Published in 1976, Edwin Bliss’s Getting Things Done: The ABCs of Time Management didn’t make the same splendiferous splash as David Allen’s GTD. It’s easy to see why. While Allen outlines a holistic approach to productivity, Bliss only presents a series of unconnected entries. Kinda like a blog. ;-)

Despite it’s lack of cohesion, it does have a few gems. Here are my favorite excerpts:

1. Parkinson’s Law

“Professor Parkinson was right: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

“When you think in terms of the task, instead of in terms of the time available for it, the sin of perfection sets in. You can always put one or two more finishing touches on the job, and can con yourself into chalking these up to excellence when in reality you should chalk them up to wheel spinning”

“The only way to overcome this is to work Parkinson’s principle in reverse—set a deadline for each task and hold to that deadline”

2. Eat lunch later

“A practice that many people find useful is to postpone lunch until 1pm or later, using the noon hour for work. In most offices, phone calls and other interruptions are less likely then—and you have the added bonus of quicker service at the cafeteria or in a restaurant when the rush hour is over.”

3. Protect your prime time

“Most of your work gets done in only a portion of your working day, the time we might designate prime time.

“For most people, the first couple of hours of the day are prime time. But many of us ignore this fact and spend those hours doing routine tasks: reading the morning mail (which seldom contains top-priority items, reading periodicals, glancing through the morning newspaper, making routine phone calls, and so on. Id doesn’t take much though to see the waste this entails; the best time of the day should be spent on the things that matter most, the things that require top energy, complete alertness, greatest creativity.”

4. Read selectively, not faster

“If your problem is that you spend too much time reading, a rapid-reading course won’t solve it. The solution is to read more selectively

“It is true that some people have bad reading habits, such as subvocalizing or rereading phrases unnecessarily. A reading course can help break those patterns and increase speed somewhat. But a surprising number of students who make some progress in increasing reading speed report that after a few months they slip back into their old patterns.

“It is difficult to resist the lure of reading, especially when there is something less pleasant that you should be doing. Keep in mind these words of British critic F. L. Lucas: ‘It is mere common sense never to undertake a piece of work, or read a book, without asking, ‘Is it worth the amount of life it will cost?’”

Audio

1. Productivity Talk: 43 Folders meets David Allen
Merlin Mann: “This was a lot of fun for me to do, especially since it gave me the chance to ask David many of the questions that you and I have both had about Getting Things Done ‖ so, as you might expect, there’s a heavy focus on implementation and best practices, as well as how to troubleshoot problems in your own GTD system.”
(1hr:26min)

2. DonationCoder interviews David Allen
J. Reichler: “In this interview we talk in depth about the key principles, the subtleties of the system, and some potential trouble spots.”
(43min, in two parts)

3. RoadMap Interview With David Allen
David Allen Company: “In this interview with David Allen, he explains the motivation for developing this flagship one-day seminar, its benefits, and what it means to ‘win at the game of work and business of life.’” (20min)

4. The Personal Productivity Show
Des: “Last week Cameron and I interviewed the GTD Guy himself, David Allen, for the TPN Personal Productivity podcast. It was a fantastic opportunity to talk to the man, and we certainly had a great time.”
(49min)

5. The Business Shrink
“David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity; and Laurel Tielis, author of The Girl’s Guide to Getting On Top: Positioning Your Business Through Media Placements.”
(49min)

Text

6. GTD: A New Cult for the Info Age
“A holy book for the information age is turning stressed-out worker bees into members of an unlikely new cult obsessed with keeping an empty inbox. To converts, popular time-management manual Getting Things Done is a way of life and its author, personal productivity coach David Allen, leader of their flock.”

7. Meet the man who can bring order to your universe
“You’re born an open loop; we’re all on the planet to finish something.”

8. A Method Out Of Madness
“As you run through life, you have ideas that you think you should do something about. You’ve now made an agreement with yourself‖this is called opening a loop. The creative part of us opens loops all over the place. But in order to manage that, you have to come back at some point and deal with that loop. You need to have a thought process where you examine what things really mean to you.”

9. Don’t Manage Time, Manage Yourself
“There’s usually an inverse relationship between how much something is on your mind and how much you’re actually doing about it. Ask yourself a question: From the minute you woke up this morning until right now, have you thought about something that you need to do but haven’t done? If so, you’re wasting your creative energy.”

10. You can do anything—but not everything.
“Isn’t it interesting that people feel best about themselves right before they go on vacation? They’ve cleared up all of their to-do piles, closed up transactions, renewed old promises with themselves. My most basic suggestion is that people should do that more than just once a year.”

11. Cutting through the clutter to get things done
“I kind of didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I had a degree in American intellectual history, then a black belt in karate and all kinds of weird things trying to find out where I was going to land.”

12. Top Productivity Guru Shares His Thoughts and Experiences About Entrepreneurship
“Obviously the balance among all the importances is critical for sustainability of the style of what you’re doing. But it would be a mistake for entrepreneurs (or senior executives for that matter) to assume they’re not going to have to heed the fire in the belly and all that entails.”

13. David Allen’s Path to Bliss
“I encourage people to give respect to everything: the little stuff, the big stuff, personal, professional, relationships, whatever. If your cars tires are starting to go bald, it may not seem like a big deal. But if you get distracted and don’t take care of it, you may end up with a flat on your way to a big sales meeting. The little stuff has a way of coming back to bite you in a big way.”

14. Meet the MasterMinds: David Allen Helps You Get Things Done
“A lot of people, even with great intentions, are less than successful when they try to get themselves organized. The main reason for the high failure rate is that most people have not had a model for productivity they could trust.”

15. Stress-Free Productivity: An Interview with David Allen
“You can’t manage time, it just is. So ‘time management’ is a mislabeled problem, which has little chance of being an effective approach. What you really manage is your activity during time, and defining outcomes and physical actions required is the core process required to manage what you do. You get things done by defining ‘done’ and deciding what ‘doing’ looks like. “

16. Homiletics Interview: David Allen
“If you’re not doing meaningful things, a clean desk isn’t going to make your life any more meaningful than a messy desk. So, give me a break! Being organized is not the essence of anything. Organized toward what? Organization just means that there’s an efficiency to my system. But if you know what you’re doing, efficiency is your only improvement opportunity.”

17. David Allen’s Digitized Organization Man
“I want to do nothing as often as I can. That’s why I constantly get my e-mail inbox as close to zero as I can, and try to close all those loops. Most people spend the whole week before they go on vacation just trying to manage this stuff and not be managed by it. But 90 percent of the work of GTD is just being able to look up very quickly what I [should] be doing right now.”

Do you see an interview missing? Let me know in the comments!