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Some notes from someone who's attempted GTD for 15 years. My trouble with it is that it really hasn't worked when your lists become large. > When you first sta

Some notes from someone who's attempted GTD for 15 years. My trouble with it is that it really hasn't worked when your lists become large. > When you first start to use GTD you should take an hour to write down all things you want to—or have to—do. An hour is not even close to being enough. A whole weekend may get you to 50%. > If it’s something that you want to remind yourself about later (“I really didn’t understand this article, I should have a look at it again in two weeks”) it should go into your calendar or your tickler file The problem is that my tickler files become bloated with these, and it becomes a daily burden to open that day's file and try to decide. If I deferred something till later "because I couldn't decide what to do with it", there's a 90% chance I'll defer it again. These are items I want to work on actively, and not put in the Someday/Maybe list. > This is where the some day/maybe list comes it. ... This list should be reviewed weekly along with the rest of the system as described in the weekly review section below. Perhaps many people don't have as much aspiration (or imagination), but my Someday/Maybe list is huge - hundreds of potential TODOs/projects. Reviewing that every week is a huge burden, so it's not done. I treat Someday/Maybe almost as a garbage dump - I don't look at it, but my brain takes comfort that I've captured it somewhere. It's got to the point that I now have an "intermediate" list in between my active and someday/maybe. This list contains items I must do, but I've placed them there because I lack the bandwidth. Whenever I finish a project, I move items from this list to the "Active" list. I need this intermediate list because I know once something goes to Someday/Maybe, it's practically lost in all the noise. One of the problems with GTD is it doesn't address how to focus or prioritize, nor what to ask yourself during the review. I've found making a Do Not Do list to be far more effective (as in, at the beginning of the year, I list projects that I commit to not doing until I'm done with the ones I do want to do). Listing goals for the year and asking myself weekly/monthly what work I did not tied to those goals is helpful during the review.

