Allen | real estate deal | oil-change reminders

When asked what draws people and companies to GTD, Allen cites both positive and negative reasons. Some people just want to make life better - get more done, leave work earlier, realize more of their potential. More often, he says, GTD throws a lifeline to people drowning in a sea of stress. Someone gets downsized, changes jobs, gets divorced, or lands a big promotion.

"They're suddenly feeling buried," says Allen. "Many of them are control freaks suddenly out of control. They girded their entrepreneurial loins and marched out into the world. Now they're successful, but it's grown beyond their ability to control it."
That's where GTD comes in.

What is Getting Things Done? We'll get to that in a moment, but first, why Getting Things Done? Why does it need to exist? In a nutshell, the Allen methodology rests on three key insights about "stuff," the nature of work today, and the way the mind operates.

Stuff, for Allen, is the Great Enemy, the Lord of the Flies. As he puts it in Getting Things Done, stuff is "anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step."

That's a big butterfly net, sweeping in, well, almost everything: a $20 million real estate deal, a sore elbow, an elderly parent's need for care, a squeaky garage door, an unanswered e-mail, an invitation to join a church softball team, a dissatisfied customer,­ a cluttered closet, a burgeoning waistline, a monster deadline, a wilting houseplant. And stuff never stops: While you're reading this article, stuff steals into your life from 100 roads: e-mail, cell phone, frowns from your boss, overnight mail, oil-change reminders, sticky notes left on your computer monitor, please-help letters from your kid's school, postponed doctor visits.