This is my first blog post about a system of life and time management that I stumbled across a few years back. I had been an advocate of the Stephen Covey approach which helped me identify my mission in life, live it through my roles by creating specific goals for each role and then schedule activities in my week to help live out each goal. That approach is contained in two key books by Stephen Covey (you can order then through Amazon.com or your local book store): The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and First Things First.

Getting Things Done (or GTD as it is widely called) is an approach to action management that was created by David Allen – the author of three book on the subject: Getting Things Done, Read for Anything and Making It All Work.

This approach has helped me go beyond the top down approach advocated by Stephen Covey (ie. you start with your mission, identify your roles, then your goals and finally schedule your activities). While there is still merit in this approach, David Allen has introduced a bottom up approach – it is all about handling commitments and demands on your time and energy as they arise. It leads to higher levels – as he ends up talking about not just next actions and projects but also responsibilities, objectives, vision and values.

My website contains a two part presentation that I recently shared with the 60 leaders at our local church. Take a look at the Productivity page on the Youth Ministry Resourcer website and the first four downloads on the page will give you the presentation and handouts for each session. It is explores both the top-down (Covey) and bottom-up (Allen) approaches that I have just described.

David Allen has a website with plenty of free items as well as a newsletter that you can subscribe to. Take a look at: http://www.davidco.com/

In the coming posts I will describe the tools and strategies that I use to stay focussed and in control of time and life.