(Editorial note: You and your company need to get things done – lots of things, and the right things. Are you maximizing your output? Are you getting critical things done with the least amount of effort and stress? Do you have a sustainable work style that supports your commitment to the organization and yourself? Are your activities, moment to moment, lined up with the strategic focus for viable expansion? In this series of questions, we ask David Allen to talk about the strategic value of personal productivity and supply to answers to a few things on our minds.)
Q: What are the main reasons why people let themselves get overwhelmed at work?
A: People tend to both overcommit and to be inefficient. Few people know exactly how much work they actually have, and therefore must take everything on that they think about and that others ask them to do. Their integrity forces them to agree to take things on because, not being real clear how many projects they already have on their plate, some part of them thinks they actually MIGHT be able to do it. And most people are inefficient because they don’t force themselves to decide what things mean and what they are actually going to do about them when they first show up. So they are constantly rethinking the same things over and over and not making any progress in doing so–only adding to their stress.
And when they DO finally decide what to do, it’s usually because they have allowed the situation to get into “last-minute” mode, and they now have to go deal with things as a crisis, one at a time, instead of in an orderly, timely, manner. E.g. when you are talking to your boss about the urgent thing, why not also talk to them about the five things you need to talk to them about, before they are urgent? Most people are not that good at making next-action decisions and organizing the results effectively. The inefficiency creates greater inefficiency, and it can get out of hand easily.
David Allen is an international author, lecturer, and founder and Chairman of the David Allen Company, a management consulting, coaching and training company. He is the author of three books, including, the international best-selling book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (2001), Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done (2003), and Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life (2008). In the past 20 years, David has developed and implemented revolutionary productivity improvement programs for over a million professionals in hundreds of organizations worldwide.
