Making It All Work: Winning At The Game Of Work And Business Of Life (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
I strongly recommend this book if you read the first and have been working at applying GTD for a year or more. I first tried to read this about a year after I had read the first GTD book, and put it down in disappointment. I was caught up in the fussiness of realising GTD through software (Org-Mode in this case): an easy mistake to make, given how much is written on the web from this point of view, and also just how much wrangling with messy and incomplete commitments I encountered. Coming back to this book after several more years made all the difference.There are two reasons for this. First, this book cleans up some of the thinking and terminology around the control aspects of the approach, and greatly clarifies the perspective aspects. Since, by his own admission, the author has carefully organised what might be taken to be common sense, it is unsurprising that it requires experience with the process to understand the subtleties. Second, only in this book did I begin to understand how radical a proposition this approach really is. I wish this was more forcefully argued. The most common criticism you will hear of GTD is that it is just too much micro management of lists. As I understand it now, this is almost entirely incorrect. I've liked many things about the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology since I first read Allen's first seminal work. Yet there were also aspects of it that turned me off (for example, in my opinion he has way too many lists). In a funk with my own organization schema and wanting to hit the refresh button, I picked up this tome to see if I could make a fresh start.On that point Allen did not disappoint. I really liked how he delved into the basic principles behind what most people call time management. Most people that write about this subject are simply trying to sell you on their system, so the deepest they ever go is only what is needed to explain how to work the system they want to sell to you. Allen goes further, delving into the why behind his system. He is trying not just how his system works but also why.And that is where I start to get off the train. Allen describes the principles of time management in the context of sponsoring his own GTD system, and in that respect he's no different from any of the other time gurus out there. Of course I expect him to do this because he has founded a business enterprise around his system. But that doesn't mean that I have to like everyone, Allen included, trying to sell me something everywhere I go.On the bright side (and this is how his book garnered four stars from me), Allen does discuss the principles in depth and at length, providing much food for thought to build my own personal management system. And I am playing around with some ideas that so far appear to be working well for me. I'm going to do some more playing and testing to fine tune everything. Then maybe I can write the book that I really want to read.I don't recommend that people ignore this book or pass it by. I found it quite thought provoking. At the same time I recommend that people keep an open mind and decide for themselves how to structure the system that will work best for them.
What do You think about Making It All Work: Winning At The Game Of Work And Business Of Life (2003)?
a good book, but harder to get into and more dry than GTD. But I still got a lot out of it.
—alondra23
Get yourself a copy of 'Getting things done'. No added value.
—caroline
I wish I could apply everything in this book.
—Rj0680
