The David Allen Company

The David Allen Company is the organization presided over by David Allen, whose consulting and coaching practice supplies the professional background and accumulated examples behind Getting Things Done. The company’s work connects individual productivity methods to a wider organizational problem: knowledge work generates shifting projects, dense communication, and more commitments than any one person can complete, making reliable capture and renegotiation essential.

Organization and Professional Work

David Allen is the company’s president and has more than twenty years of experience as a management consultant and executive coach. His work has included keynote speaking and facilitation for organizations such as New York Life, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, L.L. Bean, and the U.S. Navy, as well as workshops for individuals and organizations across the country.

The book describes Allen’s practice as private productivity coaching and seminars, conducted alone and in small partnerships. He and his colleagues had coached more than a thousand individuals, trained hundreds of thousands of professionals, and delivered many hundreds of public seminars. Allen identifies this experience as the source of the book’s practical examples, placing the company’s work not merely in the background of the system but among the settings in which its procedures were tested and taught.

The company’s stated professional context also includes a public profile: Allen’s work had been featured in major publications, and Getting Things Done had appeared in twelve foreign countries. These details frame the organization as the institutional base of a method circulated through consulting, training, and publication.

The Work the Method Addresses

The book situates the company’s approach within a changing economy of knowledge work. Earlier forms of work, such as plowing fields, packing boxes, or milking cows, made tasks and completion visible. Many contemporary projects have no comparable edges: a conference, training program, compensation structure, essay, or reorganization could almost always be improved further, while potentially relevant information is effectively limitless and readily available on the Web.

This lack of boundaries also expands work beyond individual office silos. Organizational outcomes increasingly depend on communication, cooperation, and engagement across divisions, bringing employees into contact with copied emails and ad hoc committees as well as their own responsibilities. At the same time, organizational goals, products, partners, customers, markets, technologies, and ownership can change, reshaping structures, roles, and responsibilities. Professionals may also move between careers and continue pursuing development rather than remain in one stable job description.

Allen’s diagnosis is that people receive large volumes of external information and communication while generating a similarly large flow of ideas and agreements internally, without being adequately equipped to manage those commitments. The missing element, as the book defines it, is a coherent system of behaviors and tools that works at the actual scale of knowledge work: it must connect big-picture outcomes to small open details, handle multiple levels of priority, manage hundreds of daily inputs, and save more time and effort than it takes to maintain.

From Individual Capture to Shared Reliability

The method starts from a cognitive constraint. The book compares short-term memory to a computer’s RAM: it holds incomplete, undecided, and unorganized matters, but has limited capacity. Conscious attention is a focusing tool rather than a dependable storage place; when unresolved items remain in memory, they compete for attention and can interrupt concentration. Recording an open matter in a trusted place, with a plan to review it, transfers it into an objective system rather than leaving it to recur as worry.

External capture also supports thinking, not only remembering. The book discusses brainstorming practices such as mind mapping, in which a central idea gathers associated thoughts, and emphasizes capturing an idea when it arises so it need not be generated again from scratch. Its account of distributed cognition describes how reviewable external formats can reflect thoughts back to their user and prompt further ideas. Allen traces this practical lesson to a high-school English teacher who told him to put notes and quotations on separate three-by-five cards, spread them out, and use the arrangement to see a structure and identify what was missing.

The same principle applies to organizational communication. Allen argues that a request or relevant information sent by voicemail, email, conversation, or written note must enter the recipient’s system, be processed and organized, and become available for review as a possible action. If that person reliably manages only one medium, the sender is forced to use that medium alone; the resulting bottleneck can impede the whole effort. An organization’s system is only as strong as its weakest link, and the book identifies a key person’s dulled responsiveness to communications as a possible point of failure.

Tools, Agreements, and Organizational Culture

The company’s approach does not require a single prescribed technology. The book advises choosing organizing tools that people will actually use: lists may be kept on paper, in notebooks or planners, or in digital task systems. The relevant capabilities are creating a list quickly and reviewing it readily and regularly; the medium should suit the user’s information, mobility, and working habits. Allen also notes that enjoyment can help sustain use, recalling that he sometimes planned and updated his own system on a Palm organizer while waiting for dinner in a restaurant.

Practical filing details reinforce the emphasis on reducing friction. Where workers must use hanging-file cabinets, Allen recommends labeling the files rather than the hangers so folders can be carried to meetings or while traveling. A separate folder for each hanger keeps drawers visually orderly, and a supply of plain hangers and new folders at the front of the first drawer makes it possible to create files quickly. The underlying concern is operational: if filing takes too long in the pressure of real work, people will stack papers instead.

Personal systems cannot simply be legislated, the book cautions, but organizations can hold people accountable for outcomes and for tracking and managing incoming work. They can also make it acceptable to have more to do than can be completed and safe to renegotiate agreements about what will not be done. That ongoing negotiation depends on reliable collection: people cannot renegotiate commitments they no longer remember, or agreements with others that they have lost track of. When a group adopts a complete collection standard, it may not guarantee that the group is pursuing the right goal or even sailing on the right ship, but it can help the group operate with less wasted effort in the direction it has chosen.