One thing you may have seen pop in a few of my posts is Getting Things Done by David Allen. So today I’m going to step away from pure work/life balance, and touch upon this topic. For those of you not familiar with Getting Things Done, or GTD, it is an action management system, a variation on the traditional time management systems I’m sure many of us have seen. But what is GTD, and why is it suddenly all over the Internet?

Simply put, GTD is a system for collecting all of the open loops in your life, breaking them down into doable chunks, and organizing them in such a way as to make the decision of what to do at any given time easy.

At its core, GTD is a set of principles and lists. From the basic 5-step process (Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do) to the customizable context lists, you see similarity between even the most disparate GTD systems.

Now you may be wondering, “Disparate systems? But I thought when you got into a time management system it was pretty much you did it their way or not at all.” This is the key and is in my opinion, why GTD is becoming more popular by the minute.

Looking at myself, I’ve always been a little (or a lot) disorganized. In high school and university, my reference filing system consisted of random scraps of paper either tucked inside the cover of a textbook, or crammed into a pile the in the bottom of my backpack. Suffice it to say, I was not the paragon of tidiness.

After graduating, this “system” served for another two or three years. It wasn’t a great way to do things, but I got by with reasonable success. However, almost two years ago I started a new job where I was much busier, my work was much more project-based, and I was working far more in a group setting rather than individually, and I realized that this just wasn’t going to cut it. The challenge was that I’d never had success in implementing a time management system in the past, I’d found them all too rigid, and that priorities and plans changed far too often for me to keep to the plan, or to keep the plan up to date.

Then, in an extremely roundabout manner, I stumbled across GTD. GTD takes a different perspective on organizing and productivity. Rather than figuring out your life goals and then trying to make your day to day actions fit them, GTD works from the bottom up. The very first step is gathering all of your “stuff” into a physical inbox and going through each item one-by-one, taking stock of what you have and where you are. Then, by deciding on the very next doable action for each item, you’re left with a list of things that, given the proper tools, time and energy, can actually be done. After organizing these actions into context specific lists (basically, the tools or environment to complete those actions) and making a master list of your current and future projects, you’re off!

Getting back to the disparate systems remark from earlier, you may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned anything about the tools required for GTD. That’s because by and large GTD is tool agnostic. You can use everything from a stack of index cards to a three-ring binder filled with paper to a high-technology system incorporating wikis, web apps and PDAs. For instance, I use Outlook and a Blackberry, along with a series of notebooks for idea capture. I actually started out with a day-timer I organized in a GTD manner, but made the switch to electronic when I got my Blackberry.

If you’ve been finding that it can be challenging to keep the many facets of your life organized, and this has been a source of stress, there’s no harm in picking up the book and giving it a quick read-through. David Allen, the author, actually states that if you can even pick up one or two things from the system, it can have a positive impact on your personal organization. So if you’re interested, give it a shot, and if you have any questions, please feel free to either ask me or take a gander over at the Davidco forums on GTD.