32 ms·

The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done

293 points by aarghh 6y ago

muttled 6y ago
Google cache copy (no paywall): https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LbmYDMToHe8J:https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LbmYDM...
- dddw 6y ago
  Thanks
- bartread 6y ago
  Still only shows the first two paragraphs of the article for me, unfortunately.
  - mxmilkb 6y ago
    https://outline.com/Km5Svm https://outline.com/Km5Svm
    - bartread 6y ago
      Thank you - much appreciated!
dddw 6y ago
Oeh look forward to read this
muttled 6y ago
What I got out of that was the combination of work autonomy and email culture causes us all to work at different paces in different ways, all tied together by making random, unplanned demands of others via email as we go about doing our job. This generates a bunch of work not visible to management and the company as a whole. The author suggests looking at programming sprints as a time where we define the work to be done and just let people do it without being interrupted. I would leave it up to the programmers to respond if they're actually left alone to do their work or if they're sitting in the same amount of useless meetings as the rest of us.
- greggman3 6y ago
  I'm going to take it in a different tangent. I need less distraction. The latest one is MacOS Big Sur, anytime I open my MBP or actually anytime I step away and comeback it pops up a notification about my "Airpods Nearby" or something like that and if I don't respond it will do it again in 10 to 15 minutes (probably lost the signal for a moment) 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.
scrooched_moose 6y ago
I'm not sure what changed with COVID, but something has been much worse in the last 9 months. I've always used a personal system similar to what I understand "GTD" to be based on the article but everything about it has broken down. Instead of focusing on a task until it's completed, I'm constantly being yanked back and forth by whoever is yelling at the moment. 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.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  Don't know which industry you're in but it feels like my managers work burden has increased, and not because they pestered me more - as an IC my work are more or less unaffected, as even in office my development environment is cloud based anyways.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - darkerside 6y ago
    I'd agree. As a manager, conversations that used to be side of desk are now 30 minute meetings. The entire day is wall to wall Zoom calls. I try not to pester my team but it's a fine line between that and failing to keep communication lines open in a remote environment.
    - aantix 6y ago
      Async audio messages seems like it would cut down on the meetings? Something like Yac? https://www.yac.com/ https://www.yac.com/ * Not a customer, investor, or the janitor. Just looks like a good solution to a wall of meetings.
noobly 6y ago
The author of this article wrote Deep Work, which stresses the importance of, well, deep work over more shallow tasks like responding to emails (it is stressed that shallow is not intended to be a deragatory term). 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.
- CPLX 6y ago
  I tried reading Cal Newport's books and have found them terrible, even given the quite low standards of the genre. I really wanted to get excited about the concept of digital minimalism, but his book of the same name was almost completely devoid of insight. I struggled to find any information in it that wasn't already contained by thinking the two word title seemed not-bad as a prospective lifestyle change. 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.
  - porknubbins 6y ago
    I really enjoyed Deep Work because it solidified the idea of something I did sometimes anyway without realizing it so I could be more conscious of it. If you have had a long enough STEM education or career I almost think there has to be some deep work at some point, but maybe its already so ingrained that its nothing new. I don’t think there is an “epidemic shallowness” though, just that most jobs are mostly shallow.
cushychicken 6y ago
...it fell? 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/ 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.
_jal 6y ago
I read the book and tried to follow Allen's system until I stopped. But I did end up incorporating some of it into what I do. 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.
Glench 6y ago
For more context, Cal Newport discusses this article a little bit on his blog: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/11/17/when-did-productivity-become-personal/ https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/11/17/when-did-producti... > 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?
- emptysongglass 6y ago
  > 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.
  - freddie_mercury 6y ago
    I don't think that's the case and, as is often true with sweeping claims, it doesn't really stand up to a global survey. 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.
    - emptysongglass 6y ago
      You're agreeing with me. If societies with less respect for the self-sovereignty of their knowledge workers can't improve their productivity the solution indeed isn't more management and never was.
sn41 6y ago
My understanding is that GTD is for management-type tasks and deep work is for creative tasks. Paul Graham also has an article about allocating half-day units (1). But I guess that this is for a different type of work, not, for example, a sales rep. 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. (1) http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
ssivark 6y ago
