Category: “Getting Things Done - GTD”

You feel overwhelmed by the large number of commitments that you have to deal with in your life. You just can’t keep up. You have tried to apply all the tricks that you found on the web to get better organized and you’ve tried all the tools that promised to improve your productivity, but you haven’t achieved a significant improvement.

Are you one of those people who estimate the time that it will take to complete each task, in order to know how many things you will get done at the end of the day, week or month? If so, how often do you check off all the tasks in your to-do list, at the end of the period? If you’re like almost people, the answer is “rarely”.

One day in 1927 Bluma Zeigarnik, a Russian student of psychology at the University of Berlin, went along with several classmates and teachers to have dinner at a restaurant in town. When the waiter who served them took the order of all the diners with absolutely nothing to write in, as he did with the rest of the tables, she thought it was going to end badly. However, after a while the waiter served everyone exactly what they ordered.

Many of the things that fall into your hands do not require any action but contain valuable and useful information for some of your tasks or some future project.

The ultimate goal of the workflow defined by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done is to ensure that you’re always doing what you really need to be doing and, at the same time, you feel good by not doing what you’re not doing.