How David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ Made Me a More Productive Social Media Marketer

Effective social media marketing often requires one to manage multiple accounts. For marketing professionals, this could mean having to juggle several different accounts, sometimes with competing priorities and deadlines. If you’re feeling the stress, I am here to help you regain sanity. It all comes from two very simple principles written in a book long before social media was a thing.

Productivity consultant David Allen should be heralded as an oracle for his book Getting Things Done, an ingenious method for time management and productivity. Why such high praise? In my opinion, his book, written in 2001, is much more valuable in today’s world than it ever could have been at time of publishing.

These are the two principles from Getting Things Done, better known as GTD, that make it the best social media marketing book out there.

1) Create your own inbox.

You need master catch-alls in which to collect anything and everything that comes into your life. Email was designed this way because it is how our brains work most efficiently. Everything comes into one central place, allowing us to effectively process that information and make an intuitive decision about what to do with it next.

What does this have to do with social media marketing? It is a fantastic principle for processing the waves of information that need to be shared and engaged with.

How to create your own inbox:

The book tells you to create your own physical inbox for paper notes, physical mail, bills to be paid, or any other “stuff” that you don’t know what to do with yet. Unfortunately, this would be an impossibly inefficient system for our purposes. Instead, I use Hootsuite, a social media management tool.

With this tool, I can create streams from all of my social media channels that show me, at a glance, any incoming posts that I can act upon, any mentions or responses to my content, as well as selected keyword searches I choose to monitor. Additionally, I can quickly add to or rearrange my scheduled posts without changing the view.

What about information that isn’t from social media, but has relevance for later use?

If I see something that I may want to use for a post that I am writing, I use the Evernote Web Clipper to save it for later. This is great if I’m working on something else, but don’t want to lose focus. It also keeps me from having to remember something for later, which leads me to my second point…

2) Don’t keep anything in your head.

Ever. Just don’t do it. Our brains weren’t meant to retain all of the information we are inundated with on a daily basis, especially in the social media world. In fact, did you know that Albert Einstein didn’t have his own number memorized? He said it was because he didn’t want to waste space in his head when it was right there in the phone book.

David Allen says, “The mind is for having ideas, not holding them”. Einstein and I couldn’t agree more.

So, what do you do when you find something popping into your head that you feel is important? Well, this brings me back to Evernote. If I have an idea, I quickly jot it down and save it to a Notebook labeled, you guessed it — “Inbox”. This way, when the time comes to recall the info, I know where to find it.

So when you have ideas, or your client sends down something vitally important that needs to go into the social media calendar, write it down, and then come back to it when the time is right. Free up the space in your mind so you can first finish the task at hand.

These skills are extremely valuable in the high pressure world of social media marketing and will only become more valuable in 2016 and beyond. If you haven’t read Getting Things Done in its entirety, I highly recommend adding it to your list.