The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
My personal theory is the ~60% of useless middle managers have nothing left to do without an office. They now split their days into asking for constant status updates on every conceivable detail, and "breaking down walls" which is pestering whoever is holding up a project by a couple hours because they are focused elsewhere.
I've disabled my IM client which made them shift to phone calls, and the next step is turning off call forwarding.
* Not a customer, investor, or the janitor. Just looks like a good solution to a wall of meetings.
Too much overhead or something with asynchronous communications, or having to “spin” up your thoughts regarding the issue every time feels taxing. As opposed to a quick back and forth chit chat that addresses any concerns that come to mind and then closing that task out.
That it is intentional does not really help, because you still have to deal with the inherent awkwardness of not knowing if your tone and message come across correctly in a one-way conversation without feedback.
Reading stuff is so much quicker.
One college asks me if i have time to do a short video chat for the update i need; The coordination take sprobably a higher effort then just writing it down.
Otherwise you can just use whatever you have used already anyway.
Having something like this as main feature, means thats the default. In my opinion therefore not a good tool.
Putting in some effort on the sending side to express your thoughts as text makes things a lot more flexible for the receiver, and pays off big when you want more than one person to consume it.
It's the second heading, right at the top when you click the link - "Cut down on meetings & calls with voice messages, searchable transcriptions & async screen sharing"
Also, I don't know if this is in my head or just speaker or mic quality, or on phone/network noise cancellation, or what, but I've found landline calls to be much more clear and easy to converse than zoom or cell phone calls. I think that may be where some of the fatigue comes from.
Harder to do that over zoom because of an org policy that include the words “camera on”
With a wireless headset connected to my computer I have much more freedom, and at least I can continue some low-key work during meetings which aren't all that interesting or have a lull
> ... With a wireless headset connected to my computer
?
This is my (and my team's) main problem right now. We like working from home but it broke down any kind of interactive process/exercise, every meeting for a workshop becomes this choreography of: how to ask for a spot to speak, how to leave space for others to take that spot, who will facilitate that. It kills any spontaneous take or realisation that you could bring up in a meeting room. It feels like everyone has to stay in a queue to have time to speak. A lot of times it's happened that people forgot what they wanted to say or the conversation went way past that point and people don't feel like backtracking the discussion.
I can say that people feel like they should only speak up and state *really important things™" but often the small unsaid things are really valuable.
It really sucks, I thrive in environments where I can pick up bits and pieces of information and glue them together into something meaningful to my team, I can't really do that remotely (not without pestering people or trying to have scheduled coffee breaks to just chat).
Or maybe I'm just a luddite that likes landlines and IRC....
When I was using self-hosted Ventrilo playing with friends we didn't have this problem. It was like being in the same room. The ping was like 5ms and sound latency not noticeable.
One day in the far future, we'll have to learn to deal with the light lag. Why not start now?
Makes me wish I could have work meetings there, honestly.
An old POTS landline would be nice too, but my understanding is a lot of landlines now are basically VoIP anyway.
Yeah I think you're right. VOIP and landline and probably one and the same these days, and as long as whatever voice application you use doesn't use excessive compression or any added complexity, or route you halfway around the world, you've prob got landline quality.
Disclaimer: we dogfood our own product.
I care a lot about video when doing calls to keep in touch with family and friends, but I find it's really not pertinent or useful at work.
My favorite part is how low-effort the video calls themselves are. It makes me far more likely to end the conversation instead of waffling around looking for other things to shove into a meeting
Over communicating at times of my preference has been helpful
The amount of useless emails has gone through the roof, with a lot of the content being managers reminding people they are still there.
Everyone cc's everyone now. If someone wrote an email to the ALL distribution group back in the day and there were more than 2 replies to that email, someone would immediately lose their shit and tell everyone to stop replying-all. Now those reply-all email chains happen weekly, with junior VPs laying hot takes all over the place.
The key then is to make sure your inbox only contains items directly to you or from specific mailing lists.
