David Allen

David Allen is a productivity consultant and the creator of Getting Things Done, a method known as GTD. He grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he acted and won a state debate championship. He studied at New College in Sarasota, Florida, and did graduate work in American history at the University of California, Berkeley.

His path to the work was not direct. After graduate school he used heroin and spent a short time in an institution. He says he held 35 different jobs before age 35. In the 1980s he began to consult on productivity for companies, starting with Lockheed, and he later built the David Allen Company to teach his method.

Getting Things Done (2001) argues that most stress comes from open loops: commitments a person has made but has not tracked. The fix is a trusted external system. Capture everything, decide the next physical action, organize by context and review the whole system each week. A revised edition appeared in 2015, after Ready for Anything and Making It All Work. Allen moved to Amsterdam in 2014.