How often have you sat at your desk, piles of folders stacked around you and dozens of unopened e-mails lurking in your inbox, and felt like hiding in a bathroom stall or sprinting out of the office because you literally don’t know where to begin with all the work you have to do?

Sooner or later most people suffer a bout of work paralysis. This causes people to feel anxious and helpless and often leads to a nasty case of procrastination.

Over the last 20 years David Allen has worked with over a million professionals in hundreds of organizations worldwide, including many Fortune 500 companies and U.S. Government agencies, to help them tackle the issue of getting things done. He is THE productivity guru. He is the author of two best-selling books: Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity and Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life.

David Allen can help YOU manage your work flow and get things done.

According to Allen, there are five discrete stages we all need to go though as we deal with our work (regardless of the setting): We 1) COLLECT things that command our attention; 2) PROCESS what they mean and what to do about them; and 3) ORGANIZE the results, which we 4) REVIEW as options for what we choose to 5) DO.

The majority of us can stand to significantly improve our handling of each one of the five stages.

The quality of our work flow is as good as the weakest link in the five-stage chain. Things go sideways when part of the process breaks down. For example, some people might be superb at collecting things, but fail to process or decide what action to take. All links must be integrated together and supported with consistent standards. Many people get stuck because they try to do all five phases at once, which causes a meltdown.

1. Collect. In the first stage, you need to collect all incoming items into ‘containers’ that hold these items until you have a few moments to decide what they are and what, if anything, you’re going to do about them. There are various collection tools out there – both high-tech and low-tech – that you can use: a physical in-basket, e-mail, electronic note-taking devices, etc. To ensure this phase is working properly, you need to test it against three requirements: 1) Is every open loop in your collection system and out of your head?; 2) Do you have as few collection containers as you can away with?; and 3) Do you empty your containers on a regular basis?
2. Process. In this stage, you need to evaluate every item that lands in each of your containers. When something lands in one of your containers, you first need to figure out what it is. The next question is to find out whether or not it is actionable. The answer is either yes or no. If ‘yes’, you need to determine 1) what ‘project’ or outcome have you committed to?; and 2) what’s the next action required?
3. Organize. After you’ve processed everything, you need to categorize and file the items. For non-actionable items, Allen suggests that categories include trash, incubation tools and reference storage. For actionable items, you will need a list of projects, storage or files for project plans and materials, a calendar, a list of reminders of next actions, and a list of reminders of things you’re waiting for. Allen also points out that all these organizational categories need to be contained in some form.
4. Review. You need to be able to review the whole picture of your life and work at appropriate interval and levels. Normally, this should be done on a weekly basis. This is an opportunity for you to scan all the defined actions and options in front of you, thus increasing the efficacy of the choices you make about what you’re doing at any point in time. It also gives you a change to ensure that your mind is clear and that all the loose strands of the past few weeks have been collected, processes and organized.
5. Do. The fundamental purpose of this workflow management process is to facilitate good choices about what you’re doing at any point in time. Now it’s time to rely more on your intelligence, practical thinking and intuition. If you’ve diligently collected, processed, organized, and reviewed all your current commitments, chances are you have a pretty solid idea of what you should be working on at any given time.

Listen to a talk by David Allen on GETTING THINGS DONE for Google.