6 ms·

Getting (Unremarkable) Things Done: The Problem With David Allen’s Universalism

44 points by dctoedt 14y ago

ErikAugust 14y ago
I agree with the author. I remember reading a Seth Godin post from about six months ago that addressed this albeit in different words. I wrote about the subject myself a bit here: http://sicklittlebeast.com/2012/07/25/how-does-it-fit-in/ http://sicklittlebeast.com/2012/07/25/how-does-it-fit-in/ "Are you avoiding important work by doing busy work?"
- proksoup 14y ago
  I was very pleased to see the first couple of comments on this agreeing completely. I often get the vibe the HN community doesn't understand this risk of the GTD philosophy, but apparently I was happily mistaken.
dirtyaura 14y ago
pg wrote about this very subject in his essay Good and Bad Procrastination http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
- ErikAugust 14y ago
  "That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff." That's it, really.
codex 14y ago
While I agree completely, it's worth mentioning that the author does use GTD for his mindless, shallow tasks (that he can't delegate or get rid of). Presumably that boost in efficiency gives him more time for deep work.
- ErikAugust 14y ago
  Yeah - GTD is a useful system - partially for the reason that it can "open you up" to clearer thinking and deeper work.
vl 14y ago
I think author misused GTD. GTD allows me to dedicate uninterrupted time for "deep work" precisely because I know that there is dedicated time and place for dealing with "shallow" work and it's take out of the way. Allen himself writes about not being to do everything, for me it means that there should be conscious effort to limit amount of "shallow work" you do and may be decide not to do some items at all. In other word if all you time goes to "shallow work", then you prioritized your projects wrong. Also, GTD book is one of the most badly written books, the style is watery, and just hard to get through. It could be compressed threefold without the loss of meaning. I opted out for audio version which I could listen to on faster speed. This is a pity that invaluable advise comes in such package, recently I started to re-read, but now thinking about trying to reading some of this "GTD Summary" books instead. I wish somebody would buy license from Allen to rewrite it in digestible, concise way. Also, I was using (and paying for) RTM for years for my list keeping, but it's just not optimized for GTD and web UI needs long-required update. Nirvana HQ finally got smartphone client, I switched to it and it's really good. Nirvana's web UI is well structured, compared to RTM it needs better keyboard shortcuts and group operations, but overall it's much easier to use for GTD than RTM.
- roopeshv 14y ago
  what are these "GTD Summary" books you talk about?
  - vl 14y ago
    There are (as far as I understand) unauthorized summaries on Amazon. This one looks promising, but it's hard to assess the quality without actually reading it: http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Summary-Productivity/dp/1477490086 http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Summary-Productivi...
- cabbeer 14y ago
  doit.im works perfectly with GTD methodology.
gomox_ar 14y ago
I agree as well, it definitely matches my experience. GTD will only work on a certain type of work. In startup environments there are often significant tasks that go out of your comfort zone (if you're an engineer, you may have to write a tutorial or a script for a video). Those don't typically go on my "pending" list although they are very important to the business, sometimes even more so than dealing with whatever technical situation that might have come up in the last few days. This is why I have stopped feeling guilty about what I used to call "procrastination". Sometimes you have to avoid your task list and work on the complex things. This said, the Service Desk / Issue tracking system we develop adopted a GTD-like philosophy in its latest iteration (a pretty significant UX change) and the feedback from our internal and external customers has been outstanding. It helps you keep your head level.
pseut 14y ago
Somewhat agree with the author, but I make the big tasks calendar events or put them on their own context list (ie "edit paper" is not on my office list, but my "research" next action list). The idea with GTD is to choose the best next task, not just hammer them out mindlessly, so I think the author misunderstands GTD.
1123581321 14y ago
For people who want to focus but cannot always, GTD is a floor. While doing deep work, he should do nothing else. When he is not, or more importantly when he cannot, he at least takes care of small things and chips away at his big projects until he's pulled back into them completely. I like a literary analogy here: I would recommend GTD to an obituaries editor for everything. I would have recommended it to Samuel Coleridge to keep him working during his low periods, since they prevented him from finishing his work. I would never recommend it to a busy genius like Shakespeare or Dosteyevsky for fear of ruining their ability to write (I assume I would have recognized their genius as a contemporary; please work with me.)
jere 14y ago
>As a graduate student, I didn’t need better lists of next actions. I needed instead to be training my ability to focus hard on meaningful things for long periods of time — even after it becomes uncomfortable. This is the part I'd like to figure out how to do.
- neltnerb 14y ago
  Well, I'm one of the fortunate few who managed to escape from graduate school (Masters and PhD) in 4.5 years in an engineering field. I am the first to admit that I am very, very, very lucky in a variety of ways that made this possible. But one of them is as follows. I similarly have a hard time focusing for long periods of time. Like many people, while I'm not manic-depressive, I have manic-depressive tendencies. For a week or two I feel depressed and don't want to do anything. Then for a week or two I'm really excited about research and get a ton done. Then back to depressed. It's just the way I am, and my situation doesn't seem very unique from talking to many of my friends. Sometimes research is inspiring, sometimes it's frustrating and tedious. I think much of that is perception, and that really all that's changing is a fundamental chemical shift in your moods. In any case, what I realized back in undergrad is that when I'm in a depressed mood, I don't work. At least, not on creative, difficult, interesting stuff. It's just impossible, intimidating, frustrating, and a waste of my time. All it does it work to prolong my depression. Instead, I focus on what I call cultivating