Discussions of GTD aside, the article seems to be advocating for individual productivity to be externally managed (through “management intervention”), > 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 https://youtu.be/3B_1itqCKHo )
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  While I agree with you, I’m afraid that say a blacksmith could have made very similar arguments in the beginning of the industrialisation. At that time he was a skilled independent worker. His work conditions eventually became much worse, but the productivity increased enormously.
jbfunk 6y ago
This is too painful to even read.
x87678r 6y ago
If you're good at getting things done you just get more BS work. The most successful people I know do the bare minimum of regular work and concentrate on doing what they really want.
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  Underrated point is that it’s not about getting things done, it’s about doing the right things.
  - unishark 6y ago
    I think phrases like GTD/GID predate these systems and bring that connotation already. No one uses them to describe a person who constantly makes progress "doing stuff" but doesn't accomplish anything impactful. 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.
- kamaal 6y ago
  >>If you're good at getting things done you just get more BS work. 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.
  - deleted 6y ago
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Podwicker 6y ago
I only heard about SCRUM (to do / doing / done board) about a year ago, but it is my main go-to framework for productivity now. It let's you chalk up simple or very complex tasks and gives you an instant visual of where they are in terms of completion. You can do it digitally, but I prefer a physical board in my workspace. It let's me complete offload the anxiety that's mentioned in the article about trying to juggle/remember/prioritise tasks.
m463 6y ago
First, I read David Allen's book and liked it. I will point out that although valuable, it is not easy reading. for example: "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.
- montagg 6y ago
  You are not alone! This is how I used OmniFocus for a very long time (I use Things now but basically the same way I used OF). I also found the same dynamic: a lot of things went in, not a lot of things came out, and the things that did were incredibly helpful and usually focused around some very unambiguous context, like the grocery store or my boss or a doctor. 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.
ISL 6y ago
My feeling is that GTD is powerful for its stated goal but provides limited guidance on prioritization (among my personal weaknesses). It is a tool in the toolbox, but not a holistic approach. The notion that you can offload cognitive load to an organized system, a tenet of GTD, is really essential for me.
- dddw 6y ago
  It sort of feels like an holistic approach when I started out with GTD, but indeed I'm afraid you will right
wbharding 6y ago
The relevant trend that covid has accelerated is giving workers more autonomy. I don't think humans are good at figuring out how to resist the perils that come with it. Absent willpower, or a job that's inherently aligned with one's natural interests, human nature inevitably drifts toward distraction. 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.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  > Absent willpower, or a job that's inherently aligned with one's natural interests, human nature inevitably drifts toward distraction. 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.
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justinclift 6y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20201118005202/https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done http://web.archive.org/web/20201118005202/https://www.newyor... EDIT - Switched URL from the archive.today version, as it only had part of the content.
- deleted 6y ago
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- neonate 6y ago
  That's unfortunately the paywalled version. Has archive.is stopped working on New Yorker articles?
  - justinclift 6y ago
    Oh damn. I thought the article was just super short. :( Thanks for pointing out the problem. :) Looks like the Wayback Machine has the full thing, so I've just updated the URL.
    - justinclift 6y ago
      Something weird is going on. Even with the "full" article in the Wayback Machine, if the page is left open for very long it dynamically truncates to the short version. Some kind of timer code on the page maybe?
      - rwmj 6y ago
        Print to PDF worked for me. Try truncating that, Javascript :-)
        justinclift 6y ago
        Good thinking. :)
jl6 6y ago
I used to be a huge advocate of GTD, and I’m still a moderate advocate of it, but I’ve found it not so helpful in times where I am overcommitted or overloaded. It’s hard to spot being in that state, and it can be mistaken for being unproductive. GTD is built on the idea of processing your inputs and distilling them into next actions, but when your inputs start arriving faster than you can process them, and you start doing email over the weekend just to keep your head above water, and you find all your time is being spent curating that list of actions but not actually doing them... at that point, you need more than GTD - you need traditional management skills like delegation and negotiation and organizing people to take over those responsibilities.
- wj 6y ago
  I had a similar experience (wrote about it here: https://blog.startopz.com/2019/02/21/the-downside-to-getting-things-done/ https://blog.startopz.com/2019/02/21/the-downside-to-getting...). I was looking at a to do list that I couldn't accomplish in a year. 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.