manholio 4y ago
Sounds like you are an overachiever. The big implicit assumption of GTD is that, while it makes you more productive, there is still a limit on how much you can take on. Workload is not specifically addressed, but implicitly the overflow will go to the Someday folder. I think the answer to this problem is not any productivity trick, but to aim for exponential growth of your business, career, etc. so that Delegate becomes the primary workhorse instead of Next Actions. Prioritize actions you perform and projects you start so that they are conducive to a long term self-sustaining increase in your productivity. And accept that you may have limited success/luck in unleashing the exponential and that some projects will forever stay out of your linear reach.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  > Sounds like you are an overachiever. Not at all. I'm not trying to achieve all, or even most of those things. I know I won't even be able to do a tenth of them. One of the core ideas behind GTD is to get these things out of the mind and into a trustworthy system. My Someday/Maybe list is huge because I get it out of my mind and put it somewhere. How many of them I get to do in my life is not at all a concern I have. > Prioritize actions you perform and projects you start so that they are conducive to a long a self-sustaining increase in your productivity. When your list is hundreds of items long, and GTD tells you to prioritize every week, that is unsustainable. For my work GTD, things are simpler. The scope is limited, and there's not attachment to any project. The job dictates most of what needs to be done and it makes prioritizing almost trivial. It's the GTD for the non-work stuff that explodes.
  - bachmeier 4y ago
    > When your list is hundreds of items long, and GTD tells you to prioritize every week, that is unsustainable. One of the nice things about GTD is that you make everything explicit. It quickly becomes obvious when you have too many active projects, nudging you to decide which project are really worth doing. The same goes for having too many next actions. > It's the GTD for the non-work stuff that explodes. Great if you're actually getting all that non-work stuff done, but I just can't imagine you're doing hundreds of non-work items each week.
    - BeetleB 4y ago
      > It quickly becomes obvious when you have too many active projects The issue I'm discussing isn't the number of active projects, but the number of someday/maybe projects. > Great if you're actually getting all that non-work stuff done, but I just can't imagine you're doing hundreds of non-work items each week. See paragraph above. The issue I'm complaining about is that GTD tells you to review the Someday/Maybe list often (e.g. every week). I'm pointing out the infeasibility of that. Culling the Someday/Maybe list is fundamentally problematic in GTD, as the whole point is to get these ideas out of our head and into a list somewhere.
d0mine 4y ago
One trick is to schedule a fixed block of time e.g., an hour before launch every morning and work on these maybe/someday tasks (you can choose the next task using whatever criteria you like e.g., "what looks the most interesting dopamine-generating right now" or "boring but important even if without a fixed date" depending on your needs (or a combination of the two: start with interesting, and persevere through the boring parts by using the fixed time slot)
- BeetleB 4y ago
  It's a nice trick, but what is it trying to achieve? Also, if I'm going to spend an hour daily on Someday/Maybe tasks, then those tasks really are not "Someday/Maybe", right? Are you really suggesting I look over that list daily? I think people are misreading my comment as saying "I have so many things I want to do, and there isn't enough time to do them, and GTD doesn't help." This is not my problem. My problem is: "I have a lot of items on my Someday/Maybe list, over 90% of which will not be done, and that's OK. Reviewing this list every week (as GTD tells me to) to decide if I should move any to the 'Active' list is a huge burden"
  - packetslave 4y ago
    One thing I did to address exactly this (way too many items in Someday/Maybe to review effectively every week) was to separate the list into two: - Someday (I'm 90% sure I am going to do this, but I'm not actively working on it right now). This gets looked at during my weekly review. - Maybe (I might do this at some point, but I'm 90% sure I won't do it in the next month). This gets looked at during my monthly review.
    - BeetleB 4y ago
      Yes, this is similar to my intermediate list above (probably should call it "Backlog"). These are things I must do - just not now. For the "Maybe", to be frank, I just stopped updating it. Instead I now have a sort of bucket list: Things I'd really like to do before I die. Even if I can't do all, I should be able to do quite a bit of these. It's basically a "higher priority" Maybe list. The idea is when a random thought pops up into my head ("Write a blog post on X"), I ask myself "Does this belong in the bucket list?" If not: "Wouldn't my time be better spent on the bucket list?" If yes, I just discard the thought. Sure, it'll pop into my head often, but why bother adding it to my "Maybe" list if I can't be bothered to review that huge list?
zeitlupe 4y ago
> An hour is not even close to being enough. A whole weekend may get you to 50%. This is one problem I have with GTD: It talks and talks about collecting and sorting tasks but does not care much about whether you should do them in the first place. It invites overloading yourself with tasks and want-to-dos instead of thinking about if that tasks are truly important to you in the light of a perpetual shortage of time to do all the stuff you would like to.
- dougskinner 4y ago
  I don't think this is an accurate assessment. Yes, GTD wants you to get everything out of your head and onto the "paper" in front of you. And yes, this might take a long time for some people, up to hours or days. But the key thing is it's all written down. Once it is, then you go through the collected inputs and actually figure out what to do with them. But you can't do that while your brain is still going "did I write this other thing down?" You need a clear mind before you start processing.
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/ https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/ The five basic steps of GTD: 1. Capture 2. Clarify 3. Organize 4. Reflect 5. Engage (2) and (4), in particular, deal with whether the actions are worth doing along with the when and where of doing them. Which is covered in all the decent summaries I've read and the book itself.
euroderf 4y ago
> It's got to the point that I now have an "intermediate" list in between my active and someday/maybe. This list contains items I must do, but I've placed them there because I lack the bandwidth. In an Eisenhower matrix, this sounds like "Important" but not "Urgent", i.e. the upper right quadrant. Things that are not getting done this week, but are likely complex, so they can benefit from providing details. The Eisenhower matrix relates to my main beef about most productivity schemes, which is that every task has not less than half a dozen attributes to set. With a 4-corner matrix, just drop it in a corner without having to give it a lot of thought or fiddle with a lot of UI widgets. Maybe fill in more widget-level details after your subconscious has had a chance to mull it over.
- coutego 4y ago
  I had a similar experience and concluded that the most important thing is to learn to drop as many things as possible. If the list are getting too big it just means we are trying to do too much. The objective should be to trim those list down as much as possible. Too many someday/maybe things? Well, time to decide to move them to never/surely not category (i.e. delete them or put them in the "won't do" category). Too many things in the TODO/Next/...? Well, it's time to think whether they absolutely need to be done. If they really, REALLY do, do they need to be done by you? Delegating, asking someone to do them or just externalizing them to some service can be a possibility. Focusing is not as much about deciding what to do as to decide what not to do. I know, they are logically equivalent things, but the main issue is that most of us are not psicologically well prepared to accept that we just won't do many things we would like to do, so we invent complex systems to keep track of what we won't have time to do and unnecessarily stress us in the process. Learning to just let go is one of the most useful things I learnt in life.

