You Need to Get to Work!

On a recent Thursday, hundreds of similarly time-stressed folks gathered in a Manhattan hotel ballroom. Each had paid $595 to hear David Allen tell them how to do that. Allen's basic theory is that too many people are using their brain as a filing cabinet, which leads to deep anxiety that something will fall through the cracks. Instead, he advocates downloading these "open loops" onto a giant to-do list. Those to-dos are then carefully grouped by project and by context (actions you can do on the telephone or via e-mail). When you're hit by new information during the day—ane-mail, say—decide whether you can deal with it in two minutes or less; if not, file it away in an "action" folder to process later. Allen, a black belt in karate who's spent more than 20 years perfecting what he calls "the martial art of work," says the goal of his "Getting Things Done" movement—followers call it GTD—isn't just becoming superproductive. It's also about stress reduction. "A lot of the promise of GTD is that it's possible to have nothing on your mind," he says.

Allen may be the hot productivity preacher of the moment, but he's not the only one. Arguably the industry's biggest corporate player over the last decade is Franklin Covey Co., the Utah-based company cofounded by Stephen Covey. The company offers a broad range of seminars and one-on-one coaching, and sells fancy day planners in 89 retail stores; revenue last year totaled $279 million. While much of the gurus' advice overlaps, there are subtle philosophical differences. Allen's adherents work their to-do lists, and Covey's system focuses more on daily schedules and setting priorities. "We don't try to help you get it all done—we teach you how to get the most important things done," says Gordon Wilson, a Franklin Covey senior vice president.

Alongside those two stalwarts, new gurus are ascending. In the past several years New York City-based organizer Julie Morgenstern has gained prominence, through her frequent TV appearances and her book "Never Check E-mail in the Morning." Last fall she signed a partnership with Covey's organization; today Franklin Covey sells her gear, much of it stylish day planners aimed at women. When it comes to time management, Morgenstern's big innovation is that instead of just listing to-do items, she suggests estimating the time each one will take, to allow you to better gauge how much you can really accomplish in a day. She says the most important skill is answering the question "How long will it take?" and then "learning to accurately and honestly estimate it in advance."

Spending time among people who've discovered these systems can feel a bit like mingling with religious converts. There's no shortage of people who say these principles have changed their lives. Boston executive coach Alisa Cohn discovered Allen's teachings two years ago. Today she uses an electronic label-maker to keep meticulous files and updates her to-do list daily. "I found it a profound way to structure the way I get things done," she says. "My mind is much more rested than it used to be." As with diets, everyone cheats a little: Cohn's desk still isn't clear, and her e-mail in box isn't completely empty. But her to-do list, including the long-term "Someday/Maybe" category of far-off notions, is just about perfect.

Even so, the mess-for-success advocates like Abrahamson and Freedman say that turning your life over to any "system" has a downside. Abrahamson, a professor at the Columbia business school, believes people freshly enamored with time management can become as obsessive as new users of Quicken personal-finance software, who begin tracking the cost of every pack of chewing gum they buy. Abrahamson believes today's hot productivity schemes may prove as short-lived as Total Quality Management or Six Sigma, yesterday's management fads. "You find people who will say, 'This is like the invention of fire!' and then a year or two later it's replaced by something else," he says.

Not surprisingly, "A Perfect Mess" has created a loud negative buzz in professional-organizer circles. "He's made it seem like we're all a bunch of neatniks, running out to clean up people's messes and tell them what bad people they are," says Barry Izsak, president of the National Association of Professional Organizers. In fact, the business is less focused on physical messiness than it used to be. Ten years ago Izsak, an organizing consultant in Austin, Texas, spent most days helping homeowners declutter living spaces and create residential storage systems. Today he spends 70 percent of his time in offices, helping workers manage theire-mail and better understand the difference between feeling busy and being productive. He says he's typical of the industry's shift from residential to business organizing. Last year several dozen organizers formed a new group, the Network for Productivity Excellence, to better reflect their business-oriented practices. It's a shift partly driven by economics, says NPE cofounder Chris Crouch, since offering training classes for corporations is much more lucrative than doing by-the-hour consulting for people with ill-kept garages.