madhadron 6y ago
So I'm one of the longest running implementors of GTD (almost twenty years now). I'm also one of least into "productivity pr0n." I switched from a Palm Pilot to OmniFocus, and that was my only major shift. I dread when I leave macOS and have to shift again. I've tweaked the system a bit, and it's been many years since I've read any of David Allen's books, though I've corresponded with him a bit, so I don't know how far I've diverged. 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.
- EricE 6y ago
  "It's about being able to take complete stock of your life on a regular basis." 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
gexla 6y ago
Tried to read Deep Work, which just seemed like a much simplified rehash of Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Then the replication crisis happened, which may have tagged some of the ideas in Flow as questionable. I don't think I would read anything more from Cal Newport.
- altrent 6y ago
  > Then the replication crisis happened, which may have tagged some of the ideas in Flow as questionable. Do you mind to expend? I am genuinely curious to understand what was debunked.
pantulis 6y ago
GTD is only a productivity system, you can choose between several ones. Also, there are a lot of productivity porn (apps, BuJos, YouTube gurus) and so on. The thing is that you need to understand what you can and cannot do with your time, and either you embrace it or you change it. 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).
codeyperson 6y ago
I think a lot of these problems would go away if we’d all just SLOW DOWN a little bit. The endless pursuit for more productivity is exhausting. Let’s pad those estimates a little. Have a laugh at the standups and the retro’s. And enjoy ourselves.
- cseleborg 6y ago
  I think this is an important comment. Work (and life) doesn't have to be a grind. Grind is surprisingly ineffective. 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.
troelsSteegin 6y ago
Newport did not mention "agile" per se, but in writing "Consider instead a system that externalizes work. Following the lead of software developers ..." he is clearly referencing that set of systems for organizing work. Agile, in the way that Newport is writing, is a way to shift autonomy and accountability to teams. The team collectively owns the mission articulated by management. Bosses are in the background. The team is an intermediary between bosses and individuals and acts as both a smart way of allocating work committments and throttling device on inbound work requests. Merlin Mann is a straw man for a limiting philopsophy of "doing it all"; systems that externalize work represent a philosophy working deliberately. The unstated assumption is that organizations will perform better this way too. 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.
- Terretta 6y ago
  Yes. Kanban is[1] GTD. Personal Kanban is a lovely bridge. See also Trello. 1. Depending on what the definition of “is” is.
Maro 6y ago
I really liked Cal Newport's first book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You", published in 2012 [1]. The titular sentence is great advice, one I've been following all my life. 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/1455509124 https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/14555091... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692 https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/...
cjfd 6y ago
This article really feels like some kind of straw man charicature of GTD, as I have seen before from Cal Newport. Ultimately a water tight productivity system, like GTD, allows one to choose for oneself what one considers the most important to work on. If you decide that the most important thing in your job is to always answer every email, that is great. You can create yourself a schedule with lots of room for answering email and move all other tasks to left over time slots. If you decide, on the other hand, that working in deep concentration on hard programming tasks is the main thing of your job you can do that too and reserve only half an hour a day for answering as much email as can be done in half an hour or for other adminstrative tasks. In all jobs there are usually more things that could be done than things that actually get done and a water tight productivity system, like GTD makes sure one can focus on what one considers important.
alexpotato 6y ago
Back when GTD started to become the hot new thing, it was often compared to Steven Covey's 7 habits. 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.
toyg 6y ago
Reads like a call to increased micromanagement...
- branweb 6y ago
  Agree. The argument seems to be: 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".
tmaly 6y ago
I like the idea of GTD, but when you are not given a set of priorities, the whole thing falls apart. If your in a position of fighting fires everyday, this system will not work for you.
lcall 6y ago
I would feel lost w/o my GTD-like system (from what I understand anyway). My daily routine (like a "self-program") with tasks, priorities, calendars, notes for review, habits in process of being formed, everything all smoothly integrated, inside this text/desktop (keyboard-oriented) app I wrote (free, AGPL, uses postgresql but I might move it to Rust and SQLite someday to simplify installation): http://onemodel.org http://onemodel.org (aka OM). 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.
reagle 6y ago
Folks might be interested in Hacking Life (available under a CC license at MIT Press). I have chapters on the history, practice, and excesses of hacking time and productivity. https://hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu/ https://hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu/

