Making It All Work “Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life”

David Allen’s Getting Things Done hit a nerve and ignited a movement with businesses, students, soccer moms, and techies all the way from Silicon Valley to Europe and Asia. Now, David Allen leads the world on a new path to achieve focus, control, and perspective. Throw out everything you know about productivity– Making It All Work will make life and work a game you can win. For those who have already experienced the clarity of mind from reading Getting Things Done, Making It All Work will take the process to the next level.

David Allen shows us how to excel in dealing with our daily commitments, the unexpected, and the information overload that threatens to drown us. Making It All Work provides an instantly usable, success-building tool kit for staying ahead of the game.

Making It All Work addresses: how to figure out where you are in life and what you need; how to be your own consultant and a CEO of your life; moving from hope to trust in decision-making; when not to set goals; harnessing intuition, spontaneity, and serendipity; and why life is like business and business is like life.

This eagerly awaited follow-up to Getting Things Done is guaranteed to find an audience in today’s competitive business environment and among David Allen’s many fans.

Reviews:

“I have been a practicing full blown GTD since 2003. Not some of it, but the entire system and principals. It’s assisted in making some great changes in my life. Don’t bother with this book until you have read the original Getting Things Done and have implemented your system for at least a few months. Then I’d come back and buy this one.

For established GTDers Making It All Work clarifies and connects the entire GTD system in a more cohesive manner. If you read through GTD forums you will find endless questions on people asking things such as: “How should I organize my context lists?” “How should I organize my horizons of focus?”. This book spells things out a lot more instead of merely implying them in the original book. Similar to a Frequently Asked Questions I would suppose.

The biggest idea in the book: “Perspective and Control” is not new, it’s just a different way of looking at things. Control is essentially the GTD workflow model which is: collect, process, organize, review, and do. Perspective is described from the bottom up as: actions, projects, areas of focus, goals, vision, and purpose. Control and perspective link up in the “Do” part of Control and the “Actions” part of perspective. This is much more easier to understand if you have a diagram to see what David Allen is getting at.

Just like a management textbook, we are introduced to four quadrants based on the Control and Perspective attributes. What you have are: Crazy maker / Visionary, Victim / Responder, Micro-manager / Implementer, and then the Captain & Commander. The above labels are not absolute and can be applied to a behavior or a personality. For instance I might be a Crazy maker when I’m doing some brainstorming, but other times when training an employee I might be considered a micro-manager. Different situations require you to be in the different quadrants, but where you should be spending most of your time is the Captain & Commander quadrant.

The Captain & Commander is someone who has both high perspective and control. To continue with the naval metaphor, this is someone who as a Commander would decide where to sail and with what with what ship. The Captain is the implementer who would steer the ship to the destination through action. We’ve all met people who have vision, but can’t implement - or the person who is so busy implementing that they could be doing the wrong thing entirely because they don’t ever bother to look up.

I think Making It All Work will shift the focus from getting a “Mind like Water” from the original book to the Captain & Commander concept. I think this is much better as it offers a more complete and responsible look at work and life, as opposed to having a “Mind like water” which I can get at anytime with a good bottle of wine!

I derived significant benefit from this book, as I found a quite a number of missing pieces from the GTD puzzle — so I rate it 5 stars. Your mileage will vary. Just like many things about GTD, some ideas may seem small but are actually much more profound with further inspection and application.”
–T. Quinn “LogoTournament.com”

“Just finished this book and found it excellent. I have applied the GTD ideas before but not completely. This book clarified them, and inspired me to use them more effectively. If you have read Getting Things Done, and find yourself not implementing them as well is you wish you were, this is a great book to get you re-motivated to do it. I felt it also did a great job explaining some of the deeper reasons and philosophy behind some of the GTD methods. Honestly, a book that I can tell is changing my life in significant ways.”
– kkid55