boredom. I do things like read hacker news until I've read all the articles. Or god forbid read slashdot. Or NPR. Or meditate. Or much better; practice karate, go for a walk, take mind altering substances (you know, like nicotine), hang out with friends, cook, that sort of stuff. Sure, I still take care of the little logistical things that need doing, but I don't try to do creative work when I'm in this mood. It's counterproductive. Instead, I basically use up all my avenues of distraction, and eventually doing that creative, hard, difficult, complicated work becomes attractive again in comparison with sitting at my computer reading facebook. This process takes about 3-4 days. Then, I suddenly just... flip. And then I'm manic again, and I'm roaring through piles of highly creative work that is of incredibly good quality. So instead of wearing myself out doing superficial tasks, I try to actually let myself rest and most importantly, become bored so that my mind can recover. This is the only way I have found to work productively as a graduate student. It's only anecdotal, of course, but I probably worked an average of 25 hours a week. I'd spend two weeks straight working 9-10 hour days and then coming home and writing grants and papers and thesis. Then I'd burn myself out and do literally nothing worth even remembering for two weeks. And after two weeks of that I'd be bored and really excited about working a ridiculous amount again. And in this way, I managed to graduate in 4.5 years, in a lab where the median graduate student was in their 5th year, and many were in their 7th year. It's quality of work, not quantity of work, nor time spent in lab that lets you graduate. Anyway, worked for me. Might not work for you. Try at your own risk. But I've never found another way to work that makes me happy, lets me get through my depressive periods in a reasonable period of time, and which produces high quality creative work products.
Karunamon 14y ago
Something I've found with GTD is something that's somewhat alluded to in the book. Granted I don't remember the book outright (perhaps I could do with another reread...), but the gist is that if you're having trouble with a "thing" on your list, you just need to reduce that "thing" down more because it's too broadly scoped as stated. Instead of "work singlemindedly and with complete focus on MyNewWebApp", perhaps "Write user authentication module for MyNewWebApp" or even "Get basic username/password authentication working for etc." Just about anything and everything can be broken down this way; in fact I struggle to imagine something that is incompatible with this! The author of this piece even fails to give any examples of what he means by something that couldn't be broken down. The other thing is that GTD is a framework. You can follow the way the book tells you to do it to the letter, but then you're missing out. Start with the book, add a little, take a little, mix in whatever works for you. Once you've got the foundation, improvements will come naturally. I'm doing a little GTD mixed in with pomodoro right now and it works incredibly well for keeping my ADD-addled mind in check.
- SatvikBeri 14y ago
  Just about anything and everything can be broken down this way; in fact I struggle to imagine something that is incompatible with this! The author of this piece even fails to give any examples of what he means by something that couldn't be broken down. Any chunk of work that pushes the limits of your brainpower is hard to break down into pieces. For example, coming up with a Mathematical proof. You might be able to break the problem down to some extent, but there's a lot of time spent just thinking, and it's very difficult to predict how long solving a problem will take.
thoughtcriminal 14y ago
The problem isn't GTD, it's this desire to do and be "remarkable" all the time. To only want to do "deep work" so people will remark about it and then tell other people how awesome you are is shallow at best. I think Dale Carnegie had it right when he said: Generally speaking we like the big stuff because it seems to make an impact. Huge tasks should equal huge rewards, theoretically. If you do a lot of little things really well, however, it reflects positively on your character. You seem like a person who gets a lot done and does a great job. The little tasks may not always seem exciting, but you have a lot to gain by completing them with the same passion as a larger project.
maaku 14y ago
Thank you - you solidified my own thinking as a GTD practitioner. I think the last paragraph is essential. What GTD has done for me is mechanize the rote, bureaucratic aspects of life and work, which leaves more time and an uncluttered mind to haphazardly pursue creative, open-ended tasks.
b1daly 14y ago
I made a few attempts at GTD but got stuck on something that is related to the authors point. It had to do with the literalism of the "next action." Most of what I experience as a problem in my work relates to getting overwhelmed by the scope of ongoing projects. I'm a music producer, a lot of the projects I do go over a period of weeks or months. I could never figure out the level of granularity for the next action. A common unit of my work is a song. Producing a song has many such levels. The highest/largest would be "produce song X. From there there are obvious chunks: pre-production, recording, mixing. Recording could be broken down to basic tracks and overdubs. Overdubs to vocals, horns, percussion. And so on. So on a given day, I might have planned to mix a song (could take a day). Is my next action "mix the song" or is it "boot the computer." The task is a whole series of steps that all must be completed. After a while I started to think that my problem wasn't getting started, it was getting finished! Mixing music is a difficult task that requires a lot of concentration, and I am usually very resource constrained. Since I have a lot of projects that I am working on, more than I can do, I'm already heavily prioritizing my time. After a while it just seemed like more trouble than it was worth to write out all of these next action, as they were usually obvious. What I experience as my problem is not having enough time to get a project done. I'm working efficiently, but as I come up against the resource constraint, which I always do, my subjective experience of stress goes up, and I start getting tired, the stress adding to my stress so to speak. This is when I'm in the thick of it working as hard as I can. I'm sure I am missing something with GTD, but I gave up on it pretty quickly. Though it did make me feel a lot more comfortable with deleting/trashing things I don't need. I'm probably just in the wrong business.

