Back in 2001, while I was a senior at Yale, I picked up a hardcover copy of a new book called Getting Things Done. And it changed my life. For the first time, I went from a lose-track-of-everything mess to the kind of guy who owns a label-maker.

Ever since, Getting Things Done has served me very well. In particular, I’ve loved its emphasis on getting everything out of my head, and into a trusted system. And I’ve loved the structure of the GTD workflow: collect – process – organize – review – do.

My problem, though, has always been with that last step. After helping readers craft a list of their context-appropriate next actions, GTD author David Allen basically tells them, ‘now do those actions’, and assumes everything works from there.

Which might for Allen. But, for me, actually doing actions has a relationship to the instruction ‘just do it’ much akin to the relationship between the fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and their notation in the original script as “they fight.”

Most problematically, after years and years of Getting Things Done, while I had gotten to be very good at knowing exactly what I should be doing at any given moment, at that moment, I was usually doing something else entirely. I still procrastinated terribly. I still felt overwhelmed and behind. I was much more organized, but I’m not sure I was actually that much more productive.

Until, recently, I stumbled across a book called Do It Tomorrow, by the lesser-known UK-based Mark Forster. Forster explicitly recognizes that our well-intentioned rational brain isn’t always in control. And, more importantly, he offers strategies for coping with that fact in our jobs and lives. Strategies that, for me at least, work.

Because Do It Tomorrow also places a strong emphasis on limits and on reducing randomness, a Do It Tomorrow day feels almost the exact opposite of a Getting Things Done day. It’s more structured, less reactive. And I leave at night knowing that I’ve finished everything I set out to for the day, rather than with vague ongoing guilt from the giant list of next actions still hanging over my head.

I’m still fairly new to Do It Tomorrow, so I can’t yet say if the approach will permanently supplant Getting Things Done for me; I’ll weigh back in next month with further thoughts on that. In the meantime, though, as it’s easily the best productivity book I’ve read in the last five years, and is available on Amazon for $16, if you have even passing interest in dorky time management stuff, I’d highly, highly recommend you pick up a copy for yourself.