293 points by aarghh 6y ago

Google cache copy (no paywall): https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LbmYDMToHe8J:https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LbmYDM...

dddw 6y ago
Thanks
bartread 6y ago
Still only shows the first two paragraphs of the article for me, unfortunately.
- mxmilkb 6y ago
  https://outline.com/Km5Svm https://outline.com/Km5Svm
  - bartread 6y ago
    Thank you - much appreciated!

dddw 6y ago

Oeh look forward to read this

muttled 6y ago

What I got out of that was the combination of work autonomy and email culture causes us all to work at different paces in different ways, all tied together by making random, unplanned demands of others via email as we go about doing our job. This generates a bunch of work not visible to management and the company as a whole. The author suggests looking at programming sprints as a time where we define the work to be done and just let people do it without being interrupted. I would leave it up to the programmers to respond if they're actually left alone to do their work or if they're sitting in the same amount of useless meetings as the rest of us.

greggman3 6y ago
I'm going to take it in a different tangent. I need less distraction. The latest one is MacOS Big Sur, anytime I open my MBP or actually anytime I step away and comeback it pops up a notification about my "Airpods Nearby" or something like that and if I don't respond it will do it again in 10 to 15 minutes (probably lost the signal for a moment) 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.

scrooched_moose 6y ago

I'm not sure what changed with COVID, but something has been much worse in the last 9 months. I've always used a personal system similar to what I understand "GTD" to be based on the article but everything about it has broken down. Instead of focusing on a task until it's completed, I'm constantly being yanked back and forth by whoever is yelling at the moment. 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.

Aperocky 6y ago
Don't know which industry you're in but it feels like my managers work burden has increased, and not because they pestered me more - as an IC my work are more or less unaffected, as even in office my development environment is cloud based anyways.
- deleted 6y ago
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- darkerside 6y ago
  I'd agree. As a manager, conversations that used to be side of desk are now 30 minute meetings. The entire day is wall to wall Zoom calls. I try not to pester my team but it's a fine line between that and failing to keep communication lines open in a remote environment.
  - aantix 6y ago
    Async audio messages seems like it would cut down on the meetings? Something like Yac? https://www.yac.com/ https://www.yac.com/ * Not a customer, investor, or the janitor. Just looks like a good solution to a wall of meetings.

noobly 6y ago

The author of this article wrote Deep Work, which stresses the importance of, well, deep work over more shallow tasks like responding to emails (it is stressed that shallow is not intended to be a deragatory term). 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.

CPLX 6y ago
I tried reading Cal Newport's books and have found them terrible, even given the quite low standards of the genre. I really wanted to get excited about the concept of digital minimalism, but his book of the same name was almost completely devoid of insight. I struggled to find any information in it that wasn't already contained by thinking the two word title seemed not-bad as a prospective lifestyle change. 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.
- porknubbins 6y ago
  I really enjoyed Deep Work because it solidified the idea of something I did sometimes anyway without realizing it so I could be more conscious of it. If you have had a long enough STEM education or career I almost think there has to be some deep work at some point, but maybe its already so ingrained that its nothing new. I don’t think there is an “epidemic shallowness” though, just that most jobs are mostly shallow.

cushychicken 6y ago

...it fell? 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/ 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.

_jal 6y ago

I read the book and tried to follow Allen's system until I stopped. But I did end up incorporating some of it into what I do. 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.

Glench 6y ago

For more context, Cal Newport discusses this article a little bit on his blog: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/11/17/when-did-productivity-become-personal/ https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/11/17/when-did-producti... > 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?

emptysongglass 6y ago
> 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.
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  I don't think that's the case and, as is often true with sweeping claims, it doesn't really stand up to a global survey. 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.
  - emptysongglass 6y ago
    You're agreeing with me. If societies with less respect for the self-sovereignty of their knowledge workers can't improve their productivity the solution indeed isn't more management and never was.

sn41 6y ago

My understanding is that GTD is for management-type tasks and deep work is for creative tasks. Paul Graham also has an article about allocating half-day units (1). But I guess that this is for a different type of work, not, for example, a sales rep. 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. (1) http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

ssivark 6y ago

Discussions of GTD aside, the article seems to be advocating for individual productivity to be externally managed (through “management intervention”), > 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 https://youtu.be/3B_1itqCKHo )

