Three years ago, Kevin Wilde overhauled his life in an effort to be more organised. As vice-president of General Mills, the US food manufacturer, he was already successful. But as its chief learning officer, he was sure he could learn some new tricks about personal productivity. So he called in David Allen, author of the best-selling book Getting Things Done (GTD).
Mr Allen's approach to personal organisation is rigorous, to say the least. It involves gathering every single unfinished task or "open loop" in your life - from implementing a new policy across your company to fixing a leaking tap at home - into a regimented system of to-do lists so that they no longer weigh on your mind.
Initially, this means walking round your office and house, picking up every scrap of paper, business card, receipt and Post-it note - anything that represents an open loop - and putting it into a huge box marked "in".
Processing all this stuff takes the average person two full days. But, Mr Allen says, it is absolutely necessary: your goal should be to create a comprehensive list of actions and projects (when two actions or more are needed) that can be deferred, delegated or done personally. In this way, you have a trusted system to take the strain of all your commitments. "If it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear."
To maintain the system, you must review your commitments and process any new ones you have gathered on a regular - preferably weekly - basis.
Mr Wilde says the regime has had a dramatic impact on his work style and wellbeing. He singles out two of Mr Allen's insights for particular praise: "First, putting everything in one place and managing off a master list of tasks versus having to look at old e-mails, file folders and paper notes to find my commitments. Second, doing the weekly review of my calendar - all the commitments, projects and goals."
He is not the only one to have benefited from Mr Allen's ideas. Since the book was first published in 2001, tens of thousands of GTDfans have used websites, forums and chat-rooms to exchange advice, anecdotes and software recommendations.
The "cult of GTD" is still growing and at the heart of this loose community is 43folders.com, published by Merlin Mann, a San Francisco-based website project manager and designer. GTDand similar techniques, he explains, were initially most popular with IT workers.
"Geeks are like coalmine canaries," he says. "They encounter problems before other people. They got spam before the rest of us knew what it meant, for example. And being aware of ways to improve what you're doing is a built-in practice in programming."
Increasingly, Mr Mann says, the techniques are being embraced by other types of worker. "I think there was an immediate resonance with writers, designers and other creatives - anyone with a job involving lots of decisions and without hard walls between their different roles."
So could such systems be adopted as policies to make entire companies more productive? Mr Wilde thinks so. "We've had more than 2,000 employees GTD'd in one form or another, from top executives to entry-level employees." General Mills has modified and extended the methodology to "better adapt to our culture" and now offers GTDtraining to all 27,000 staff. The results, he says, have been impressive - and measurable.
"Various measurements are used, depending on the programme and initiative. Some track return on investment, some employee satisfaction, some 'alignment to strategy'."
A big benefit of widespread use of GTD, he adds, is that when staff switch jobs they leave their successor with comprehensive information about the status of all their work.
Mr Mann highlights how GTDencourages you to consider what your "next action" is whenever you are outlining a project, finishing a period of work or coming to the end of a meeting. "When people learn the 'next-action habit' they get a lot more done every day."
There is evidence to suggest that many "knowledge workers" would benefit from "personal productivity improvement" training - for example in the results of the Microsoft Office personal productivity challenge, published in 2005. Respondents to this survey of 38,000 people in 200 countries said that, although they worked 45 hours a week on average, 17 hours were "unproductive". Similarly, they spent 5.6 hours in meetings, but 69 per cent said they felt those meetings were not productive. The most common "productivity pitfalls" identified by the survey included ineffective meetings, unclear objectives, unclear priorities and procrastination - all targeted specifically by GTD. Only 34 per cent of respondents said they were using "proven scheduling tools and techniques" to help them accomplish tasks.
For knowledge workers, the tools of personal organisation include software - hence Microsoft's interest in commissioning such a survey. Indeed 55 per cent of respondents said they related productivity directly to their software.
Mr Allen's website sells literature and software utilities that help users of common applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes to implement GTD. These products are targeted primarily at PC users, but it is users of Apple Macintosh computers who have embraced GTDmost fervently. A huge number of applications have been written for Macs by members of the GTDmovement.
"Apple's whole design ethos is one of elegance," Mr Allen says when asked why Mac users should be particularly enthusiastic about GTD."They have a kind of zen approach, and the same is true of our methodology."
Among diehard GTDconverts, talk of eastern philosophies governing the in-tray is not unusual. Indeed, many report that by "capturing" all the unresolved tasks in their lives in a watertight system, they achieve an almost transcendental state in which dealing with everyday problems becomes effortless and dealing with crises considerably easier.
As Mr Allen says, by observing a few simple rules of information management, it really is possible to have a "mind like water", the term karate experts use to describe a state of perfect readiness.
