A How-To Classic: David Allen's Getting Things Done

This isn't a new book, but one I've found invaluable: David Allen's Getting Things Done. The subtitle is The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, and that sums it up. Allen's target readers are primarily information workers and executives, but anyone with a lot to do and at least some autonomy in deciding how to do it would benefit (school teachers, office workers of all kinds, small business owners, etc.).

What Allen offers is a process (GTD for short) to help you wade through all the information coming at you and get the work done that will move you toward your goals, with a minimum of panic or running around like the proverbial beheaded chicken.

As Allen himself points out, the big difference between his strategy and others' (especially Covey's) is his is a bottom-up, rather than top-down strategy: get sane first on the day to day, mundane work details that make you feel overwhelmed (in other words, become more efficient), then you'll have time and mental energy to take a look at the larger picture (so you can become more effective). When you use methods that start at the big-picture level, sometimes you never get down to the day-to-day reality, and the system falls apart (or sits, pristine and unused, like that gleaming leather Daytimer you bought six years ago).

The GTD process is simple and logical at its core (here's a preview), and highly adaptable to how you work -- you can use this method with a paper planner, with Outlook, with GMail (there's even a GTD plug-in that works with GMail now) and Google Calendar, whatever you like. You keep track of projects (anything that takes more than one step/task to accomplish, so "Call Mom" is a task, but "Plan Chicago vacation" is a project. For each project, you ask yourself these magic words:

What is the next action?

Those words are also magic in meetings at work in which not a lot is happening. Asking this focuses your attention on what the very next step is toward getting that thing done. Then you either "do it, delegate it, or defer it" (that's part of the process). Deferring it means scheduling the task at a specific later date.

Allen has a web site, of course, and many other GTD-related blogs and sites have sprung up, too; my favorites are 43Folders and LifeHack.org. A new (to me) site I just found is Black Belt Productivity, which I'll have to check out...I'll just put it on my "Read/Review" list.

Highly recommended.

Next up: Deep Economy by Bill McKibben

In Deep Economy, Bill McKibben offers tantalizing glimpses into a saner world, one we may be on our way to creating, one in which economic decisions are made using a different, broader, deeper set of criteria. It's a hopeful book, and McKibben's smart but engaging, conversational style makes subjects that could be dull-as-dry-toast (U.S. foreign aid policy? farm subsidies? rural and urban poverty in developing nations?) fascinating.

Crop productivity is a great example of the changes we might be encouraged to make, if we change the economic decision-making criteria. If you measure agricultural productivity on a per-dollar or per-work-hour basis, then large-scale monoculture, using lots of big petroleum-burning machines, is usually considered the best way to go. Fewer people need to be involved when you reduce the number and varieties of crops, increase the acreage per farm, and increase the chemicals applied (herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers).

What McKibben points out is that the productivity of the land in that scenario actually decreases, compared to more labor-intensive farming practices. You can grow more food per acre using sustainable acricultural practices. But most economists (except those few who have begun to practice the types of economics McKibben describes as "deep") would tell you that it's less productive to do it that way, because of the way they are measuring productivity.

McKibben encourages his readers to take a different view of productivity and economic growth. The book is a series of anecdotes, stories of communities finding different ways to improve their lives than "economic growth at any cost." The examples he gives, from new organic farming efforts in Vermont and Bangladesh to rabbit-raising training schools fighting rural poverty in China to a clothing mercantile created by the residents of Powell, Wyoming to combat an incursion by Walmart to a small company building "bike mills" (human-powered equipment to mill grain, pump water, etc.) out of abandoned bikes in Guatemala—there are lots of cool things going on in the world.

Whether they are bucking the trend or creating a new one is perhaps open to debate, but some of them are clearly catching on. McKibben says that farmers' markets in the U.S. are growing at a rate of 25%, which is more than respectable.

I was happy to see just how many community-strengthening, local-economy-improving projects McKibben cites are also happening in my own back yard here in Lawrence, Kansas:

• Cohousing - Delaware Street Commons
• Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) - Rolling Prairie Farmers Alliance
• Farmers Markets - Lawrence has expanded this year from two to three weekly markets
• Community-owned mercantiles - the Community Mercantile (McKibben's example is a clothing co-op; the Merc is a grocery store)
  

There are also community vegetable gardens, restaurants which proudly serve local organic produce in season as well as locally and organically raised meat, public transportation (which the city is threatening to reduce!), and more.

These are projects that work. They are not subsidized or imposed by the government; people have created them because they wanted them, saw the value in them, and made them happen. And there's lots more to be done; improving public transportation may top that list, as well as increasing the amount of local food served in local school cafeterias, and many other things. But it's easy to see how life can improve by doing more in these areas.

Even more drastic improvements are possible for people in the "undeveloped world." McKibben believes that it isn't necessary for them to destroy their natural resources and their communities in order to industrialize and escape poverty. Using the principles McKibben champions (sustainability, emphasizing strong local communities and preserving local resources) some families, villages, and regions are finding creative ways to do just that. One remote Tibetan village is exploring carefully planned (and village-run) ecotourism as an alternative to hunting local species to extinction. A group of organic farmers in Bangladesh is providing a real alternative to chemical-intensive farming, and getting respect (and higher prices for their food) at the market.

McKibben also points out how U.S. foreign and domestic policy undercuts, sometimes very actively, these efforts. Farm subsidies as they are now doled out are especially destructive, undercutting local prices worldwide for staples like corn and rice. The World Bank pushes projects that replicate large-scale monoculture farming, whether that's appropriate to a local economy and ecology or not.

