We’ve all cursed at the driver, cell phone tight to his ear, cruising 10 mph below the speed limit in the fast lane, his turn signal on for the last five miles. We’ve all been guilty, too, of dialing at a red light or getting in a quick chat with a friend on the drive home from the store. The allure of personal gadgets -- Blackberries, iPods, and navigation systems, to name just a few -- makes it harder and harder to keep your eyes on the road, and not just when you’re behind the wheel.

Here’s how my morning in the office went. I run a writing business and chauffer my two preschoolers on a yin-yang schedule 3 days a week -- the 4-year-old going to preschool in the morning, the 5-year-old to daycare. At noon they flip places. This is one of the 2 days a week that isn’t broken up with ferrying them around, a day that I count on to work without interruption. I pull up Google to locate a journal article I need for a report I’m working on. While I’m typing in the search, my eyes are drawn to a news headline about a driver in Florida who buckled a case of beer into the front passenger seat, while letting her young child ride in the back -- no car seat, not even a seat belt for her baby. Enough. I turn back to my article search. But just then my iCal window pops up with a reminder to schedule my flight for a business trip next month. So I go to Travelocity instead and look for that rare itinerary that doesn’t make me go all the way down to Atlanta in order to catch a flight to Indiana. That done, I finally locate the full text of that journal article I wanted. I am starting to read it when… Aaaaaarrrrrgh… my phone rings.

And so it goes. Distraction has become the ever-twisting thread that holds my workday together. What I have is a bad case of "open loops."

Open loops are what productivity whiz David Allen, author of the bestseller Getting Things Done, calls anything you’ve ever intended to do, from the cosmic to the minuscule, that’s still afloat in the netherworld of what you haven’t yet accomplished. Your mind keeps working, to no avail, on all the archived items on your mental to-do list. As long as you have "incompletes," your mind can’t really let you rest. So you end the day feeling like you got nothing accomplished. And that’s the source of a lot of stress.

Allen’s Getting Things Done system won’t add more hours to the day or turn you into the time-management equivalent of an Evelyn Wood speed-reader. But it can help you feel in control and relieve your stress. Heck, it might even make you look forward to the day instead of dreading it.

"Don’t tell anyone," Allen told me when I caught up with him on the phone recently, "but what we’re selling is hope."

I’m skeptical when it comes to imagining that I could wrestle my unruly and chaotic life into any kind of system. But I am all for hope. I find it in a simple exercise in the first chapter of Allen’s book, which I was reading in bed one night. Write down the project or situation that is bugging you or distracting you or interesting you the most. Write a sentence that describes the outcome you would like. Now write down the very next physical action that would move things forward. In an instant I thought of a bevy of open loops to choose from. Bothering me the most was a complicated, multi-part assignment that I had been putting off because I couldn’t quite figure out how to approach it. My goal was to turn in a clever and articulate story on time. Next physical step? How about making a timeline so that I could see the order of events. That was so easy, I tackled a few other projects in my mind -- Martha Stewart look out. I fell asleep that night with a lighter heart. I couldn’t wait to get to my desk the next morning and start moving through the bottleneck of work and life.

Getting things done

Allen breaks his system into five phases: Collect. Process. Organize. Review. Act. He actually recommends that you set aside at least 2 days to implement it fully. That time commitment wasn’t practical for me right now, but I was anxious to get started. Let me share with you some of the things that I’ve found to be helpful.

Mind-sweep exercise

For this, I grabbed a spiral-bound notebook and began catching all the many things that I have felt overwhelmed by, have procrastinated on (for years now I’ve been meaning to defrost the freezer), or keep forgetting about. You have to write down everything that is on your mind in order to get it off your mind, Allen says. By the end of the first day, I had filled 10 pages and already felt a hundred times better.

Two-minute rule

If it takes 2 minutes or less to take care of something, do it immediately. This is common sense. Still, I was surprised by how many things I would have been inclined to put off until later if I hadn’t stopped to think how quickly I could be done with it. This helped me put to rest 30% of the items I had written down, which felt oh-so-good to do.

Next step

I try to define the next simple action with everything now, from ordering new snow boots for my son whose feet are growing at an incomprehensible rate (measure them with a tape measure) to planning a writing workshop I’m leading 3 months from now (dedicate part of my notebook to catching ideas I might want to talk about). This is especially useful for daunting projects. What’s the one small action I can take to keep the project moving forward?

Tickler file

For this you’ll need 43 file folders. Number them one through 31 for a perpetual daily system and another 12 for monthly folders. File memos that you’ll need on a particular day, your tickets for a concert 2 months from now, a reminder to order flowers in time for your mother’s birthday. Empty the front folder into your inbox each day, and then file behind the next month’s file.

The power of A through Z

This is a filing system for general-reference materials -- that amorphous blob of information you don’t have to take action on but do want to hang onto. It’s organized alphabetically, which means you don’t have to spend any time thinking about where it should go:

• Scraps of paper on which you jotted a password you’ll otherwise forget: P.
• Greeting cards -- the cute one your husband gave you for your anniversary as well as the funny birthday card you bought with no one particular in mind: C (or possibly H for Hallmark).
• List of English words that are often confused with each other: W.

I was able to clean out a top desk drawer that I haven’t been able to open fully, let alone use functionally, for years. I am giddy with the freedom of not being held hostage any longer by instructional manuals, MapQuest printouts, a review of ink-jet printers, and take-out menus.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.

Editor’s note: For tips and more information, check out www.davidco.com.

Sally Ann Flecker is an award-winning writer from Pittsburgh. Sally is a recovering technology addict who fell prey to the spin that machines will someday leave us with more time to relax than ever. She can be reached at featuredstories@adamcorp.com.