Are you being productive or just active? They’re not the same thing, but we often use—unconsciously—the concept of activity to deceive ourselves (or consciously, to fool our boss). Sometimes we need to feel busy to not have to do other important tasks that make us uncomfortable for any reason. “I keep doing things all day. So cool!”. No doubt you’re working hard; you show dedication, but dedication sometimes masks a meaningless work. Are you inventing things to avoid doing what’s important? Think carefully about it and be honest with yourself.

The FacileThings mobile web application has been updated today, and now you can access your tasks via tags (contexts) and projects. Unlike the web application, you’ll only find active tasks on these lists, that is, those that aren’t done yet and aren’t in the trash.

When I talk to someone who has successfully implemented GTD, I try to find out the reason that has led him to try it. It is not just curiosity. There are many people interested in productivity-related books, blogs and applications, which fail to implement any methodology or system. I want to know what differentiates the former from the latter. What does it take to succeed? Is there a secret?