You only have to @mention the people who really have to see. All the other's who would have previously have been cc:ed can simply review the messages if they are interested at their leisure, withou being pinged.
> I've disabled my IM client which made them shift to phone calls, and the next step is turning off call forwarding.
Imagine being this socially awkward where you just can’t say “I’m busy.” or actually enjoying interacting with and helping others.
There is a larger problem you're touching on that in most knowledge-workcompanies there is little to no attention paid to the production line process of how that work is 'produced' with the inevitable miasma of low-value busywork ('quick question, where are we with X','thoughts on X??' etc)
With so many people acclimated to putting on themselves, and translating, office friendly body mechanics, working at home may indeed cause subtle anxiety from loss of habit.
At the web app layer, software is a simpler world to design and ship at any scale versus a decade ago. All the logistical nonsense needed to manage office life could very well be bullshit from a GTD standpoint. Satisfying last generations memes on corporate structure versus more atomized social networking abilities.
Most of these people where literally ruling by authority and not having physical presence is a huge problem for these people.
It also kind of sends across the message that things can run well without them.
We really are in a place where an operating system takes more resources to run than the programs it runs.
And don't get me wrong but when your solution is to disable/block communication ways instead of communication with others on how you want/need to communicate, then the issue is on both sides.
The addition of the constant, unrelenting background stress of a global goddamn pandemic?
It's interesting that Cal Newport chooses to mention GTD in his title, because what he's complaining about is stuff that David Allen has complained about, too...and, to be honest, Merlin Mann and that whole community never understood. It's not about the task lists or tickler files or whatever.
It's about being able to take complete stock of your life on a regular basis.
Everything else is based on that. You get everything captured and in one place so you can look at it and say, "Okay, is this working?" David Allen explicitly suggests similar activities for teams, and high functioning teams generally do this.
I think Newport is absolutely right about the chaos and distraction that characterizes so much white collar work today. I'm not sure how fair it is to lay it at Drucker's feet. My view from the software world is that there are twin gaps in strategy and leadership in most organizations. Strategy provides the framework in which groups deploy tactics. Leadership provides the framework in which groups adopt tactics to deploy.
Yes! Merlin is very entertaining but for someone who spends so much time talking about his life, it's amazing how little of it he seems to grok.
One of the best things that has really kicked into gear my utilization of GTD and also helping with my ADHD is learning about and incorporating the Pomodoro technique with my use of Omni Focus. I found a great little play/work timer on Amazon for under $20 - 30 minutes on the right side, 5 minute on the left side and a big toggle button on top that reminds me of a chess timer. It's very satisfying to whack the physical button (no stupid touch controls here - tactile feedback baby!) at the end of a session to start the other. Once you get into a rhythm it's amazing what you can accomplish.
I also block time on my calendar with meetings to give me chunks of time when I need to get stuff done. Meeting creep is real, especially now that the former hallway wanderers can only do virtual drive by's :p
Yes! This so much! I spend time in r/gtd, and I see that kind of misunderstanding (“productivity pr0n”) not infrequently. People want a system they can use to tell them what to do, and that’s not what GTD is about. I usually reply with something along what you said, paraphrasing David Allen: GTD is not about getting things done; it’s about being engaged appropriately in your life.
My first implementations were clumsy because I wanted to get fancy with my system with sequential projects and deeply nested tasks (in OmniFocus), but I eventually evolved to realize that the book really was right. I use a fairly minimal system that hews closely to what the book says. The most liberating thing was understanding that I _shouldn’t_ necessarily plan all my future actions out. I can document things I know I need in my support material, but those aren’t next actions, and GTD is about capturing and clarifying next actions.
Another comment here mentions that the book sometimes isn’t easy reading. I can definitely agree with that. There are places where it gets into the details before it properly introduces a concept and why it’s useful. Contexts are widely misunderstood because of this. The book leads with what they are (tools, people, places, etc), and people conclude that since we’re connected almost all the time, we don’t have contexts. The reality is contexts are just filters, and they’re useful because they help you manage having lots of next actions.