Ma8ee 6y ago
While I agree with you, I’m afraid that say a blacksmith could have made very similar arguments in the beginning of the industrialisation. At that time he was a skilled independent worker. His work conditions eventually became much worse, but the productivity increased enormously.

jbfunk 6y ago

This is too painful to even read.

x87678r 6y ago

If you're good at getting things done you just get more BS work. The most successful people I know do the bare minimum of regular work and concentrate on doing what they really want.

throwaway1777 6y ago
Underrated point is that it’s not about getting things done, it’s about doing the right things.
- unishark 6y ago
  I think phrases like GTD/GID predate these systems and bring that connotation already. No one uses them to describe a person who constantly makes progress "doing stuff" but doesn't accomplish anything impactful. 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.
kamaal 6y ago
>>If you're good at getting things done you just get more BS work. 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.
- deleted 6y ago
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Podwicker 6y ago

I only heard about SCRUM (to do / doing / done board) about a year ago, but it is my main go-to framework for productivity now. It let's you chalk up simple or very complex tasks and gives you an instant visual of where they are in terms of completion. You can do it digitally, but I prefer a physical board in my workspace. It let's me complete offload the anxiety that's mentioned in the article about trying to juggle/remember/prioritise tasks.

m463 6y ago

First, I read David Allen's book and liked it. I will point out that although valuable, it is not easy reading. for example: "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.

montagg 6y ago
You are not alone! This is how I used OmniFocus for a very long time (I use Things now but basically the same way I used OF). I also found the same dynamic: a lot of things went in, not a lot of things came out, and the things that did were incredibly helpful and usually focused around some very unambiguous context, like the grocery store or my boss or a doctor. 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.

ISL 6y ago

My feeling is that GTD is powerful for its stated goal but provides limited guidance on prioritization (among my personal weaknesses). It is a tool in the toolbox, but not a holistic approach. The notion that you can offload cognitive load to an organized system, a tenet of GTD, is really essential for me.

dddw 6y ago
It sort of feels like an holistic approach when I started out with GTD, but indeed I'm afraid you will right

wbharding 6y ago

The relevant trend that covid has accelerated is giving workers more autonomy. I don't think humans are good at figuring out how to resist the perils that come with it. Absent willpower, or a job that's inherently aligned with one's natural interests, human nature inevitably drifts toward distraction. 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.

dcolkitt 6y ago
> Absent willpower, or a job that's inherently aligned with one's natural interests, human nature inevitably drifts toward distraction. 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.

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justinclift 6y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20201118005202/https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done http://web.archive.org/web/20201118005202/https://www.newyor... EDIT - Switched URL from the archive.today version, as it only had part of the content.

deleted 6y ago
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neonate 6y ago
That's unfortunately the paywalled version. Has archive.is stopped working on New Yorker articles?
- justinclift 6y ago
  Oh damn. I thought the article was just super short. :( Thanks for pointing out the problem. :) Looks like the Wayback Machine has the full thing, so I've just updated the URL.
  - justinclift 6y ago
    Something weird is going on. Even with the "full" article in the Wayback Machine, if the page is left open for very long it dynamically truncates to the short version. Some kind of timer code on the page maybe?
    - rwmj 6y ago
      Print to PDF worked for me. Try truncating that, Javascript :-)
      - justinclift 6y ago
        Good thinking. :)

jl6 6y ago

I used to be a huge advocate of GTD, and I’m still a moderate advocate of it, but I’ve found it not so helpful in times where I am overcommitted or overloaded. It’s hard to spot being in that state, and it can be mistaken for being unproductive. GTD is built on the idea of processing your inputs and distilling them into next actions, but when your inputs start arriving faster than you can process them, and you start doing email over the weekend just to keep your head above water, and you find all your time is being spent curating that list of actions but not actually doing them... at that point, you need more than GTD - you need traditional management skills like delegation and negotiation and organizing people to take over those responsibilities.

wj 6y ago
I had a similar experience (wrote about it here: https://blog.startopz.com/2019/02/21/the-downside-to-getting-things-done/ https://blog.startopz.com/2019/02/21/the-downside-to-getting...). I was looking at a to do list that I couldn't accomplish in a year. 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.

madhadron 6y ago

So I'm one of the longest running implementors of GTD (almost twenty years now). I'm also one of least into "productivity pr0n." I switched from a Palm Pilot to OmniFocus, and that was my only major shift. I dread when I leave macOS and have to shift again. I've tweaked the system a bit, and it's been many years since I've read any of David Allen's books, though I've corresponded with him a bit, so I don't know how far I've diverged. 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.

