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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.
by 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 agoI 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.