It seems awkward to have to explain that "Getting things done" is not about getting things done :P
When I first met my wife, she commented on how I would capture everything. To her, it seemed like I had to plan everything out, so how could I be spontaneous? It’s actually the opposite. By knowing my landscape, I knew what I had to hand off at work while I was away visiting her, and what I could let wait until I got back.
I barely engaged with my system while I was visiting her, but that’s okay. It was still there keeping all my responsibilities safe while I was away, so I could focus on my time with her instead.
And to be fair, sometimes people want a method that tells them what to do or how to make decisions. GTD isn’t that method, but it can help you manage your next actions once you figure what they are.
So much of the productivity world is still lifehacks or tricks to get an "extra edge". Anyone who has gone down that path knows it only goes so far. Same for the folks who focus solely on the tools, except that path is an endless circle.
Yet what matters most is being able to embrace the process of life, recognize where you are now, and make adjustments on the way to improve.
"It's about being able to take complete stock of your life on a regular basis"
Is it then enough to leave everything in Inbox and declutter Inbox periodically to delete items since done?
Again, that's what a lot of people miss. When you have everything in front of you, you can look at it as a whole and say, "Alright, what do I want to be different?"
> My latest article for The New Yorker, published on Tuesday, is titled “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” It’s not, however, really about David Allen’s productivity system, which longtime readers (and listeners) know I really admire. It’s instead about a deeper question that I hadn’t heard discussed much before: Why do we leave office workers to figure out on their own how to get things done?
Because we respect their self-sovereignty? The solution isn't more management as he proposes but for the worker to speak up and say what it is they need from others.
Just tell your co-workers that this is how your mind works best and not to disturb if these conditions are in place. Or that they shouldn't expect to be answered immediately if these times, this activity, etc.
Do societies that have less respect for self-sovereignty do a better job of getting office workers figure these things out?
No, definitely not. I live in an authoritarian country in Asia and I can assure you that isn't the case. So your claim seems to founder immediately when put to the test and there is almost certainly another explanation at work.
But there was never any explicit training on things like "you need to accept or reject meeting invites" or "this is how to correctly use Slack/wiki/email ... And all three are different."
I think a lot of it goes back to the current trend of companies not investing in employees and expecting someone else to have done that for them.
And then... when someone else did do that investment - as in, you come in to an org with actual real experience - you somehow are "doing it wrong" or "don't get our culture" or whatever the pushback may be.
I do take a very eclectic approach to productivity systems, and tend to pick what works for me while leaving behind anything I consider fluff. I've built almost, but not quite, TDD teams this way (organically from the ground up), and it helps us stay lean and agile.
Maybe I'm dense, or oversimplifying, but the answer seems obvious to me: because there's no one size fits all solution. Sure, people can be lost and confused, but being told there is one and only one way to things feels like a straitjacket to me. It's the same reason I despise the term "best practice" as if some arbiter of "best" determined that every other way of doing something sucks.
I'm very much of the eclectic school. I don't follow GTD strictly, but I pulled what I found useful from it and went from there. Honestly, it's been so long since I reviewed the method, it's probably time to go back and review it again. You can't just rest on your laurels; as another good (but often overpraised) productivity book put it, you need to sharpen the saw every once and a while, and this includes always questioning "best" practice.
The same type of guidelines and trade-off discussions could be taught in e.g. high school. I'm pretty sure just getting people to reflect on this stuff would bring huge improvements.
On this I agree. And even just putting out a single, simple, effective method, while mentioning there are other ways would be fine. Those that are curious should be able to ask after lecture as to what those ways are.
I do resent I was never formally taught any sort of study skills in high school, and I feel this falls under that same banner. But I still stand by my assertion that people shouldn't be punished for deviating from a "one true way", unless those deviations are objectively harmful.