manholio 4y ago

Sounds like you are an overachiever. The big implicit assumption of GTD is that, while it makes you more productive, there is still a limit on how much you can take on. Workload is not specifically addressed, but implicitly the overflow will go to the Someday folder. I think the answer to this problem is not any productivity trick, but to aim for exponential growth of your business, career, etc. so that Delegate becomes the primary workhorse instead of Next Actions. Prioritize actions you perform and projects you start so that they are conducive to a long term self-sustaining increase in your productivity. And accept that you may have limited success/luck in unleashing the exponential and that some projects will forever stay out of your linear reach.

BeetleB 4y ago
> Sounds like you are an overachiever. Not at all. I'm not trying to achieve all, or even most of those things. I know I won't even be able to do a tenth of them. One of the core ideas behind GTD is to get these things out of the mind and into a trustworthy system. My Someday/Maybe list is huge because I get it out of my mind and put it somewhere. How many of them I get to do in my life is not at all a concern I have. > Prioritize actions you perform and projects you start so that they are conducive to a long a self-sustaining increase in your productivity. When your list is hundreds of items long, and GTD tells you to prioritize every week, that is unsustainable. For my work GTD, things are simpler. The scope is limited, and there's not attachment to any project. The job dictates most of what needs to be done and it makes prioritizing almost trivial. It's the GTD for the non-work stuff that explodes.
- bachmeier 4y ago
  > When your list is hundreds of items long, and GTD tells you to prioritize every week, that is unsustainable. One of the nice things about GTD is that you make everything explicit. It quickly becomes obvious when you have too many active projects, nudging you to decide which project are really worth doing. The same goes for having too many next actions. > It's the GTD for the non-work stuff that explodes. Great if you're actually getting all that non-work stuff done, but I just can't imagine you're doing hundreds of non-work items each week.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    > It quickly becomes obvious when you have too many active projects The issue I'm discussing isn't the number of active projects, but the number of someday/maybe projects. > Great if you're actually getting all that non-work stuff done, but I just can't imagine you're doing hundreds of non-work items each week. See paragraph above. The issue I'm complaining about is that GTD tells you to review the Someday/Maybe list often (e.g. every week). I'm pointing out the infeasibility of that. Culling the Someday/Maybe list is fundamentally problematic in GTD, as the whole point is to get these ideas out of our head and into a list somewhere.

d0mine 4y ago

One trick is to schedule a fixed block of time e.g., an hour before launch every morning and work on these maybe/someday tasks (you can choose the next task using whatever criteria you like e.g., "what looks the most interesting dopamine-generating right now" or "boring but important even if without a fixed date" depending on your needs (or a combination of the two: start with interesting, and persevere through the boring parts by using the fixed time slot)

