With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, ",flow,", ",mind like water,", a nd other concepts bo r rowed fr om the East (a nd usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper fr om David Allen should have been called Zen a nd the Art of Schedule Maintenance.

Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system fo r downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's cloggin With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, ",flow,", ",mind like water,", a nd other concepts bo r rowed fr om the East (a nd usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper fr om David Allen should have been called Zen a nd the Art of Schedule Maintenance.

Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system fo r downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framewo r k of files a nd action lists--all purpo r tedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're wo r king on. However, it still operates fr om the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really o r ganized, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Company has dubbed ",the personal productivity guru,", suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers a nd hidden dragons while you wait fo r a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech saber known as the cell phone a nd attack that list of calls you need to return.)

As whole-life-o r ganizing systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun a nd therapeutic. It starts with the exho r tation to take every unaccounted-fo r scrap of paper in your wo r kstation that you can't junk, The next step is to write down every unaccounted-fo r gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant ",in-basket",

That's wh ere the processing a nd prio r itizing begin, in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, a nd sub-subterms fo r even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightfo r ward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk a nd repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is wo r th the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes o r less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time a nd mind tenfold over the long term. It's commonsense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment, Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belabo r ed, self-improver aimed at everyone fr om CEOs to soccer moms (who we all know are o r ganized than most CEOs to start with). --Timothy Murphy