44 points by dctoedt 14y ago

I agree with the author. I remember reading a Seth Godin post from about six months ago that addressed this albeit in different words. I wrote about the subject myself a bit here: http://sicklittlebeast.com/2012/07/25/how-does-it-fit-in/ http://sicklittlebeast.com/2012/07/25/how-does-it-fit-in/ "Are you avoiding important work by doing busy work?"

proksoup 14y ago
I was very pleased to see the first couple of comments on this agreeing completely. I often get the vibe the HN community doesn't understand this risk of the GTD philosophy, but apparently I was happily mistaken.

dirtyaura 14y ago

pg wrote about this very subject in his essay Good and Bad Procrastination http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

ErikAugust 14y ago
"That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff." That's it, really.

codex 14y ago

While I agree completely, it's worth mentioning that the author does use GTD for his mindless, shallow tasks (that he can't delegate or get rid of). Presumably that boost in efficiency gives him more time for deep work.

ErikAugust 14y ago
Yeah - GTD is a useful system - partially for the reason that it can "open you up" to clearer thinking and deeper work.

vl 14y ago

I think author misused GTD. GTD allows me to dedicate uninterrupted time for "deep work" precisely because I know that there is dedicated time and place for dealing with "shallow" work and it's take out of the way. Allen himself writes about not being to do everything, for me it means that there should be conscious effort to limit amount of "shallow work" you do and may be decide not to do some items at all. In other word if all you time goes to "shallow work", then you prioritized your projects wrong. Also, GTD book is one of the most badly written books, the style is watery, and just hard to get through. It could be compressed threefold without the loss of meaning. I opted out for audio version which I could listen to on faster speed. This is a pity that invaluable advise comes in such package, recently I started to re-read, but now thinking about trying to reading some of this "GTD Summary" books instead. I wish somebody would buy license from Allen to rewrite it in digestible, concise way. Also, I was using (and paying for) RTM for years for my list keeping, but it's just not optimized for GTD and web UI needs long-required update. Nirvana HQ finally got smartphone client, I switched to it and it's really good. Nirvana's web UI is well structured, compared to RTM it needs better keyboard shortcuts and group operations, but overall it's much easier to use for GTD than RTM.

