More Praise for Team

In my former role as Global Head of Executive Development at Siemens I worked with Ed Lamont to train up many of my team in the GTD approach. I started to communicate with my direct reports in a consistent and structured way according to GTD, which led to an immense increase in our efficiency and a reduction in burnouts. It has quite literally changed the life of many people I know. ‘Team’ is the logical next step of GTD in a world with increasing complexity and speed where effective and healthy teams are the only way to cope with the variety and volume of incoming challenges. During the last decade we have understood how interconnected we all are, and that no individual, company or country is an isolated island. Interacting and getting things done with colleagues, friends or even in my family requires a structured systematic approach, and this book provides exactly this. It is the best, most actionable book ever written about true leadership and team effectiveness.GTD dramatically changed my life 15 years ago, and released huge amounts of positive energy. It got me out of firefighting mode and being constantly haunted by worries about unresolved issues. Once I had the system in place I was able to trust it, relax, and be much more present in my life. As an executive recruiter, I have too often seen how damaging it can be for executives and teams to get lost in complexity and information overflow. GTD allows you to cut the proverbial elephant in actionable pieces and to stay on top of pending issues in a relaxed way.

Many leadership tomes are worthy manifestos but this is an operating manual. Backed by the gold standard of acting with equanimity.

Individual effectiveness is essential, but not sufficient. Lasting results require collective effort. Teams offers deeply practical insights into the alchemy of creating collective performance that far exceeds the sum of its individual contributions.

Team - Getting Things Done with Others” is a game-changer. This book takes the proven method of planning and executing tasks efficiently at an individual level and refines and expands it on a team level. The result? A significant leap towards a high-performance culture within the team.Having personally practiced the Getting Things Done method for several years, I’ve experienced firsthand the productivity gains and high success rate of achieving targets. Now, this book promises to take us to the next level of productivity gain by amplifying these positive results on a team level.The approach outlined in this book reduces unnecessary noise and friction and paves the way for effective team collaboration. It aligns individual excellence with wider team performance and creates synergies that propel the entire team forward.If you’re looking to boost your team’s productivity and foster a high-performance culture, “Team” is a must-read. It’s more than just a book; it’s a roadmap to team success.

This book was the missing link, when I took GTD to the US Congress.”“David introduced GTD to my congressional team-this book is what we were missing a Heathy High-Performance Culture.”“I’m a big fan of David’s GTD methods, and I’ve always wanted to apply them to more complex and diverse teams-this book makes it possible.”“This book bridges the gap between making things work for yourself and making things work for your team".

The first GTD book had a transformative effect in terms of my personal efficiency and effectiveness. With “Team” I can clearly see how I can achieve the same impact for the work with my team. Huge thanks to David and Ed for writing this book. You have laid the foundation for a quantum leap in how we work with each other.

This book is a powerful contribution to the literature on team effectiveness. It contains a clear and comprehensive description of team dysfunctions and a rich set of practical tools for turning average teams into agile high performers that keep improving. The book not only extends GTD beautifully to teams, it also shows how to root out cynicism and move entire organizations toward a positive can-do mindset. The book is a must-read for anyone serious about organizational performance and evolution.

'Team’ is the logical next step for GTD. If you are on – or leading – a team that isn’t collaborating as smoothly as you’d like, this is the book for you. Its approach is refreshingly pragmatic and offers valuable insights for team members and leaders alike.

GTD offered a refreshingly straightforward approach and effective tools to transition from a paradigm of individual accountability to individual capability. Responding to needs within today's dynamic work landscape, David and Ed lay the groundwork for scaling this methodology, demonstrating how it can be effectively replicated on a larger scale. TEAMS builds on the GTD foundation, providing practical insights and powerful tools to elevate capable individuals within diverse groups, shifting focus from team accountability to team capability. It's a valuable evolution of GTD's impact on contemporary life and work.

David and Edward have crafted a guide that is essential for any organization looking to harness the collective power of their people. With decades of experience distilled into each chapter, they offer not just theories, but a pragmatic blueprint that transforms teams into efficient, cohesive units capable of mastering the complexities of the digital age. Team: Getting Things Done with Others is an indispensable resource for leaders and team members alike, aiming to create a culture of high performance and seamless workflow.

GETTING THINGS DONE changed my life. Now David Allen and Edward Lamont have applied the brilliance of GTD to the challenge of collaboration in a book that will change even more lives. TEAM delivers the fresh perspective and practical actions that can transform group work into a platform for genius.

