Getting Things Done

David Allen published his productivity methodology in 2001 and it became the foundational text of the knowledge-worker productivity movement, with over 1.5 million copies sold and a devoted global community known as GTD practitioners. Its core contribution — the two-minute rule, the concept of "next actions," and the idea of the mind as a processor rather than a storage device — gave people a systematic way to handle cognitive overload that predated and arguably predicted the productivity crisis of the smartphone era. Time magazine named it one of the most important self-help books of the decade.