The Personal Efficiency Program by Kerry Gleeson: Book Notes

TL;DR

• Kerry Gleeson’s «Personal Efficiency Program» rests on one rule: «Do It Now» — handle each task, paper, or message once instead of shuffling it around.
• The mechanism is real. Re-handling and interruptions carry a measurable cost, and the same «touch it once» idea reappears as the two-minute rule in every serious system since.
• The theory around it is thin: no controlled evidence for the full program, and the 1994 core predates the email and chat overload it now gets sold against.
• «Do It Now» quietly conflicts with prioritising. Doing everything the moment it lands is not the same as doing the right thing.
• Verdict: the toolkit outlives the book. Read our notes instead.

Verdict

Gleeson found one durable behaviour and built a career on it. Deciding a task once, then acting, beats touching it five times and deciding nothing. That single habit is worth keeping.

The rest is a 1994 office manual in a 2009 cover. It assumes paper trays and a manageable inbox, offers no controlled evidence, and treats «now» as a substitute for judgement. You can extract the working parts in ten minutes and skip the anecdotes about tidy artists. «Read our notes instead».

The big idea

Gleeson’s claim is that most lost time is self-inflicted. We do not lose hours to hard work; we lose them to re-handling — reopening the same email, re-reading the same memo, moving the same paper from pile to pile.

His fix is «Do It Now»: process each item to a decision on first contact. Act on it, delegate it, schedule it, or discard it — but never set it back down untouched. Add organised inputs, batching of similar chores, and fewer interruptions, and he calls the bundle the Personal Efficiency Program.

Key ideas

• «Do It Now» as a default. The core rule is not «do everything immediately». It is «reach a decision on first contact». The waste Gleeson targets is the second, third, and fourth look at the same item, each costing attention and giving nothing back.
• Touch it once. Every input gets one of four outcomes: do, delegate, defer to a scheduled slot, or delete. The point is to stop items from re-entering your attention unresolved. This is the same move David Allen later formalised as the two-minute rule.
• Organise the inputs, not just the desk. Gleeson argues a chaotic workspace is a symptom of unmade decisions. Filing and clearing are not tidiness rituals; they remove the constant low-grade prompt of unprocessed stuff in view.
• Batch similar work. Group calls, correspondence, and filing into blocks instead of interleaving them all day. The rationale is that switching between kinds of work carries a hidden restart cost.
• Reduce interruptions at the source. He treats interruptions as a design problem: close the door, silence the prompts, protect blocks. The aim is fewer forced restarts, not heroic willpower.
• Continuous, not heroic. Gleeson pitches PEP as a maintained habit, not a one-off purge. Process inputs daily so nothing accumulates into the overwhelm the subtitle promises to end.

What holds up

The re-handling cost is well supported. Switching between tasks forces the brain to reload rules and goals, and Rubinstein, Meyer, and Evans measured the lag directly: people lost time on every switch, and the cost grew with complexity (Rubinstein, Meyer & Evans, 2001, Journal of Experimental Psychology). «Touch it once» is a way to buy fewer switches.

Interruptions are worse than they feel. Gloria Mark’s field research at the University of California, Irvine found workers took around 23 minutes to return to a task after being pulled away (Mark, González & Harris, 2005, CHI). A follow-up showed people compensate by working faster — and pay for it with more stress and pressure (Mark, Gudith & Klocke, 2008, CHI). Gleeson’s «reduce interruptions» instinct was correct before the evidence caught up.

Batching inputs holds up too. When knowledge workers were assigned to check email only three times a day, they reported measurably lower stress than when they checked freely (Kushlev & Dunn, 2015, Computers in Human Behavior). That is Gleeson’s «process in blocks» with a control group attached. We cover the wider mechanics of protecting attention in our notes on focus.

What doesn’t

«Do It Now» has a prioritisation hole. Doing each task the moment it arrives is not choosing the important task — it is letting arrival order choose for you. The urgent-important distinction Eisenhower popularised exists precisely because «now» and «matters» are different axes. A day of prompt, immediate responses can be a day with no deep work in it.

Cal Newport’s argument sharpens the point: the highest-value output comes from long, uninterrupted blocks on one hard thing, not from clearing inputs quickly. If «Do It Now» pulls you into every small item on contact, it can crowd out the very work that pays. We weigh these systems against each other in choosing a time system.

The program has no controlled evidence. Claims that PEP «wins back an hour a day» come from the consultancy that sells it, not from an independent trial. Compare that with the named, peer-reviewed studies above — the mechanism is proven, the packaged program is not.

And the core is 1994. The book assumes paper you can file and an inbox you can empty. It was written before Slack, before notification-driven feeds, before the always-on device that makes «reduce interruptions» a fight against the tool’s business model. The advice survives; the world it describes does not. Why the switch costs land so hard on the brain is the subject of our Your Brain at Work notes.

Why the tools outlive the theory

Touch it once works because it collapses many small decisions into one. Each reopening of an item forces a fresh switch and a fresh reload; deciding on first contact pays that cost once. This is the exact logic of Allen’s two-minute rule, which we unpack in our Getting Things Done notes.

Batching works because kind-of-work switches are the expensive ones. Twenty emails in one block share a mental context; twenty emails scattered across the day each demand a restart. The Kushlev study measured the stress that scattering causes.

Guarding blocks works because the recovery tax is steep. If a single interruption costs roughly 23 minutes of re-orientation, then two protected hours are worth far more than two fragmented ones. The tool is sound even where Gleeson’s framing is dated.

Who should actually read it

Read the full book if you manage a high-volume administrative inbox and want a gentle, non-technical routine to stop paper and messages from piling up. It is calm, concrete, and unintimidating.

Do not read it if you already run any modern system — GTD, time blocking, a weekly review. You have the two-minute rule and batching already, in a form built for screens. And skip it if your problem is choosing what matters, not clearing what arrives. «Do It Now» will make a bad priority list run faster, which is the wrong direction.

One thing to try

The shift: stop letting arrival order run your day. Decide once, on first contact, and protect a block for the work that actually pays — do not confuse motion for progress.

First move: take your next hour. Silence every notification, pick the one task that matters most today, and do only that. When small items arrive, apply the rule — do it in under two minutes, or park it for a batched slot later. One block, one decision each, no re-handling.

Get the book

Find «The Personal Efficiency Program» on Amazon — as an Amazon Associate, The Boring Work earns from qualifying purchases (disclosure).

The boring bottom line

Gleeson isolated a genuinely useful habit and wrapped it in a dated office manual. The habit — decide once, act, do not re-handle — is confirmed by research he never cited. The program around it has no trial behind it and was built for a paper world. Take the rule, batch your inputs, guard your blocks, and leave the anecdotes on the shelf — the same test we apply across our book notes.

Sources

• Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E., & Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
• Mark, G., González, V. M., & Harris, J. (2005). No task left behind? Examining the nature of fragmented work. Proceedings of CHI 2005.
• Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of CHI 2008.
• Kushlev, K., & Dunn, E. W. (2015). Checking email less frequently reduces stress. Computers in Human Behavior, 43, 220-228.
• American Psychological Association. Multitasking: Switching costs. apa.org.
• Allen, D. (2001, rev. 2015). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Goodreads listing.
• Gleeson, K. (2009, 4th ed.). The Personal Efficiency Program. Wiley.

The Russian-language predecessor of this article (2012) is preserved in the archive.