As a very longtime GTD fan (fanatic, perhaps?), I was delighted to see David and Edward extend their insights into the rituals of great teams. Their book offers valuable insights into building strong relationships, nailing the essentials, and shifting focus for high-performance. And they provide actionable strategies for achieving success as a cohesive unit. This book should be required reading for anyone looking to build rituals that enhance team performance and accomplish goals collectively.

This book captures the fundamentals of what makes teams work effectively, or not, and weaves them together with established GTD ideas. My key take-aways: that lifting one's own performance is essential in legitimising challenge of others; that a focus on only doing things that only you can do should be hard wired into every leader's brain; and above all that high performance, sanity and decency can not only coexist in teams, but be complementary drivers of success. Its unique contribution is the way that key high-level principles are linked to granular tips and methods for actually making it happen. Ed has been responsible for substantial amounts of anything I have achieved as a leader, and this book shows me there's still so much to learn...

As a neuroscientist and psychiatrist with a strong focus on ADHD, I have been using GTD myself and with my patients for over a decade, and I find it an extremely helpful organisational system that supports the strengths and complements the weaknesses of those affected. In ‘Team’, Allen and Lamont take GTD to a new level, showing how improving team collaboration and productivity need not involve rooting through complex relational dynamics, but can be resolved through a focus on clarity in structures and standards.

It’s over a decade since I first encountered Ed Lamont and the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach developed by David Allen. At the time I was struggling to make sense of an ever-increasing workload and my sessions with Ed were transformative. They gave me a sense of agency and focus at a crucial time in my life and career. Much of that was focused on me as an individual. Yet most of my work was with colleagues. Team fills an important gap, showing how GTD can be applied to groups of people working together. This takes the co-authors’ thinking to a new level, reimagining what it means to collaborate in our post-Covid working world. Written in clear, deceptively simple language, Team’s easy style makes it feel like a personal conversation with the authors. Maxims such as ‘only do what only you can do’ crystallise the years of experience which underpin this fascinating book. Its wisdom and clarity make it essential reading for anyone who wants to develop their potential for co-operative work to the full.

Getting Things Done is a superb approach to improving personal productivity and reducing stress, so I was extremely pleased to see that David Allen and Ed Lamont have now adapted the method to declutter teamwork in a clear and forthright way. In a time of ever greater stress and burnout this is a timely and important book.

I’ve spent the past years growing my business from one shop in London to selling in multiple stores around the world. That is only possible by building a great team, and anyone who is part of a team or managing a team MUST read this book. End of. If only they taught this stuff at school.

Even an optimal GTD practice often reaches its limits at the team level, when the clarity you need is not just within yourself, but in the boundaries between yourself and others. This book offers practical solutions to this perennial challenge, so you can finally apply GTD principles beyond individual productivity, to achieve team-level mind like water.”“At long last, this book offers the final missing piece of a complete GTD practice: how to scale GTD’s impact beyond the individual level and achieve team-level mind like water.”“Even companies full of seasoned GTD practitioners often struggle to achieve team-level flow; to get there, a team needs not just individual GTD practices, but team-level practices that bring GTD principles to bear on managing the boundaries between members - the roles, expectations, and decision rights each will hold. This book adds that last missing piece of the GTD puzzle and shows you how to finally apply GTD’s perennial wisdom to optimize team-level clarity and productivity.

When two or more are gathered to get things done, first pick up this book. As a talent development leader, I've seen the transformative power of GTD for individuals. Unfortunately, their productivity and momentum often stall when working in teams. This book unlocks the power of GTD for teams with a fresh and pragmatic approach.From the opening observation that another new software platform won't save a struggling team from today's constant team churn, the authors help us face the reality of teaming challenges today. Based on years of experience, they share how teams can apply the essential GTD approach to face these challenges and succeed.I highly recommend this book to anyone who needs to get more done through teams, anyone frustrated with the old, stale approach to team leadership searching for a better way, and anyone who coaches teams for high performance.

If you regularly get things done with others, here’s your new productivity bible. In TEAM, David and Edward masterfully break down how the principles of GTD work for all team settings—whether you have a corporate, sports, or family team. At its best, working in a team feels effortless. This book helps get you to this magical place, so you can accomplish more with others while actually enjoying the process.

Team is filled with valuable insights into working with others dedicated to achieving a common purpose. While many of these are simple and commonly known, applying them in a systemic approach is invaluable. I am most excited about the potential of Ed and David’s work with college graduates. Some have been exposed to these skills and techniques in the classroom. But they struggle to relate them to the workplace. The team will be the entry point for their professional career. By applying these practices early and consistently in their career students will be able to hone these skills as they progress. This has the real opportunity to develop organizational leaders who can create the cultures we need for a just, caring, and sustainable world.