I think that's partly because so many people yearn for more human connection, which in covid times is often expressed as unnecessary Slack conversations. Also, because humans are naturally wired to be drawn toward whatever is most recent; until a few hundred years ago, if an event happened nearby you, that was always the most important thing to which attention should be directed. Finally, I don't think that "avoiding distraction" is even a goal for many people, especially if they're meh about their job or they feel watching current social trends are more important/interesting than their job.
I doubt there is a generalizable solution for these "perils of autonomy." But if eventually we move away from the synchronous messaging that pervades modern office culture, that would be a step in the right direction. Slack needs a mode that debounces messages so they're delivered en masse once per hour unless a box is checked that the message is urgent.
In the future, when more people work as independent contractors, that ought to help too. This isn't a problem that a manager will step in and fix by imposing a new policy, as the story seems to imply.
I think the biggest testament to this is the 50%+ dropout rates common in PhD programs. You're starting with some of the most intelligent, diligent, bright-eyed young people on the planet and letting them work independently in a field that they presumably have a deep passion for.
All we ask them to do is write 100 pages or so on a topic of their choosing. They're given four or five years, which comes out to less than a page a week. Yet more than half will fail to complete the task due to attrition. (Yeah, I know this is over-simplified...)
And I think the obvious answer is that humans, in general, are horrendous at being self-directed on long-running, large-scale, multi-step tasks.
Almost anybody who consistently produces anything of real value works on a team, where at least there's some semblance of regular accountability to other humans. The rare example of truly productive people who can work in isolation are almost all (rightly so) lauded as atypical geniuses.
This is extremely simplified.
In my PhD program (engineering), you had to take more credits than a MS student does (and if you did not come in with an MS, you had to take those as well). A total of about 54 credits of just coursework - not research.
Then you have advisors who will not let you graduate unless you have published N papers (and N varies widely) in their preferred journals. And then you write it all for your 100 page thesis. I know all students slow down a lot when they have to write that thesis, but for many students, writing the thesis is the easiest part, and only at the end.
The traditional school system, at least in the US, is almost entirely focused on training obedience and completion of relatively short-term tasks. Homework, tests, maybe the odd paper that's "due in 3 weeks" but really can be done in a mad dash the night before.
Until someone tries to go for a PhD, they may never have needed to plan and execute a large-scale, long-running, poorly-defined task on their own before. School didn't train for that. And they're expected to undo 20+ years of that step-by-step spoon-fed approach, throw that all out the window... and learn a new way of working, mostly on their own, and tackle this huge project. No wonder the failure rate is so high.
I have learned a ton of stuff, some of which was a key part of my day job in 10 years. I've read a number of brilliant papers, and a ton of so-so papers. I had a rather clear idea, which you can currently see mundanely implemented in many IDEs.
But my scale proved to be too grandiose, my understanding of it, too vague, going / flying to conferences scantly reimbursed, and general guidance which might have helped me find a realistic path to completion, mostly non-existent.
The industry, in its better parts, is a much more helpful community, people working both on open-source and commercial projects.
There's some truth to this, but the other reality is that academia is a pyramid scheme; the scheme worked from 1945 - 75, when higher ed grew rapidly, and has worked more or less poorly for PhDs ever since: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo....
The "deep passion" can also meet academic politics, the need for stable income, the insanity of the peer-reviewed journal system, sadistic or simply indifferent advisors, a lunatic dissertation committee, and so on.
There are likely some solutions to some of these problems; the elimination of tenure could be one, or the creation of the "teaching" PhD that consists of four years of coursework with a relatively small amount of research, with the degree awarded based on whatever papers have been written or contributed to, or whatever experiments have been done.
What utter nonsense. You have to do research, that is found good enough and sexy enough to be published to get published. In the meanwhile you have all kinds of other tasks you have to do like teaching or being your professors slave, depending on where you do your PhD. Writing a thesis is part of it, but is just a little part.
Of course if you are looking at a startup, needing the structured environment is viewed as a weakness, but the successful startup hub itself is a testament to how long a little structure can go.
I am someone who thrives in structure. For example, in academia, I'm not in need of resources, passion for learning, or direction. I simply need an instructor who expects things from me with hard deadlines.
