In 1968 David Allen was in graduate school at Berkeley studying American intellectual history. He was reading about people who were enlightened, and he decided he wanted that for himself, so he dropped out. He had no career, no plan, and rent coming due every month.
What he wanted was simple. He wanted to keep exploring himself without giving up the life he liked living.
The hard part was that none of that exploring was paying his bills. He was diving deep with spiritual teachers, meditation, and martial arts, and he came out of it with a black belt in karate and no source of income. He had always assumed he would end up teaching intellectual history in a university, and he imagined himself with a pipe, a dog at his feet, and a grand fireplace. He also had no interest in the version of the path where you give everything away and go sit in a cave. In his words, he likes good Chardonnay and good-looking women.
So I said, okay, how do I maintain a life and still keep this personal exploration game going?
That question is the whole origin story. He didn’t start out with the intention of creating a methodology. He was funding deeper inquiry. So he asked around, found a friend who needed help organizing his office, and was able to make a huge difference for him. Then he got bored with that project and moved on to finding another similar job. Soon after, he learned that people who do that for a living are called “consultants”, and that they actually can get paid quite well.
What came next is David sharing the most people know in some form, if they’ve heard an interview or read his story before. A senior manager sat in one of his small workshops and asked him to build a training for his whole company, which became a pilot program for a thousand executives and managers at Lockheed in 1983 and 1984. He spent the next two or three decades training and coaching within organizations, thousands of hours in it, sitting desk-side with some of the busiest people on the planet. Eventually his advisors told him to write a book about it, so his first action was to order three books about how to write a book. He committed in 1997 and it took four years to get it done. He wrote it while working inside Goldman Sachs, where the method spread among the employees, and that was his proof it would hold up anywhere. The first weekend the book was out, a woman in Philadelphia picked it up in a Barnes & Noble, implemented the system over a weekend, and shared with David that it changed her life. That was when he understood that his system was scalable and could support people without him needing to be in the room sharing it. By his count Getting Things Done has now sold three million copies in over thirty languages.
So we had him on Sacred Business Stories to trace the arc, and there was a part of the story I was initially surprised by, but really expanded my heart.
David is an ordained minister in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. Years ago he met his spiritual coach, a man named John-Roger, and stayed close to him trying to learn everything he knew, which he says he never got to the end of. What he learned there was how to send the light.
I’m sending the light to you guys. I’m doing that right now. So I’m meditating essentially all the time.
He said that in the middle of the interview, casually, the way you would mention the weather. He described spending afternoons in Amsterdam watching people get on and off the tram and sending light to all of them. He reads the New York Times and The Guardian every morning and sends light to every headline as he goes. He has no idea how much effect that has out in the world. But he is clear about the effect it has on him.
That’s a better thing to think about than to fret about it, worry about it, cry about it, complain about it.
None of this is in the book. I told him I had never heard him speak about any of it anywhere, and when I thanked him for going there, he answered with gratitude for having built a career that improves conditions for anyone who uses any part of it. The living it earned him is what gives him room to focus on the subtler stuff.
Two moments stood out.
The first came from a question in the chat. Someone asked whether letting go is the ultimate purpose of Getting Things Done.
Letting go is the ultimate purpose of life. Control is the biggest human addiction.
Coming from the man who built the world’s best known system for staying on top of everything, that is worth reflecting on. He shared that you cannot let go of something you haven’t look at directly first, and with honesty. Write it down, decide what you want to do about it, park it somewhere you trust that you can come back to, and your mind will stop chewing on it at three in the morning.
The second was the being and doing question, which Carolina and I both kept returning to.
It’s a false dichotomy. It really is. In order to really do, you need to be. In order to really be, you also really need to do.
He answered it with his own observations instead of speaking from theory. The people he has known across eighty years who most represent being are, in his description, highly productive and highly creative people who never stop making things. Then he went further and said everybody is already as spiritual as they ever need to be, and the only work left is recognizing it.
If you’re not sure what to do, clean a drawer.
Plenty of people we encounter with our work treat structure as the enemy at first. Lists feel like cages. Creating systems feels like the opposite of creative freedom. David lives life the other way around and is quick to say so. He calls himself a freedom-loving guy who plans as little as he can get away with, and he says people who meet him are surprised he isn’t buttoned down and corporate.
There are a whole lot of things I do that are not on any of my lists. But I have the freedom to do that because of my list. So I know what I’m not doing.
His list does not dictate his day. It lets him walk away from his day and go have a beer or walk the dog with nothing nagging at him once he shuts down. Which flips the belief a lot of people carry into their work, that getting organized costs you your spontaneity. In his experience it creates the space for it.
Then he spoke to the pattern underneath all of it. He said your world comes down to two things, completion and creation, and that he never invented the method, so much as recognized what people were already doing. Then he added the part that stung a little.
In our culture, most people have created a lot more than they have completed.
I see a version of that constantly with folks we encounter with our work. Five offers, four websites, a course that’s most of the way built, a newsletter that was kept up for two months before falling off. In my opinion, one of it comes from laziness. It comes from people who are genuinely good at what they do and keep starting new things because starting is the part that feels like progress. David’s answer is unglamorous. Go finish something small and watch what it does for you, and frees up in your life.
Getting Things Done was one of the first things I read during my tech years that gave me any relief from the chaos of a workday, and it helped me create the conditions to reflect and ask the questions about what I truly wanted. And that is a question I’ve kept asking that helped to set up the last decade of my work.
The new close, so you can read it without opening the file:
Near the end he described who this work actually reaches. The people most drawn to it are the ones who need it least, already organized and already competent, just hitting a capacity issue. The people in real trouble, he said, don’t think they need it at all.
Most people are in their comfort zone with their ambient anxiety, so they think they’re fine with what they’re doing.
Ambient anxiety is his term for the low hum of knowing there’s something you should be handling without being able to name what it is. He says people get addicted to it.
A lot of the people Carolina and I talk to live in that hum and would never use that word for it. They’re in motion. They’re good at the actual craft. And somewhere along the way they decided that structure is a threat to their essence, that lists and systems are in opposition with creativity and spontaneity that they bring to their work.
So the thing that would free them up the most is the one thing they often have the most resistance to looking at.
If that’s you, I invite you to take a closer look at this with the Harmony Map, a free assessment that shows you the energy behind what you’re doing and where your resistance actually lives.
You can find David writing at davidallen.substack.com and at gettingthingsdone.com.
Watch the full replay. I promise you, the last fifteen minutes are the part you won’t hear anywhere else.
This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on July 29th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.
