Discussions of GTD aside, the article seems to be advocating for individual productivity to be externally managed (through “management intervention”), > It see

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 )