Title: Getting Things Done
Author: David Allen
Topics: Time Management
You should read if: you have too much to do and feel like you are losing track of important tasks.
Description: I first heard about David Allen from an engineer I worked with who started carrying around a short stack of index cards in a home made duct tape wallet. When I asked him what it was and he explained that it’s his analog PDA, and referred me to this book. In the book, Mr. Allen lays out a framework for managing a hectic life, and freeing your mind from task management to allow your creativity to help solve problems. By capturing tasks on paper and getting them our of your head, processing them into projects, and knowing what the next step required to advance in each project, a practitioner of Mr. Allen’s Getting Things Done, or GTD, framework can be more more effective, and much less stressed. His two following books Making It All Work and Ready for Anything are great follow ups once you get the basic framework down, which took me about a year… This book is a must read for product managers.