Getting Things Done

Why Your Head Is the Worst Place to Keep Your To-Do List

Most people think their problem is having too much to do. David Allen has spent forty years arguing they have it backwards. The problem is not the volume of work. The problem is that every uncompleted task you can think of is currently competing for a small slice of your attention, and that competition is exhausting you before you have done any actual work.

Allen calls this background noise ambient angst. It is the Sunday evening dread you cannot explain, the low hum of pressure that follows you into showers and dinners and your kids' soccer games. It is the moment at 2 a.m. when you sit up in bed because you have just remembered you never replied to your sister-in-law. None of these moments are about the task itself. They are about the fact that your brain has been forced to act as the filing cabinet for every commitment you have ever made, and a filing cabinet is a terrible thing for a brain to be.

This is the foundation on which Getting Things Done is built. The book, first published in 2001 and revised in 2015, sold millions of copies because Allen put a name and a system around a feeling that knowledge workers had been suffering from for decades without knowing what to call it. Peter Drucker had described the shift in advance. Where industrial work used to have visible edges, knowledge work has none. The factory worker knows when the shift ends. The marketing manager could in theory keep refining the deck forever. The schoolteacher could in theory keep improving the lesson plan forever. The startup founder could in theory keep iterating on the product forever. Nothing ever ends, and there are always more inputs incoming, and somewhere along the way your mind starts believing that every one of those open loops needs to be solved right now, including the ones you have not even consciously articulated.