The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done

Google cache copy (no paywall): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:LbmYDMToHe8J:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;annals-of-technology&#x2F;the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done+&amp;cd=1&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:LbmYDM...</a>

I&#x27;m not sure what changed with COVID, but something has been much worse in the last 9 months. I&#x27;ve always used a personal system similar to what I understand &quot;GTD&quot; to be based on the article but everything about it has broken down. Instead of focusing on a task until it&#x27;s completed, I&#x27;m constantly being yanked back and forth by whoever is yelling at the moment.<p>My personal theory is the ~60% of useless middle managers have nothing left to do without an office. They now split their days into asking for constant status updates on every conceivable detail, and &quot;breaking down walls&quot; which is pestering whoever is holding up a project by a couple hours because they are focused elsewhere.<p>I&#x27;ve disabled my IM client which made them shift to phone calls, and the next step is turning off call forwarding.

So I&#x27;m one of the longest running implementors of GTD (almost twenty years now). I&#x27;m also one of least into &quot;productivity pr0n.&quot; I switched from a Palm Pilot to OmniFocus, and that was my only major shift. I dread when I leave macOS and have to shift again. I&#x27;ve tweaked the system a bit, and it&#x27;s been many years since I&#x27;ve read any of David Allen&#x27;s books, though I&#x27;ve corresponded with him a bit, so I don&#x27;t know how far I&#x27;ve diverged.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that Cal Newport chooses to mention GTD in his title, because what he&#x27;s complaining about is stuff that David Allen has complained about, too...and, to be honest, Merlin Mann and that whole community never understood. It&#x27;s not about the task lists or tickler files or whatever.<p>It&#x27;s about being able to take complete stock of your life on a regular basis.<p>Everything else is based on that. You get everything captured and in one place so you can look at it and say, &quot;Okay, is this working?&quot; David Allen explicitly suggests similar activities for teams, and high functioning teams generally do this.<p>I think Newport is absolutely right about the chaos and distraction that characterizes so much white collar work today. I&#x27;m not sure how fair it is to lay it at Drucker&#x27;s feet. My view from the software world is that there are twin gaps in strategy and leadership in most organizations. Strategy provides the framework in which groups deploy tactics. Leadership provides the framework in which groups adopt tactics to deploy.

For more context, Cal Newport discusses this article a little bit on his blog: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.calnewport.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;when-did-productivity-become-personal&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.calnewport.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;when-did-producti...</a><p>&gt; My latest article for The New Yorker, published on Tuesday, is titled “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” It’s not, however, really about David Allen’s productivity system, which longtime readers (and listeners) know I really admire. It’s instead about a deeper question that I hadn’t heard discussed much before: Why do we leave office workers to figure out on their own how to get things done?

The relevant trend that covid has accelerated is giving workers more autonomy. I don&#x27;t think humans are good at figuring out how to resist the perils that come with it. Absent willpower, or a job that&#x27;s inherently aligned with one&#x27;s natural interests, human nature inevitably drifts toward distraction.<p>I think that&#x27;s partly because so many people yearn for more human connection, which in covid times is often expressed as unnecessary Slack conversations. Also, because humans are naturally wired to be drawn toward whatever is most recent; until a few hundred years ago, if an event happened nearby you, that was always the most important thing to which attention should be directed. Finally, I don&#x27;t think that &quot;avoiding distraction&quot; is even a goal for many people, especially if they&#x27;re meh about their job or they feel watching current social trends are more important&#x2F;interesting than their job.<p>I doubt there is a generalizable solution for these &quot;perils of autonomy.&quot; But if eventually we move away from the synchronous messaging that pervades modern office culture, that would be a step in the right direction. Slack needs a mode that debounces messages so they&#x27;re delivered en masse once per hour unless a box is checked that the message is urgent.<p>In the future, when more people work as independent contractors, that ought to help too. This isn&#x27;t a problem that a manager will step in and fix by imposing a new policy, as the story seems to imply.

The author of this article wrote Deep Work, which stresses the importance of, well, deep work over more shallow tasks like responding to emails (it is stressed that shallow is not intended to be a deragatory term).<p>I&#x27;ve seen his opposition to GTD expressed before and was excited to see it in long form, but left a bit disappointed when it was essentially just recommending a kanban style approache and some limitations on interuprting another person. I understand it is an open question though.<p>Though I do empathize with the addictiveness of productivity systems. As mentioned, it disguises itself as a form of productivity and can be easy to get carried away.<p>I think ultimately it comes down to how one implements their GTD system; I use it to offload stuff I don&#x27;t want to worry about remembering (including outlines for projects), and am careful to limit my view to only what&#x27;s currently on my plate. This allows me more time for &#x27;deep work&#x27;, but this work however is extremely unstructured, and I&#x27;ve come to learn that&#x27;s a feature and breaking it down into a GTD style checklist is not at all effective for me. I think that&#x27;s why it may be hard to come up with an equivalent system for deep work; it just doesn&#x27;t lend itself as well to a GTD style approach, so perhaps my criticisms above were misguided.

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.