EricE 6y ago
"It's about being able to take complete stock of your life on a regular basis." 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

gexla 6y ago

Tried to read Deep Work, which just seemed like a much simplified rehash of Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Then the replication crisis happened, which may have tagged some of the ideas in Flow as questionable. I don't think I would read anything more from Cal Newport.

altrent 6y ago
> Then the replication crisis happened, which may have tagged some of the ideas in Flow as questionable. Do you mind to expend? I am genuinely curious to understand what was debunked.

pantulis 6y ago

GTD is only a productivity system, you can choose between several ones. Also, there are a lot of productivity porn (apps, BuJos, YouTube gurus) and so on. The thing is that you need to understand what you can and cannot do with your time, and either you embrace it or you change it. 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).

codeyperson 6y ago

I think a lot of these problems would go away if we’d all just SLOW DOWN a little bit. The endless pursuit for more productivity is exhausting. Let’s pad those estimates a little. Have a laugh at the standups and the retro’s. And enjoy ourselves.

cseleborg 6y ago
I think this is an important comment. Work (and life) doesn't have to be a grind. Grind is surprisingly ineffective. 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.

troelsSteegin 6y ago

Newport did not mention "agile" per se, but in writing "Consider instead a system that externalizes work. Following the lead of software developers ..." he is clearly referencing that set of systems for organizing work. Agile, in the way that Newport is writing, is a way to shift autonomy and accountability to teams. The team collectively owns the mission articulated by management. Bosses are in the background. The team is an intermediary between bosses and individuals and acts as both a smart way of allocating work committments and throttling device on inbound work requests. Merlin Mann is a straw man for a limiting philopsophy of "doing it all"; systems that externalize work represent a philosophy working deliberately. The unstated assumption is that organizations will perform better this way too. 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.

Terretta 6y ago
Yes. Kanban is[1] GTD. Personal Kanban is a lovely bridge. See also Trello. 1. Depending on what the definition of “is” is.

Maro 6y ago

I really liked Cal Newport's first book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You", published in 2012 [1]. The titular sentence is great advice, one I've been following all my life. 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/1455509124 https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/14555091... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692 https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/...

cjfd 6y ago

This article really feels like some kind of straw man charicature of GTD, as I have seen before from Cal Newport. Ultimately a water tight productivity system, like GTD, allows one to choose for oneself what one considers the most important to work on. If you decide that the most important thing in your job is to always answer every email, that is great. You can create yourself a schedule with lots of room for answering email and move all other tasks to left over time slots. If you decide, on the other hand, that working in deep concentration on hard programming tasks is the main thing of your job you can do that too and reserve only half an hour a day for answering as much email as can be done in half an hour or for other adminstrative tasks. In all jobs there are usually more things that could be done than things that actually get done and a water tight productivity system, like GTD makes sure one can focus on what one considers important.

alexpotato 6y ago

Back when GTD started to become the hot new thing, it was often compared to Steven Covey's 7 habits. 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.

toyg 6y ago

Reads like a call to increased micromanagement...

branweb 6y ago
Agree. The argument seems to be: 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".

tmaly 6y ago

I like the idea of GTD, but when you are not given a set of priorities, the whole thing falls apart. If your in a position of fighting fires everyday, this system will not work for you.

lcall 6y ago

I would feel lost w/o my GTD-like system (from what I understand anyway). My daily routine (like a "self-program") with tasks, priorities, calendars, notes for review, habits in process of being formed, everything all smoothly integrated, inside this text/desktop (keyboard-oriented) app I wrote (free, AGPL, uses postgresql but I might move it to Rust and SQLite someday to simplify installation): http://onemodel.org http://onemodel.org (aka OM). 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.

reagle 6y ago

Folks might be interested in Hacking Life (available under a CC license at MIT Press). I have chapters on the history, practice, and excesses of hacking time and productivity. https://hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu/ https://hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu/