I love seeing all the comments in this thread talking about things they use from GTD. I also extracted a ton of useful tips, tricks, and concepts from GTD that

I love seeing all the comments in this thread talking about things they use from GTD. I also extracted a ton of useful tips, tricks, and concepts from GTD that are now just part of my working life. Thinking through concrete next actions, having an inbox to throw things everything, having dedicated time to process through my inbox and think through priorities, putting anything involving time on my calendar (including "tickler" reminders to think about and take action). One time I showed a friend the GTD book. She opened it to a random page, read for a moment, and said "oh! I can use this technique!" and she incorporated it. It seems the article's claim is that GTD takes an individual approach whereas it might be more fruitful to take a systemic approach — why is GTD needed in the first place (tons of ad-hoc tasks generated by others for you) and is there a way to obviate the need for it upstream? I'm pretty sympathetic to this argument. We humans can stretch our capacity for cognitive work quite far, but I think almost everyone has had the experience of overload when our natural human limits are stretched for too long. I think if the author wanted to develop this argument he wouldn't have stopped with suggesting a limp theoretical proposal but done an empirical investigation of organizations that already did what he was proposing and how it went a la Frederic Laloux's brilliant "Reinventing Organizations". Or maybe just build the software and studied how organizations used it. Maybe Newport did some of that in his books, I'm not sure.