roopeshv 14y ago
what are these "GTD Summary" books you talk about?
- vl 14y ago
  There are (as far as I understand) unauthorized summaries on Amazon. This one looks promising, but it's hard to assess the quality without actually reading it: http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Summary-Productivity/dp/1477490086 http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Summary-Productivi...
cabbeer 14y ago
doit.im works perfectly with GTD methodology.

gomox_ar 14y ago

I agree as well, it definitely matches my experience. GTD will only work on a certain type of work. In startup environments there are often significant tasks that go out of your comfort zone (if you're an engineer, you may have to write a tutorial or a script for a video). Those don't typically go on my "pending" list although they are very important to the business, sometimes even more so than dealing with whatever technical situation that might have come up in the last few days. This is why I have stopped feeling guilty about what I used to call "procrastination". Sometimes you have to avoid your task list and work on the complex things. This said, the Service Desk / Issue tracking system we develop adopted a GTD-like philosophy in its latest iteration (a pretty significant UX change) and the feedback from our internal and external customers has been outstanding. It helps you keep your head level.

pseut 14y ago

Somewhat agree with the author, but I make the big tasks calendar events or put them on their own context list (ie "edit paper" is not on my office list, but my "research" next action list). The idea with GTD is to choose the best next task, not just hammer them out mindlessly, so I think the author misunderstands GTD.

1123581321 14y ago

For people who want to focus but cannot always, GTD is a floor. While doing deep work, he should do nothing else. When he is not, or more importantly when he cannot, he at least takes care of small things and chips away at his big projects until he's pulled back into them completely. I like a literary analogy here: I would recommend GTD to an obituaries editor for everything. I would have recommended it to Samuel Coleridge to keep him working during his low periods, since they prevented him from finishing his work. I would never recommend it to a busy genius like Shakespeare or Dosteyevsky for fear of ruining their ability to write (I assume I would have recognized their genius as a contemporary; please work with me.)

jere 14y ago

>As a graduate student, I didn’t need better lists of next actions. I needed instead to be training my ability to focus hard on meaningful things for long periods of time — even after it becomes uncomfortable. This is the part I'd like to figure out how to do.

neltnerb 14y ago
Well, I'm one of the fortunate few who managed to escape from graduate school (Masters and PhD) in 4.5 years in an engineering field. I am the first to admit that I am very, very, very lucky in a variety of ways that made this possible. But one of them is as follows. I similarly have a hard time focusing for long periods of time. Like many people, while I'm not manic-depressive, I have manic-depressive tendencies. For a week or two I feel depressed and don't want to do anything. Then for a week or two I'm really excited about research and get a ton done. Then back to depressed. It's just the way I am, and my situation doesn't seem very unique from talking to many of my friends. Sometimes research is inspiring, sometimes it's frustrating and tedious. I think much of that is perception, and that really all that's changing is a fundamental chemical shift in your moods. In any case, what I realized back in undergrad is that when I'm in a depressed mood, I don't work. At least, not on creative, difficult, interesting stuff. It's just impossible, intimidating, frustrating, and a waste of my time. All it does it work to prolong my depression. Instead, I focus on what I call cultivating boredom. I do things like read hacker news until I've read all the articles. Or god forbid read slashdot. Or NPR. Or meditate. Or much better; practice karate, go for a walk, take mind altering substances (you know, like nicotine), hang out with friends, cook, that sort of stuff. Sure, I still take care of the little logistical things that need doing, but I don't try to do creative work when I'm in this mood. It's counterproductive. Instead, I basically use up all my avenues of distraction, and eventually doing that creative, hard, difficult, complicated work becomes attractive again in comparison with sitting at my computer reading facebook. This process takes about 3-4 days. Then, I suddenly just... flip. And then I'm manic again, and I'm roaring through piles of highly creative work that is of incredibly good quality. So instead of wearing myself out doing superficial tasks, I try to actually let myself rest and most importantly, become bored so that my mind can recover. This is the only way I have found to work productively as a graduate student. It's only anecdotal, of course, but I probably worked an average of 25 hours a week. I'd spend two weeks straight working 9-10 hour days and then coming home and writing grants and papers and thesis. Then I'd burn myself out and do literally nothing worth even remembering for two weeks. And after two weeks of that I'd be bored and really excited about working a ridiculous amount again. And in this way, I managed to graduate in 4.5 years, in a lab where the median graduate student was in their 5th year, and many were in their 7th year. It's quality of work, not quantity of work, nor time spent in lab that lets you graduate. Anyway, worked for me. Might not work for you. Try at your own risk. But I've never found another way to work that makes me happy, lets me get through my depressive periods in a reasonable period of time, and which produces high quality creative work products.