For someone like me who reaches out for advice, all these self improvement methods of hustle and driving your own goals are really non-starters. I know I cannot consistently engage in them. From that lens I will always be a failure, although my work under various organizations is highly valued and well compensated.
The best way for me is to find the best existing structure who goals are aligned with mine, working within it to achieve maximum mutual value, and reassessing whether this structure is still the best for me, or looking elsewhere.
Probably because a bunch of people that don't do well with unstructured systems probably shouldn't be trying to run structured systems :) So we pay people who are good at organizing to do it.
I set my tasks and deadlines (and the group can help with that if I get stuck), and I have partners in the group that provide that deadline accountability and also the structure of checkins for regular progress. Something I scoffed at first but find to be valuable is just being on a zoom meeting with someone else while working on a task. Not necessarily interacting with them, but just knowing someone else is there helps with focus, tends to keep distractions/procrastination in check, etc.
Probably sounds crazy to most reading this but for those who are wired a bit differently strategies like this can make all the difference.
That's the problem. How many can say of themselves that they are pursuing the same issues with the same esteem as they did two/three years ago?
And as someone who was in academia and has a PhD: You don't write a mere 100 pages in four years. Instead you have to submit tons of papers in between to fulfill the scoring needs of the institution you are affiliated with.
Most PhDs I know have barely any passion and are just doing it because they don't want to work.
This isn't Slack's fault or a software issue, it's the cultural expectation that once you receive a message you must reply immediately. Just don't do this. Same as if someone texts you - it's up to you when to reply. Set the expectation that you'll reply when you get around to it.
It creates a Schelling point for expectations setting, and thus people will actually set that expectation. Otherwise, the only available Schelling point is immediate response.
Just don't leave it running in a place where you see it and only check it every hour or so. A virtual desktop far away.
Turn off notifications.
Mute all channels, except ones that really matter to your work.
Feel culturally pressured to respond quickly? Set your status to "in a meeting". That will by default clear after an hour, mind you.
Until your company culturally agrees that "I did not meet my expected output because I was too busy on Slack" is acceptable, you are responsible to do what is needed to get your job done.
I've seen his opposition to GTD expressed before and was excited to see it in long form, but left a bit disappointed when it was essentially just recommending a kanban style approache and some limitations on interuprting another person. I understand it is an open question though.
Though I do empathize with the addictiveness of productivity systems. As mentioned, it disguises itself as a form of productivity and can be easy to get carried away.
I think ultimately it comes down to how one implements their GTD system; I use it to offload stuff I don't want to worry about remembering (including outlines for projects), and am careful to limit my view to only what's currently on my plate. This allows me more time for 'deep work', but this work however is extremely unstructured, and I've come to learn that's a feature and breaking it down into a GTD style checklist is not at all effective for me. I think that's why it may be hard to come up with an equivalent system for deep work; it just doesn't lend itself as well to a GTD style approach, so perhaps my criticisms above were misguided.
He sells a lot of books, so I guess it's just my opinion, but I keep relearning the same lesson, as the topics he chooses certainly are interesting.
I have no place else to say so, but latency in zoom is annoying as fuck, and it totally didn't happen with twisted pair. Back in 2016 times, I insisted on twisted pair meetings. Even then, dipshits with ipotatos on wifi would find a way to fuck it up. Now a days, even I don't have access to twisted pair, so we're in a new dark age, similar to how old fashioned 7 gallon flush toilet bowls were vastly superior to the atrocities we have now. Most people only dimly aware of what has been taken away from us in the name of "progress."
"17/ In more sanguine times, this is easy in theory. You just log off from Facebook and Twitter, and put your head down and do what people like Cal Newport call “deep work.”
18/ I personally don’t believe in the idea of unplugging for "productivity" even in sanguine times, but in choleric times, it is a recipe for doing tone-deaf projects nobody cares about.
19/ Unless you work in pure mathematics or physics (and perhaps even then), your work is capable of creating meaning only if it is responsive to, and consciously situated in, its social milieu."