To my colleagues in medicine facing continuous tough challenges and decisions, get this book. If you are looking for a more productive , sensible and sustainable way of working together with your team, Team Getting Things Done with Others is the next book that you want to read . David Allen and Ed Lamont give us a clear, concrete and concise practices to help us engage teams to “get the job done”. We are beyond the point where a single motivated hard working individual can handle most of our problems . We need effective teams to do the work of medicine and get that best possible outcome for our patients. It builds in accountability/reliability/ integrity to keep a project moving to completion.This book specifically provides us a better way to work well together. What is more fun that working together with a coordinated and cooperative team, a common goal and the tools that you need?

Team is a survey of the top research across such disciplines as leadership, delegation, prioritization, visioning, and goal-setting, but it goes far beyond that. It’s also a crystal clear distillation of the most powerful principles Allen and Lamont have discovered working within countless organizations to transform how they work. In a world of noise and constant information overwhelm, this book shines like a beacon of hope for anyone who wants concrete tools and practices they can implement and see results from before they’re even done reading.”“David Allen and Ed Lamont have crafted a masterpiece in Team. This book is not just a guide; it’s a roadmap. In it, Allen and Lamont brilliantly deconstruct the essence of effective team dynamics in today’s information-inundated world. Team is a must-read for anyone seeking to navigate the complex landscape of 21st-century work environments. It’s a book that doesn’t just speak to managers or team members; it speaks to the heart of what makes us effective and fulfilled in our professional lives.

The world needs this book. So many books on personal productivity have glossed over the uncomfortable truth that most work is delivered with other people. So many team-building books have focused almost exclusively on the relationships, without recognizing that the whole purpose of teams is the get things done (and it is often through delivery of their goals that trust and relationships are forged). This book gets to the heart of productivity in our complex and inter-dependent world. It is a practical manual on how to get things done in teams. This is not a book to read once, and extract a few ideas. TEAM is a guidebook, outlining the step-by-step process to team effectiveness. A coherent view of how teams achieve results as a unit. My advice is that you keep this book on your desk. Use it and re-use it, until TEAM structures your day-to-day activity as a team…and get amazing things done, together.

This book is a manual for creating a culture of alignment. It’s the why, what, and how for getting your team where they want to go while staying energized. If you are a GTD aficionado for yourself, you are going to love the ending for your team.

David Allen and Ed Lamont have created the ultimate guide to thought processes and agreements for every kind of team. When COVID-19 drove our consulting clients to total remote work teams, we saw two patterns emerge. Some clients began trying to build infrastructure and protocols to support remote teams. The others moved all their meetings to Zoom and thought that was the solution. No one examined and, more importantly, altered their team agreements or thought processes around the work. This book finally provides the roadmap for both! In 2000, we saw GTD change how people do the thinking required for high productivity. It moved the decision points upfront in the process to immediately provide clarity about outcomes and what was required to generate those. In 2024, David and Ed have provided a parallel in the thought processes required for healthy, highly productive teams, again moving the decision points upfront to setting standards, purpose, and vision. Successful teams “link day-to-day decision-making to whether each decision will get them closer to fulfilling their purpose or achieving their vision.” (quote from page 151), using that as the means by which they generate their success. The best way for teams of any size to work and thrive together.Thank you. I love this book! This will be a gift to all our consulting and coaching clients!

More than ever, teams are the crucible where innovation and execution intersect to generate new value. By applying frameworks for individual productivity to teams, Allen and Lamont shine a light on the everyday mechanics that make teams healthy and high performing. “Team” reminds us that it’s not just about working harder or smarter. Drawing on extensive experience, Allen and Lamont share their wisdom to elevate essential teaming activities like defining scope and focus, planning, delegation, and prioritization for greater productivity, engagement, and success. “Team” is the “how-to” guide we’ve been missing! It offers the information, tools, and support to help make any team more effective. I especially appreciate the focus on collective ownership and action for collaborative success.

Finally – a clear, simple and practical set of tools that will help any team get better. If you want to lead your team out of overwhelm and lack of focus, read this book.

Ed Lamont and David Allen have captured the best practices for working with people to produce the best possible results. TEAM is a no-nonsense manual for doing just that, no matter what your goal is or who you’re working with to achieve it. If you’re invested in making good things happen, and need others to assist, this is a must-read.