Karunamon 14y ago

Something I've found with GTD is something that's somewhat alluded to in the book. Granted I don't remember the book outright (perhaps I could do with another reread...), but the gist is that if you're having trouble with a "thing" on your list, you just need to reduce that "thing" down more because it's too broadly scoped as stated. Instead of "work singlemindedly and with complete focus on MyNewWebApp", perhaps "Write user authentication module for MyNewWebApp" or even "Get basic username/password authentication working for etc." Just about anything and everything can be broken down this way; in fact I struggle to imagine something that is incompatible with this! The author of this piece even fails to give any examples of what he means by something that couldn't be broken down. The other thing is that GTD is a framework. You can follow the way the book tells you to do it to the letter, but then you're missing out. Start with the book, add a little, take a little, mix in whatever works for you. Once you've got the foundation, improvements will come naturally. I'm doing a little GTD mixed in with pomodoro right now and it works incredibly well for keeping my ADD-addled mind in check.

SatvikBeri 14y ago
Just about anything and everything can be broken down this way; in fact I struggle to imagine something that is incompatible with this! The author of this piece even fails to give any examples of what he means by something that couldn't be broken down. Any chunk of work that pushes the limits of your brainpower is hard to break down into pieces. For example, coming up with a Mathematical proof. You might be able to break the problem down to some extent, but there's a lot of time spent just thinking, and it's very difficult to predict how long solving a problem will take.

thoughtcriminal 14y ago

The problem isn't GTD, it's this desire to do and be "remarkable" all the time. To only want to do "deep work" so people will remark about it and then tell other people how awesome you are is shallow at best. I think Dale Carnegie had it right when he said: Generally speaking we like the big stuff because it seems to make an impact. Huge tasks should equal huge rewards, theoretically. If you do a lot of little things really well, however, it reflects positively on your character. You seem like a person who gets a lot done and does a great job. The little tasks may not always seem exciting, but you have a lot to gain by completing them with the same passion as a larger project.

maaku 14y ago

Thank you - you solidified my own thinking as a GTD practitioner. I think the last paragraph is essential. What GTD has done for me is mechanize the rote, bureaucratic aspects of life and work, which leaves more time and an uncluttered mind to haphazardly pursue creative, open-ended tasks.

b1daly 14y ago

I made a few attempts at GTD but got stuck on something that is related to the authors point. It had to do with the literalism of the "next action." Most of what I experience as a problem in my work relates to getting overwhelmed by the scope of ongoing projects. I'm a music producer, a lot of the projects I do go over a period of weeks or months. I could never figure out the level of granularity for the next action. A common unit of my work is a song. Producing a song has many such levels. The highest/largest would be "produce song X. From there there are obvious chunks: pre-production, recording, mixing. Recording could be broken down to basic tracks and overdubs. Overdubs to vocals, horns, percussion. And so on. So on a given day, I might have planned to mix a song (could take a day). Is my next action "mix the song" or is it "boot the computer." The task is a whole series of steps that all must be completed. After a while I started to think that my problem wasn't getting started, it was getting finished! Mixing music is a difficult task that requires a lot of concentration, and I am usually very resource constrained. Since I have a lot of projects that I am working on, more than I can do, I'm already heavily prioritizing my time. After a while it just seemed like more trouble than it was worth to write out all of these next action, as they were usually obvious. What I experience as my problem is not having enough time to get a project done. I'm working efficiently, but as I come up against the resource constraint, which I always do, my subjective experience of stress goes up, and I start getting tired, the stress adding to my stress so to speak. This is when I'm in the thick of it working as hard as I can. I'm sure I am missing something with GTD, but I gave up on it pretty quickly. Though it did make me feel a lot more comfortable with deleting/trashing things I don't need. I'm probably just in the wrong business.