Strictly speaking, this isn't a how-to book, but it does show a number of possible paths to improving the lives of not only those in developed countries, but those who have less and struggle more, while protecting the natural resources that we all rely on for our survival.

Small, easy, but incredibly useful Outlook productivity tweak

One of the tips that I found really useful from Ferriss's The 4 Hour Workweek is his severe restriction of email. He suggests checking it twice a day and that's it. Further, he advocates getting to the point where you only have to check it once a week, which is what he does.

He also advises readers not to check email first thing in the morning, because it will tend to "scramble your brains" and derail you from more productive tasks (i.e., the stuff you want to get done, as opposed to the stuff that the people who are emailing you want to get done).

That's great, but I find I have to open Outlook to get at my calendar and contacts, and there, right when I open it, is my Inbox.

After a day or two of trying to avert my eyes and click away quickly, ignoring tantalizing subject lines like "RE: my incredibly important problem that you need to attend to right away," I found this small, easy, but incredibly useful Outlook (versions 2003 and 2007) tweak comes in.

If you don't want to check email but do need to see what your appointments are for the day, you can change Outlook so that on startup, it displays your Calendar, rather than your Inbox. Here's how:

1. In Outlook, click the Tools menu, then click Options.
2. Under the Other tab, click Advanced Options... (shown above)
   
3. In Advanced Options (shown at right), click the Browse... button next to "Startup in this Folder" and select the Calendar folder (or another folder if you like, such as Journal or Notes).
4. Click OK, then OK, then OK again.
5. That's it, you're done!
   

Head to head: The 4 Hour Workweek and Brazen Careerist

Ferriss, Timothy. The 4-Hour Work Week : Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007. $19.95

Trunk, Penelope. Brazen Careerist : The New Rules for Success. New York: Warner Business Books, 2007. $22.99

I was nearly finished with The 4 Hour Workweek when I started reading Brazen Careerist. If I had read them in the reverse order, I think I would have had a lot more patience with Trunk's strategies for getting ahead in the workplace.

Trunk targets Gen X and Y-ers and gives them liberal doses of lecturing - I mean advice - that she says is radical. "The New Rules for Success" is the subtitle of the book (her emphasis).

The problem is, the "rules" aren't all that new, and they aren't all that radical, especially compared with the advice Ferriss dishes up in his book. If Trunk is giving us the new rules of the career game, Ferriss is leaning over the fence with a slightly smug expression on his face, saying, "Are you sure that's the game you want to be playing for the next thirty or forty years?"

Here's some examples:

Trunk spends many pages advising readers on résumés (keep them to one page, no matter what, and make sure they are good selling tools for you), job interviews (there are stupid questions, so know them and don't ask them), grad school (it will not save you - a piece of advice I can certainly appreciate), and a host of workplace etiquette tips - how to win at the office politics game.

Ferriss spends many pages explaining how you can gradually (or sometimes quickly) morph your current position into a remote work situation, so that you can work from home. He also lays out a plan to focus on essential work tasks and eliminate nonessentials...such as most of the meetings, emails, and interpersonal stuff that Trunk shows you how to successfully navigate.

Suddenly Trunk's rules look a lot more like traditional career advice. Especially when Ferriss's next step is to suggest that "working from home" doesn't have to mean staying at home. Why not jet off to China or Germany with a global band mobile phone, and have your home phone number routed to you wherever you are? Online tools like Skype offer very cheap international calling, and email is already global.

A lot of this comes down to personality. If you are more task/technical-oriented, you'll probably appreciate Ferriss's approach of avoiding meetings (except for a few very clearly defined ones to make specific decisions), limiting personal contact of all kinds to strictly business interactions, and generally reclaiming your time as your own. If that kind of thinking seems cold and unfeeling, Trunk's advice on dealing with people in the workplace has you covered.

Both Trunk and Ferriss discuss starting your own business, but again take very different tacks. Ferriss advises that starting your own business is the way to go, especially for those who really can't work from home (toll booth operators? playground monitors? bank guards?). His advice, though, is to create a business that can be automated and run without you, as soon as possible, so you can go do whatever it is that you want. For those of us with vocations that are unlikely ever to pay the rent, who previously thought we'd always need a day job, this is a great idea. Separate the income from your labor.

All of that said, Trunk's book isn't bad; there is solid advice, even though it's delivered at times in a somewhat hectoring tone. For a wide-eyed twenty-something just entering the workforce, Brazen Careerist could serve as a much-needed guide. But Ferriss proves that keeping up with the changing rules of the work game may not be as important, and certainly is not as much fun as making up your own game.

Bottom line: if you want to know how to get along better at work and get what you want out of your job, Trunk's your choice. If you'd rather not have a job at all and would prefer to focus on getting what you want out of your life, give Ferriss a read.

Addendum: I heard that Tim Ferriss gave out many, MANY copies of his book to bloggers to help build buzz for it (yes, I'm apparently in an alliterative mood this morning). Unfortunately for me, I was not one. I actually shelled out my own hard-earned cash for it, after perusing it for twenty minutes at my local bookstore.

Welcome to the How-To Review

This will be the place where I indulge my most secret addiction: how-to, self-help, office productivity, and pop psychology books. And I'm going to take you with me, Gentle Reader, so you can feel the vicarious thrill of looking over my shoulder as I peruse countless volumes designed for self-improvement. Heck, I may even throw in the odd diet book.

Sneak preview
Here's what's on my bookshelf right now:

• The 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
• Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success by Penelope Trunk
• Deep Economy by Bill McKibben
• food not lawns by H. C. Flores

I'll be providing capsule reviews and longer pieces, as well as head-to-head showdowns of books on similar topics, so stay tuned!