I picked up Team, dipped in — and could hardly stop. I was punching air at the ideas on leadership, prioritisation, and nourishing a healthy team culture to generate high performance. David and Ed have somehow magically distilled what I’ve learned and valued from years of using GTD for myself and as a leader, and added more on top. If you value your energy, attention and time — and that of the people you work with — this book is a great investment.

Getting Things Done has helped millions of people make their work more effective and enjoyable. Now David Allen and Edward Lamont are taking it to the next level: truly working together in a team with the principles of GTD. Extremely realistic and practical. For everyone who feels that - with a little help - their team could do better.

Productivity has never really been a “me” thing, it’s a “we” thing. Team is a playbook for those who are tired of the same old naive tips and tricks and want to understand the governing dynamics of working well together. It cuts the Gordian knot of pointless complexity and helps you deeply focus on your most important priorities.

If GTD helped you move faster and get more done, you may have still bumped into organizational speed bumps on the way to increased productivity. David and Ed have come up with a nearly perfect application of an old African proverb: If you want go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. TEAM is the perfect recipe for going far. And enjoying the journey.

In my journey as a GTD practitioner, I have come to understand that true leadership is not just about enhancing one's own productivity; it's about uplifting the entire team. 'TEAM: Getting Things Done with Others' by David Allen and Edward Lamont resonates with this core belief. This book is a beacon, illuminating the path from the individual discipline of GTD to the collective strength of a team.As a lifelong student of leadership, I often stress the importance of simplifying complex situations to find clear, actionable solutions. 'TEAM' embodies this approach, masterfully adapting the GTD methodology to a team setting. This isn’t about just doing more; it’s about doing what’s right and effective within a team. The book showcases how GTD's transformative principles on personal productivity can be equally powerful in enhancing team communication, prioritization, and execution.A particularly insightful example from the book is the concept of “team mind sweep.” This strategy, detailed in chapter four, focuses on decluttering the team's mental space. It involves a structured process where team members collaboratively identify and categorize tasks and ideas that are occupying their mental space. This collective approach not only helps in aligning team objectives but also in reducing the cognitive load on individual members. The resulting clarity and focus are akin to orchestrating a symphony from individual notes – each member's contribution becomes more meaningful when aligned with the team's overall purpose.What truly sets 'TEAM' apart is its practicality. It’s not just theoretical musings; it's a practical toolkit for real-world application. The book extends the GTD philosophy from managing individual tasks to achieving collective goals. It provides the necessary tools and frameworks to establish a shared language of productivity, fostering an environment of clarity and purpose, often a challenging feat in team settings.Through my own experiences, I've seen how GTD principles have been transformative on a personal level. 'TEAM: Getting Things Done with Others' extends these principles into the realm of team dynamics that is nothing short of groundbreaking. This book is a lighthouse for anyone navigating the often-turbulent seas of team collaboration, guiding you towards a smarter, more cohesive work environment.Remember, the essence of effective leadership is not just about working harder; it's about working smarter, together. 'TEAM' is not just a book; it's a guide book for collaborative success, steering us towards achieving more as a collective than we ever could alone. It's an essential read for anyone committed to elevating team performance to the heights of excellence.

The trajectory of my professional and personal life took a transformative turn in 1986 when I had the privilege of attending a course led by David Allen on accelerated performance. The content wasn't just captivating; it was a catalyst for profound change. Embracing the principles of Getting Things Done, I found myself at the helm of some of the most iconic luxury and lifestyle hotels in the USA and Europe, reshaping the industry and surpassing conventional metrics.In the realm of high-performing teams, David's wisdom proved instrumental. His insights echo in my experiences, resonating with the core belief that even the most compelling vision is destined for failure without systems that hold individuals accountable. Corporate agility is not an abstract concept, but a tangible reality rooted in a culture of personal responsibility at every level.The intricate dynamics of hotels, with their myriad moving parts, serve as a crucible for potential breakdowns. In a role as meticulous as a housekeeper's, even a single hair left in a room can trigger a brand disaster. It is here that the authors, in their book on Teams: Getting Things Done, commendably emphasize the necessity of fostering "healthy" high-performance teams.Teams teetering on overwhelm due to the absence of systems to detect breakdowns early and ensure accountability risk churning talent, disappointing customers, and falling short of their potential. Bravo, gentlemen, for shining a spotlight on the imperative need for teams that operate seamlessly, preventing disruptions and delivering excellence.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen revolutionized individual productivity - and now, he and Edward Lamont show us how to transform teams and organizations. This is a masterful guide for any team striving to navigate the complexities of collaboration in today's fast-paced world.