BeetleB 4y ago
It's a nice trick, but what is it trying to achieve? Also, if I'm going to spend an hour daily on Someday/Maybe tasks, then those tasks really are not "Someday/Maybe", right? Are you really suggesting I look over that list daily? I think people are misreading my comment as saying "I have so many things I want to do, and there isn't enough time to do them, and GTD doesn't help." This is not my problem. My problem is: "I have a lot of items on my Someday/Maybe list, over 90% of which will not be done, and that's OK. Reviewing this list every week (as GTD tells me to) to decide if I should move any to the 'Active' list is a huge burden"
- packetslave 4y ago
  One thing I did to address exactly this (way too many items in Someday/Maybe to review effectively every week) was to separate the list into two: - Someday (I'm 90% sure I am going to do this, but I'm not actively working on it right now). This gets looked at during my weekly review. - Maybe (I might do this at some point, but I'm 90% sure I won't do it in the next month). This gets looked at during my monthly review.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    Yes, this is similar to my intermediate list above (probably should call it "Backlog"). These are things I must do - just not now. For the "Maybe", to be frank, I just stopped updating it. Instead I now have a sort of bucket list: Things I'd really like to do before I die. Even if I can't do all, I should be able to do quite a bit of these. It's basically a "higher priority" Maybe list. The idea is when a random thought pops up into my head ("Write a blog post on X"), I ask myself "Does this belong in the bucket list?" If not: "Wouldn't my time be better spent on the bucket list?" If yes, I just discard the thought. Sure, it'll pop into my head often, but why bother adding it to my "Maybe" list if I can't be bothered to review that huge list?

zeitlupe 4y ago

> An hour is not even close to being enough. A whole weekend may get you to 50%. This is one problem I have with GTD: It talks and talks about collecting and sorting tasks but does not care much about whether you should do them in the first place. It invites overloading yourself with tasks and want-to-dos instead of thinking about if that tasks are truly important to you in the light of a perpetual shortage of time to do all the stuff you would like to.

dougskinner 4y ago
I don't think this is an accurate assessment. Yes, GTD wants you to get everything out of your head and onto the "paper" in front of you. And yes, this might take a long time for some people, up to hours or days. But the key thing is it's all written down. Once it is, then you go through the collected inputs and actually figure out what to do with them. But you can't do that while your brain is still going "did I write this other thing down?" You need a clear mind before you start processing.
Jtsummers 4y ago
https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/ https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/ The five basic steps of GTD: 1. Capture 2. Clarify 3. Organize 4. Reflect 5. Engage (2) and (4), in particular, deal with whether the actions are worth doing along with the when and where of doing them. Which is covered in all the decent summaries I've read and the book itself.

euroderf 4y ago

> It's got to the point that I now have an "intermediate" list in between my active and someday/maybe. This list contains items I must do, but I've placed them there because I lack the bandwidth. In an Eisenhower matrix, this sounds like "Important" but not "Urgent", i.e. the upper right quadrant. Things that are not getting done this week, but are likely complex, so they can benefit from providing details. The Eisenhower matrix relates to my main beef about most productivity schemes, which is that every task has not less than half a dozen attributes to set. With a 4-corner matrix, just drop it in a corner without having to give it a lot of thought or fiddle with a lot of UI widgets. Maybe fill in more widget-level details after your subconscious has had a chance to mull it over.

coutego 4y ago
I had a similar experience and concluded that the most important thing is to learn to drop as many things as possible. If the list are getting too big it just means we are trying to do too much. The objective should be to trim those list down as much as possible. Too many someday/maybe things? Well, time to decide to move them to never/surely not category (i.e. delete them or put them in the "won't do" category). Too many things in the TODO/Next/...? Well, it's time to think whether they absolutely need to be done. If they really, REALLY do, do they need to be done by you? Delegating, asking someone to do them or just externalizing them to some service can be a possibility. Focusing is not as much about deciding what to do as to decide what not to do. I know, they are logically equivalent things, but the main issue is that most of us are not psicologically well prepared to accept that we just won't do many things we would like to do, so we invent complex systems to keep track of what we won't have time to do and unnecessarily stress us in the process. Learning to just let go is one of the most useful things I learnt in life.