I've been recommending Getting Things Done—The Art of Stress-Free Productivity to friends, co-workers, and techie mailing lists [see my review]. The following are some of the conversations my recommendation engendered.
Same Old?
My reaction to Vicki's quick overview of the book - it sounded like a typical time management system.
Interesting comment.
Interesting to me, because, from the time-management systems I've seen before, the Time Management class I attended a decade ago, and David Allen's comments on other TM systems (scattered through the book) it's really quite different. Perhaps subtly different :-) but different nonetheless.
The book frequently makes comparisons and points out the ways it's different.
- It doesn't do "Importance vs Urgency".
- It doesn't number or letter code all of your tasks by "Priority"
- It doesn't put tasks into your date book
It does compare tasks to context.
Context
The technique I developed is to partition projects into interest areas. I never think about all my projects at once, so I don't try to manage them all at once. It's more like "gee, I'd like to do a house/garage/radio/garden project this weekend" and then wander to that part of the list.
This is straight out of GTD (and LifeBalance) but not something I've seen elsewhere.
Most time management systems seem to want you to arrange all of your tasks into a single list and then work top down, no matter where you are or how you feel. Take the ones at the end and discard them as "won't ever do".
I Still Can't Do Everything!
After applying its methods for a few months (since March) it's clear that I'm never going to catch up, and that my open projects list is going to keep growing indefinitely.
I think you somehow skipped over the part of the book that made it clear that this IS how life works :-)
I don't see that as a bad thing - it's what keeps life from being boring. Also, if your list gets empty, you'll have to start thinking about what to do next, rather than picking off the top of the todo list.My key insight about them is they help you not have to rely on your memory to figure out what you should be doing or where you should be.
Yes.
The key is to get this stuff out of your RAM and onto disk, as it were. Then it's not lost and, who knows, things change, maybe you'll get to one of those things in a year or two.
Another key is to understand that your list is NOT top-down. There is no "bottom". So there is no reason to assume that ANYthing on the list is any more or less unreachable than anything else.
I think that's one of the things I like about the process because it's part of how I thin anyway. I'm constantly rearranging and reorganizing my lists, my file hierarchies, my email hierarchies, ...
Priorities
The assignment of priority to scheduling tasks is a well-studied area. One of the problems is that prioritization can't be done in absence of a utility function. The often forgotten assumption of scheduling systems is that not all tasks get done. In that context, what do you want to throw away?
Let me make a point here. GTD is _not_ about prioritizing tasks. In fact, it's very much not about prioritizing tasks. That's one of the key differences between GTD and most time management systems.
GTD never forgets that not all tasks get done. Nevertheless, it's also not about "what do you want to throw away"? Everything is recorded; then you don't keep obsessing over it in the back of your head.
Unfortunately, priority setting for most people is conflated in their heads with 'importance'
The Time Management 1-day course I took ten years ago drew a box with four quadrants, Importance vs. Urgency. They recommended you throw out all non-important non-urgent tasks, try to stay out of urgent / unimportant (because it's stressful) and concentrate on important/ urgent first, then important / non-urgent.
Life doesn't work like that. The boss hands you "unimportant urgent" tasks all the time. And, if you're tired, brain-fried from another project, have only 10 minutes, maybe that's a good time to work on less important and not very urgent. After all "important" is a relative description.
GTD considers "priority" to be a qualitative, relative measure, "given the context you're in and the time and energy you have". It's not an absolute. It's one of many criteria and a distinction to be made based on the relationship of other factors.
In the real-time scheduling arena one of the most effective algorithms is what is called 'rate monotonic' scheduling. The basic trick (simplified to the point of actually violating the underlying theorem, is to schedule the shortest tasks with the highest priority. Thus you return phone calls before you refactor large programs.
In GTD, you return phone calls because you have enough time to do that before your next meeting and you're near a phone. You start to refactor the program when you have a larger amount of ("uninterrupted") time available and you're next to the computer. You pick up mouthwash because you've just been to the Post Office and you're driving by the drugstore. You review your email Inbox _in order_ top to bottom, deleting, deferring, responding (short), delegating (forwarding), or filing for reference as appropriate, THEN go back and work through the mail that takes more time.
As a result (and according to David Allen, he has seen this work with hundreds of people) you stop getting the "rapid buildup of incomplete tasks, many of which become more painful as they get older".
Setting priorities is a very low-level technical task and unless you treat it that way you are absolutely going to get it wrong.
I believe this fits with the GTD model.
Techie Reactions
Much of the discussion [on my technical programmer's mailing list] raises echoes of my discussions with my spouse, Rich (trying to get him to read the GTD book). He kept saying "Uhuh, I do something like that already".My theory at this point is that we, the techie hacker programmer types, already think in hierarchical, ever-revisiting, ever-reviewing, ever-improving ways. For us, much of what's in GTD is considered "common knowledge". We may not use the same terminology but we already incorporate much of the philosophy in our lives and work.
But most of David Allen's clients (he's been consulting on productivity for twenty years) are CEOs, managers, sales people, ... "them". They don't live this way.
So I read the book and say "Yes, here on paper is an explanation of how things ought to be. If I make a few small shifts in how I do things, I can improve the way I work and make it a more reproducible process instead of the ad hoc system I've devised for myself over the years. Good stuff. Easy to understand. Better said than I can say it. I'll share this widely."
They say "OMG! How could I have missed this?! This is New. It's Great! It works!"
They have epiphanies; we nod and smile and say "I knew that. This is slightly different. I'll try that bit there."
But then, we're also the type who are easier to convince that something is right if parts of it already match our mental models.
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