From Publishers Weekly
Manage apathy. Stay on top of tea making. Maximize distraction. Yes, Not Getting Things Done offers a complete system of avoidance and procrastination to free your mind to focus on what's really importan: absolutely nothing.

As whole-life-organizing systems go, McAllen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation and build it into a huge pile, the shape of Devil's Tower in Close Encounters.

The next step is to imagine what you could do if only you got your shit together followed by a braindumping a list of all the things you resent about your more successful friends. Then there's a step-by-step tutorial for finding the most mind-numbing cookery program on cable to watch.

Also of value is McAllen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, forget doing that, open up a web browser and read the BBC news homepage instead. It's amazing how this simple technique frees up your time and mind a thousandfold over the long term.

McAllen's system is rife is with fancy terms. A selection of "power-words" to help you disfocus, for example ("Avoid", "Ignore", "Give up on", "Throw over your shoulder") are part of his somewhat forced 'Six Level Model of Indolence'.

McAllen excels at dispensing such wisdom but overall this is a useful bible for stress-free non-productivity aimed everyone from slackers, the idle rich and those "working from home" for the day.

This reviewer particularly liked a detailed round-up of the best knots for a dressing gown belt and also the large section on how to occupy every spare second of your day managing RSS feeds and BitTorrent downloads.

But thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on this straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book.

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