If you’ve been interested in productivity and time management for any length of time, then you will have heard of David Allen’s seminal book, Getting Things Done. In some ways, David Allen is the founder of personal productivity. Ink had been spilled on this topic before, but Allen’s book, as published in 2001, was the first time that a comprehensive system for getting things done was presented in full. The book was fully revised and updated in 2015 to take account of many of the changes in how people work that had come about in the past 14 years.
It is an excellent book.
If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend that you do.
I first encountered the concepts in late 2016 and early 2017 when I read this series of Blog posts by a friend of mine – Lionel Windsor. Sustainable Sacrifice – Forget the Channel (lionelwindsor.net). I got really excited, downloaded OmniFocus, set aside 3 days to implement the system and then I was away. Honestly, I have learned a lot from this system that is incredibly valuable and continues to be to this day. However, GTD has some issues and it is my view that the system itself is now increasingly out of date for the way we work today. Therefore, the conclusion that I have come to, and the recommendation that I make is that by all means read the book and implement the bits that are good, but as a whole system, it can’t really be implemented in its pure form.
GTD – The System
The system has five key components. These are:
- Capture. This is where you write down everything. Every note, task, thought or idea that may be relevant at some stage in the future. In fact, as part of implementing the system, Allen recommends that your write down everything, including every object in your workspace (from potted plants to printers) on individual pieces of paper and put it in an in-tray. The idea is to build a complete and comprehensive inventory of all your ‘stuff’.
- Clarify. This is where you go though everything in your captured inventory or in-tray and work out what it is and what you want to do with it. For example – this is a project and it belongs on the project list.
- Organise. This is where you put everything in its proper place. Assign tasks to a project, put events on your calendar etc etc.
- Engage. The system dictates what you can and can’t do at any given moment and therefore what you should do next. This bit is where you do the work.
- Review. The system requires maintenance and so the review of projects and other lists and the weekly review of everything in the system is critical to making the whole thing work.
Some of the key principles behind this system would be the now classic quote, the brain is a great place for having ideas but a terrible place for holding them. This is why everything must be written down. Only by creating and maintaining this comprehensive list of any and all thoughts, tasks, notes, ideas and commitments in a system that you trust can you truly achieve the ‘mind like water’ (i.e. respond appropriately to the forces applied to you) and therefore be stress-free. You know that everything is in the system and you know the system will alert you at the appropriate time so you can relax.
Whenever you work you will find yourself in a particular context. Those contexts being that you are either with certain people, in certain places or have certain things, apps or tools. Therefore, every action needs an assigned context and this then determines what you can work on in any given moment. Anything that requires more than a single action to complete is classed as a project and you will have many projects on the go at once ranging from big projects taking months and many many actions to simple projects you can complete in 10 minutes with only 2 or 3 actions. As you look at your projects, not all of the actions required can be completed or even started right away and therefore only some actions will be classed as ‘next actions’. Clarifying what these next actions are for any given project is a key part. And then, what to work on at any given moment is determined by the next actions available to you in the particular context that you find yourself in. In your project reviews and weekly reviews you update all of your project, context and next actions lists to ensure that your system is up to date and you can continue.
In all honesty – it is really good system for its day.
GTD – The Strengths
Let’s state the obvious here. The big strength is that it provided a system at a time when a lot of people wouldn’t have had a system. At least not one as comprehensive as GTD. And, having a system already puts you at an advantage. I suspect that a big part of the success of GTD is down to this fact – it provided a system and having a system was better than not having one.
For me, the biggest strength of GTD is in the principles that underly each aspect of the system, not necessarily in the system itself. The principle of capturing everything is probably the most important here. How many of us have great ideas but have no means of capturing them and so they are lost to the aether of our minds? How many of us remember we need to do something important at an in-opportune moment and then 5 minutes later have totally forgotten what we remembered? Having a systematic way of capturing and collecting everything that comes our way from every possible source is critical for being on top of things. Getting things done was spot on to highlight this.
Figuring out what things are, what needs to be done about them and then organising it in some way is also key. A long list, thousands of unrelated items long is not going to help anyone. So the principles behind clarifying and organising are also really key. As is the principal behind reviewing. Reviewing things and planning ahead prevent things from being lost in our system to never be seen again.
So I recommend that you buy and read the book and learn the principles behind the system and seek to implement them.
