Getting things done

I finally got around to reading Dave Allen's book on Getting Things Done (GTD). His idea is that our mind is bad at helping us to be be productive as it thinks

Everything you've told yourself you ought to do, it [your mind] thinks you should be doing right now.

This is bad as you can only be productive if you focus on one task at a time and complete the task. Anything that stops you completing a task kills your productivity. A good point is that not everything we try to do is an

actionable task

Some things we have to deal with are not not actionable in themselves so we have to find a way to find the next actionable task that can solve the problem. If only Hamlet had figured that one out :)

He describes his five step process for doing this in the book. I made a mindmap of the essentials so I don't have to read the book again - GTD in action. Have a look at the rather large mindmap of GTD I created to get some idea of what he says (download FreeMind - free mind mapping software if you want to play with the map).