Just triggered a thought - what's so special about "what's going on in the world", especially when the majority of what people focus on with social media will never affect them and at best is the equivalent of local gossip.
Only now, because of the wonders of the Internet and social media, mundane crap from the opposite side of the planet can now feel local too.
I came to this conclusion years and years ago, when I stopped watching TV news because of ads, but had the unintended side effect that I became more informed about the world (because I had more time to invest in reading true journalism). When I tell people I don't watch the news, they scoff and claim I'm ignorant. I ask them what the most important thing was in the news two weeks ago. They never can tell me.
In "Perfect Time-Based Productivity"[1], Francis Wade pulls this idea apart and discusses how you can create a system that is suited to the time-demands you currently have. eg. the system a CEO with days full of meetings needs is different to the postal worker whose time demands are fairly clear and dictated by someone else. The real gold in this book though, is about how you need a "trusted system" - ie. we all have multiple channels (work email, IMs, personal email, phone(s), family, colleagues, ...) creating demands on our time, and we each need a system suited to our own mind and our own siutation for remembering and organising those demands, which nobody else has permission to add to.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23600431-perfect-time-ba...
The biggest issue I had is not filtering what I put into my to do list. I was putting "ideas" or "to read/watch/review" in the same space as my "to dos". By throwing them all in the same bucket I would quickly feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I had to do. By separating ideas into Trello, to read being clipped into Evernote, and my tasks in Asana it significantly reduced the number of tasks I woke up to each day and reduced my stress level (which helped me focus better).
Last year I even moved a lot of my tasks out of Asana and into a bullet journal. This has further helped reduce the number of tasks that I am looking at on any given day.
> It seems likely that any successful effort to reform professional life must start by making it easier to figure out who is working on what, and how it’s going [...] we might use virtual task boards, where every task is represented by a card that specifies who is doing the work, and is pinned under a column indicating its status. With a quick glance, you can now ascertain everything going on within your team and ask meaningful questions about how much work any one person should tackle at a time. With this setup, optimization becomes possible.
which misses the fundamental point that individuals have different ways of thinking, and therefore varied approaches to organization. One of the crucial aspects of GTD (or any other system) is to allow an individual to adapt it to their needs, while also slightly moulding their own approach where possible. Attempting to externalize that to a bureaucracy of standardized processes seems like a Taylorist nightmare designed to thoroughly demoralize the process of knowledge work down to executing tasks which only incidentally happen to require some thinking/judgement.
(To understand the full extent of what that “demoralization” means in this context, see this talk by Barry Schwartz https://youtu.be/3B_1itqCKHo )
One big thing I took away was a different way of looking at "someday" tasks - it is OK to record them even if they never happen - it doesn't mean they're useless.
The second one was review, and is probably a bigger deal for me. I never really went over my lists previously, which in retrospect was really stupid. Now I do, keeping things not done pruned and relevant.
But more importantly, I review things I did, including saving lists of tasks for things that might happen again. That has made a huge difference, especially as I manage more people. When someone asks "how do I do that?" and I can reply with a checklist, it makes me feel like maybe I'm not so bad at this gig after all. But really, the lists are for me - it is amazing how much I half-forget of things that don't come up much, and having last time's list saves me so much time.
The phrase "getting the things you don't want to do but are far more impactful than the things you actually feel like doing, done" just doesn't make for a a catchy acronym.
There's optical solace derived by looking at long list of things you got done. This happens when you count and not weigh things.
If you are doing GTD, you probably also want to looking in to 'next tasks' and weekly reviews. Also get out of this habit of trying to fill up your diary with tasks.
More importantly opportunity identification and even creating them proactively is easier said than done.
GTD is just a process. And its a process without intelligence. The core of the idea is don't keep things in your mind and stress it out.