"Team: Getting Things Done with Others" builds on the revolutionary principles of "Getting Things Done" to address the crucial aspect of team dynamics in today's ever-evolving workplace. It provides a transformative approach to collaboration and is packed with case studies from globally successful companies. It’s a roadmap to effective communication, efficient execution, and a vital addition for groups of any size in the post-pandemic world.

Close your eyes and visualize a team. Chances are you see a group of people—maybe in a football uniform, maybe in jeans and t-shirts, maybe in lab coats—standing or sitting together. They are proximate, on a collaborative quest to create something, win something, maybe just fulfill a goal together. But they are in one another’s presence and can communicate, observe one another’s efforts, correcting, self-correcting, riffing and innovating as their relationships and communication with one another evolves.Not my team. My team is completely dispersed over the globe: from Paris to Vancouver, Canada; Ojai, California to Bath, Maine. We have no physical ‘corporate office'. We gather several times each year to have a more traditional ’team’ experience but it is imperative we reimagine and reinvent our quest to innovate in service of our mission (in our case financial readiness for young children) with tools and ways of ‘getting things done’ that didn’t exist a few years ago. I was an early adopter of David Allen's Getting Things Done. Full disclosure, my first full introduction was a Christmas gift, many years ago. It was revelatory. And that process has been the foundation of my own work habits these many years. I am not a disciplined practitioner. But success, excellence, and orderly operations are powerful aspirations, and I am comforted when, knowing I’ve strayed too far from even the sight of the box, the GTD template returns to my mind's eye and I have a procedure for getting things done that I can snap into place immediately. The trick has been to convince my colleagues that this is a worthy tool for us all. Enter GTD: Getting Things Done With Others. Change is hard—and evolution of our work sites, work habits, and work disciplines has been messy to say the least: full time remote, PT remote, Slack, teams, Zoom—holy moly. There are days I LONG for the order of the assembly line! But as we learn to work in new ways, the inventors of our new tools are to be heralded. David as been delivering tools that facilitate productivity and creative work for a very long time; and now he has done it again, giving us the new hammer and nails to GTD together; not just in the lonely chambers our home offices, skinny cubicles, and noisy intermittent gatherings.

Most everything that gets done in the world is done by humans collaborating. You'd think this would be an important topic, the subject of courses in high school, for example. But instead we're usually left to sort things out on our own, often bumbling or getting stuck. How fortunate that David and Ed have drawn on their deep experience (and the well-known GTD models David developed) to bring useful wisdom about collaboration to the world. Read this book — with your team.

This book is very timely as the world of work is changing, but the underlying principles and practices of human collaboration are just as important as they have ever been. It’s been said that nothing of great significance has ever been accomplished by a single person, acting alone. ‘Team’ takes an incredible methodology and creates the opportunity to have its impact grow exponentially in your personal and professional life.

In Team, David and Edward masterfully break down how the principles of GTD work for all team settings – whether you have a corporate, sports or family team. At its best, working in a team feels effortless. This book helps get you to this magical place, so you can accomplish more with others while actually enjoying the process.

It seems very hard for just a couple of sentences to do justice to the brilliance of this book. Team, Getting Things Done with Others might be as instrumental to the growth and success of teams all-around the globe, as Peter Drucker was to modern management. Team lays out a clear and simple approach to brilliantly bring teams together to achieve more with less. In my 40 years of growing successful companies, I have never seen anything like it. It is almost criminal to think of the unfair competitive advantage those who read and implement this book will have.

David Allen and Edward Lamont tap into their vast experience to reveal the core principles that make teams, not just individuals, get things done. They show you how to cut through the noise, align your group's efforts, and foster a remarkably high-performing team. With their guidance, you'll transform your team into a focused force, poised to achieve its objectives with less stress and more success.

David and Ed have brilliantly nailed what works and what doesn’t in the tricky, complicated world of working with others to get the right things done.

A roadmap to effective communication, efficient execution and a vital addition for groups of any size in the post-pandemic world.

If you’re invested in making good things happen, and need others to assist, this is a must-read.

In a time of ever greater stress and burnout, this is a timely and important book.

The world needs this book . . . This is not a book to read once, and extract a few ideas. Team is a guidebook, outlining the step-by-step process to team effectiveness. My advice is that you keep this book on your desk. Use it and re-use it, until Team structures your day-to- day activity as a team . . . and get amazing things done, together.

This is a masterful guide for any team striving to navigate the complexities of collaboration in today’s fast-paced world.