GTD – The Weaknesses
It’s my view that there are some big flaws in the system and approach. Though some of these flaws are common misunderstandings rather than flaws inherent to the system.
The big one is to do with it being out of date for modern work. The old idea of context being people, place or thing is less and less relevant. Let’s scroll back 3 years. Depending on where you live in the world, you are weeks away from being given a ‘stay at home’ order. And so was everyone else you work with. Improved technology, like email, slack, zoom, teams, google drive, mobile phones etc meant that even though you worked in one location, with one set of tools for the better part of a year, you still had access to everything and everyone you needed to do your work. So it is becoming rarer and rarer for your context to be a limiting factor in what you can do. Therefore, organising your tasks by context is becoming less and less helpful. Therefore, this principal should be ditched, and other ways of organising your work should be employed. For example, Carl Pullein’s Time Sector System, organised everything based on when he wants to do the task. His ‘context’ lists have been replaced by lists for This Week, Next Week, This Month, Next Month and Long Term.
The second issue that I have is to do with importance and priority. It is my view that in GTD all things are equal. Every project goes on the list of projects. Every task goes on the list. There is no obvious point in the book where these lists are evaluated based on the impact or importance of the project, only by the context you are in. It is a bottom up approach and not a top down approach. A top down approach would decide what is important and then configure everything else based around that. GTD seems to revolve around capturing every thought, idea or task, no matter how insignificant and then starting there. In a sense, you don’t let what you decide to do, determine the contexts you place yourself in. You let the contexts you find yourself determine what you decide to do. It may be that this is a wrong understanding on my part but I’ve seen re-created a lot of times so it isn’t just me. It creates an environment where it is easy to pick the low hanging fruit, the easy and unimportant tasks/projects and feel like you are being very productive because you are ‘getting things done’. When looking at a list of 100 projects that are currently running, it is hard to see clearly which projects are big impact and which are not. This may be a problem with my approach, but I found after a year of trying to follow GTD strictly, a lot had been done, but the non-urgent, big impact projects, were still sitting largely untouched. I was very productive, but not very effective.
This isn’t helped by defining everything with 2 steps or more as a project. A silly example would be going to the dentist and you need to find the number, call and book and then go. This is 3 steps but it doesn’t need to be a project in your system and having it as one just creates clutter. Having one task – to book the appointment and then putting the appointment on your calendar would do just as well and be a lot cleaner.
I also found that the ‘next actions’ approach can involve a lot of mental switching around. Say you had to make 5 calls to 5 people about 5 projects. This wouldn’t be uncommon if you strictly follow GTD. This requires you to mentally get back in to each of the 5 projects, switching from one to other to make the calls and note any decisions, information or future actions. Given that contexts are less relevant now, it makes a lot more sense to work on a project for a block of time, and benefit from mental focus on one thing, rather than constantly switching around what you are working on.
Lastly, I always loved the weekly review. I would set aside 3 hours to go through, review and update all of my projects. Having 70 odd projects on the go at once and around 650 tasks across them all, takes a lot of reviewing. But this is an awful lot of time that can be done away with by a more top down and focussed approach. So now, my weekly review is more focussed on planning. I don’t need to review my projects so much any more. I have less projects on the go at once. When I work on the projects for a chunk of time, the status of the project becomes more fixed in my mind. Given that I choose what I am going to work on based on status, impact and time available, I do not need to give a lot of time to review projects I am not going to work on in a given week.
GTD – My conclusion
I would highly recommend that you buy and read the book – Getting things Done if you haven’t. Pay close attention to the principles behind capturing, clarifying and organising your stuff. As a system, I can only speak for myself and people’s who’s work is similar to mine, but I do not believe it is viable any more in its pure form.
So what do I recommend? Firstly, here are some free courses that will be really helpful for setting up your own system:
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System. — Carl Pullein
These courses are free and cover the basics.
Secondly, I recommend that you examine the principles behind each and every system you come across. What are they trying to solve? Why have they moved on from systems they used in the past? What about their work is similar to mine? What isn’t? From that, you can build a way of organising your stuff and managing your work that is actually going to work well for you. And you can keep it fluid as your work, life and the technology changes.
Currently I use a tweaked version of Carl Pullein’s Time Sector System, with a bit of Tiago Forte’s PARA system and some of August Bradley’s PPV system thrown in. It is simple, and it works.