I've used a GTD type system to great effect for almost my whole career, and I like it very much. Details here if interested: https://cushychicken.github.io/posts/evernote-workflow/
Newport's deep work theory isn't so contrary to GTD. Sometimes, your "next step" is to just schedule time to write your big report, or do your big numerical analysis, or plan out your new driver structure.
Allen was on to something when he claimed open ended tasks with no closure create anxiety. A system that records:
-what you must do next, and
-when you must do it,
Relieved much of it for me.
It sounds great but it's not. Instead what happens is I see the motion at the top right of the screen and it distracts me, I lose my train of thought. I either have to manually click on it (more distraction) or wait 10-15 seconds for it to go away.
It the same with all the ridiculous badges in discourse. There's a notification or an unread (3) count and it's yet one more thing to distract me. Maybe it's a notification of a reply but if it turns out to be a notification of a badge then I've just been distracted and lost my train of thought.
We need designers and companies to take an pledge/oath to stop trying to distract us. I get Facebook and Twitter may never do that but I feel like a lot of designers who would just haven't yet got the message that they are not helping their users by distracting them.
Let’s pad those estimates a little. Have a laugh at the standups and the retro’s. And enjoy ourselves.
The number of hours we spend working is arbitrary. It's 8 hours in our world. On another planet it could have been 186 hours. I remind myself of this slightly tongue-in-cheek idea regularly when I'm trying to carve out another 20 minutes of work on the weekend. There is a clear upper limit to how many tasks one can get done in a week. However, the impact of a week's worth of work can be almost limitless. I can spend the entire week frantically answering emails and putting out fires (that often come from the fires I frantically put out last week), or I can dedicate the week to, say, rebuild my website's front page to be clearer and more engaging and taking my daughter camping. I know which week I'll look back on with more satisfaction.
It takes a while to let go of quantity and accept that I don't need (and, indeed, shouldn't) fill every waking hour with work and focus on important outcomes instead, but whenever I've been able to do it, I find it more relaxing and that is has yielded better results.
"To lead an effective life, we need to be able to make things happen -- to engage with our world so it will supply us with the experiences and results we seek."
That's the first sentence of the book and seems like something an engineer would write.
So, I sort-of-implemented GTD a few times over the years.
One thing Allen said is that is VERY true is that you need a trusted system to put everything into.
I've been using Omnifocus since it came out and it works well. I can put everything in it - and I do.
It is macos/ios based and you can self-host your data with webdav. (awesome, omni folks!)
Yet I probably do NOT implement getting things done correctly.
Omnifocus is sort of like a giant outline where you can arrange your life in a big tree structure, then look it up by context or just search it.
I would say that 90% of the stuff I put into the system is over-categorized but really languishes and is not used.
The other 10% is critical to my life.
I go to the grocery store and remember the 20 things I needed to get.
I go to my doctor for my annual checkup and have a list of questions.
I have a time-crunch project and as I'm working on part 1, ideas for part 2 or part 3 are recorded and removed from my head and I continue.
and nothing is forgotten.
Everything else mostly became soup, and while I’d make lists to manage somethings, I handled most things intuitively and used Projects as reminders to think about something. The tasks in them always got stale fast, though.
I do find things like the Pomodoro technique useful for routine tasks. It will be absurd to try to prove a theoretical result with a tomato timer's frequent breaks. As Tony Robbins sometimes calls it, the latter needs "immersion" or deep work.
EDIT - Switched URL from the archive.today version, as it only had part of the content.
Thanks for pointing out the problem. :)
Looks like the Wayback Machine has the full thing, so I've just updated the URL.
Some kind of timer code on the page maybe?
I think the consenus here is that working deliberately and concentrating deeply are ideal ways to work. That is not a new idea to the New Yorker audience either. I think of that what is different in this time of the Big Weirdness is that are we are focused on adjusting tactically and situationally, and that we lose sight of the norms that are sustaining and strategically valuable. What's happening is what's always happened - we're adapting, some organizations faster and better than others. With all that said, turning off most of your feeds for most of the time still seems like a good idea to me.
Kanban is[1] GTD.
Personal Kanban is a lovely bridge.
See also Trello.
1. Depending on what the definition of “is” is.
Edit: In some ways, I tie everything to:
* pvsgeer: purpose, vision, strategy, goals, empowerment, execution, measure/review/report/repeat &c.
* roles/goals (like Covey said in 7 habits, like, person/child, spouse, parent, extended family member, neighbor, church/group member, citizen, professional/employee, others)
And things sort of flow from there, but baked into daily and periodic routines to help me stay on track and enjoy balanced life. Or at least that is the intent, and it helps greatly, as I continue learning.
* edit2: I have a prioritization system inside OM that I use to not get consumed with busy-ness. It also helps tremendously, to be able to sort things etc.
IIRC, the main differentiation was that Covey's was a "big picture first" approach whereas Allen was more of a "take care of the details and the big things take care of themselves".
The clearest example was that Covey used the metaphor of the rocks/gravel/sand in the jar. If you put the sand in first (aka the little things) there is no room for the rocks (aka big things).
My take away from the above is that neither way is right, wrong or "The Way" but that there are different methods for each person, team, profession, company etc. Simple example: infosec and IP rules may not even let you have one digital application that you can access at all times for both corporate and personal tasks. YOU might not even want your personal tasks co-mingled with work tasks for privacy reasons.
Meanwhile a lot of time went by, I'm almost 40, and I have worked at 8-10 companies (incl. FAANG, my own startup). His later advice, from the book "Deep Work", was not in line with my work experience [2]. The problem is, Cal doesn't have a regular 9-5 job as a tech worker, at a tech company. He's in academia (and self-employed), which is very different --- I know, I also worked in academia! And this shows.
For example, I was reading his book Deep Work while I was at Facebook, where the whole company is on Workplace/Workchat internally, with frequent notification/mention/chat interrupts, and the culture is to have quick response times. So no Deep Work, yet velocity and productivity is very high. It's not true that you need a lot of focused time to get things done, you can manage it in smaller chunks. It'd be convenient, but it's not realistic.
Reflecting on this article, in my experience, the key thing to focus on for companies is not personal productivity but team organization. The topline differentiator between high-velocity and high-productivity organizations versus the rest is that these are a collection of self-sufficient cross-functional product teams. The rest, which is most organizations, usually run "projects" instead of products, and multiple departments and teams, with different reporting lines, goals, OKRs/KPIs, etc. are exptected to work together to make it happen --- the result is the organization becomes one big waiting/blocking graph, with 80% of projects being blocked at any given time. This also makes personal productivity harder, because more "sync" and "alignment" type email threads and meetings are needed. In this model people have to work with more people they don't know/trust, so more people are communicating with each other who don't know how to communicate with each other, they may not even know the other person's exact job description or timezone location.
Having said that, I appreciate Cal's perspective, and I'm happy to support him by buying his books.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/14555091...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/...
Productivity apps work for me on a personal level (habit tracking, personal projects, recurring chores...). But for work it's much more complicated so I have stopped trying to shoehorn my schedule/non-predictable todos into an app (it's just Google Calendar).
1. individuals are blasted with a firehose of data
2. individual-focused systems to manage this data--like GTD--are ineffective because the left hand (one person working autonomously) doesn't know what the right hand (another person) is doing, so they end up just creating more data
3. therefore, we need some sort of collective--as opposed to an individual--system so we can get a better picture of the whole and distribute work more effectively, thereby increasing productivity.
Maybe a good idea. But the "call to action" there is clearly addressed to managers rather than actually producers. They're the ones who'd control any collective system. And in my experience those always decay and get in the way...though of course that could just be me resenting limitations on personal autonomy.
I'll have to think this over more. One thing I dislike about the article is several places they say things like "Following the lead of software developers, we might use virtual task boards..." where I think I'd be more appropriate to substitute "engineering managers" for "software developers".
The notion that you can offload cognitive load to an organized system, a tenet of GTD, is really essential for me.
If your in a position of fighting fires everyday, this system will not work for you.