Discussions of GTD aside, the article seems to be advocating for individual productivity to be externally managed (through “management intervention”),<p>&gt; <i>It seems likely that any successful effort to reform professional life must start by making it easier to figure out who is working on what, and how it’s going [...] we might use virtual task boards, where every task is represented by a card that specifies who is doing the work, and is pinned under a column indicating its status. With a quick glance, you can now ascertain everything going on within your team and ask meaningful questions about how much work any one person should tackle at a time. With this setup, optimization becomes possible.</i><p>which misses the fundamental point that individuals have different ways of thinking, and therefore varied approaches to organization. One of the crucial aspects of GTD (or any other system) is to allow an individual to adapt it to their needs, while also slightly moulding their own approach where possible. Attempting to externalize that to a bureaucracy of standardized processes seems like a Taylorist nightmare designed to thoroughly <i>demoralize</i> the process of knowledge work down to executing tasks which only incidentally happen to require some thinking&#x2F;judgement.<p>(To understand the full extent of what that “demoralization” means in this context, see this talk by Barry Schwartz <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;3B_1itqCKHo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;3B_1itqCKHo</a> )

I read the book and tried to follow Allen&#x27;s system until I stopped. But I did end up incorporating some of it into what I do.<p>One big thing I took away was a different way of looking at &quot;someday&quot; tasks - it is OK to record them even if they never happen - it doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re useless.<p>The second one was review, and is probably a bigger deal for me. I never really went over my lists previously, which in retrospect was really stupid. Now I do, keeping things not done pruned and relevant.<p>But more importantly, I review things I did, including saving lists of tasks for things that might happen again. That has made a huge difference, especially as I manage more people. When someone asks &quot;how do I do that?&quot; and I can reply with a checklist, it makes me feel like maybe I&#x27;m not so bad at this gig after all. But really, the lists are for me - it is amazing how much I half-forget of things that don&#x27;t come up much, and having last time&#x27;s list saves me so much time.

If you&#x27;re good at getting things done you just get more BS work. The most successful people I know do the bare minimum of regular work and concentrate on doing what they really want.

...it fell?<p>I&#x27;ve used a GTD type system to great effect for almost my whole career, and I like it very much. Details here if interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cushychicken.github.io&#x2F;posts&#x2F;evernote-workflow&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cushychicken.github.io&#x2F;posts&#x2F;evernote-workflow&#x2F;</a><p>Newport&#x27;s deep work theory isn&#x27;t so contrary to GTD. Sometimes, your &quot;next step&quot; is to just schedule time to write your big report, or do your big numerical analysis, or plan out your new driver structure.<p>Allen was on to something when he claimed open ended tasks with no closure create anxiety. A system that records:<p>-what you must do next, and<p>-when you must do it,<p>Relieved much of it for me.

What I got out of that was the combination of work autonomy and email culture causes us all to work at different paces in different ways, all tied together by making random, unplanned demands of others via email as we go about doing our job. This generates a bunch of work not visible to management and the company as a whole. The author suggests looking at programming sprints as a time where we define the work to be done and just let people do it without being interrupted. I would leave it up to the programmers to respond if they&#x27;re actually left alone to do their work or if they&#x27;re sitting in the same amount of useless meetings as the rest of us.

This article really feels like some kind of straw man charicature of GTD, as I have seen before from Cal Newport. Ultimately a water tight productivity system, like GTD, allows one to choose for oneself what one considers the most important to work on. If you decide that the most important thing in your job is to always answer every email, that is great. You can create yourself a schedule with lots of room for answering email and move all other tasks to left over time slots. If you decide, on the other hand, that working in deep concentration on hard programming tasks is the main thing of your job you can do that too and reserve only half an hour a day for answering as much email as can be done in half an hour or for other adminstrative tasks. In all jobs there are usually more things that could be done than things that actually get done and a water tight productivity system, like GTD makes sure one can focus on what one considers important.

I think a lot of these problems would go away if we’d all just SLOW DOWN a little bit. The endless pursuit for more productivity is exhausting.<p>Let’s pad those estimates a little. Have a laugh at the standups and the retro’s. And enjoy ourselves.

First, I read David Allen&#x27;s book and liked it. I will point out that although valuable, it is not easy reading. for example:<p>&quot;To lead an effective life, we need to be able to make things happen -- to engage with our world so it will supply us with the experiences and results we seek.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s the first sentence of the book and seems like something an engineer would write.<p>So, I sort-of-implemented GTD a few times over the years.<p>One thing Allen said is that is VERY true is that you need a trusted system to put everything into.<p>I&#x27;ve been using Omnifocus since it came out and it works well. I can put everything in it - and I do.<p>It is macos&#x2F;ios based and you can self-host your data with webdav. (awesome, omni folks!)<p>Yet I probably do NOT implement getting things done correctly.<p>Omnifocus is sort of like a giant outline where you can arrange your life in a big tree structure, then look it up by context or just search it.<p>I would say that 90% of the stuff I put into the system is over-categorized but really languishes and is not used.<p>The other 10% is critical to my life.<p>I go to the grocery store and remember the 20 things I needed to get.<p>I go to my doctor for my annual checkup and have a list of questions.<p>I have a time-crunch project and as I&#x27;m working on part 1, ideas for part 2 or part 3 are recorded and removed from my head and I continue.<p>and nothing is forgotten.

My understanding is that GTD is for management-type tasks and deep work is for creative tasks. Paul Graham also has an article about allocating half-day units (1). But I guess that this is for a different type of work, not, for example, a sales rep.<p>I do find things like the Pomodoro technique useful for routine tasks. It will be absurd to try to prove a theoretical result with a tomato timer&#x27;s frequent breaks. As Tony Robbins sometimes calls it, the latter needs &quot;immersion&quot; or deep work.<p>(1) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;makersschedule.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;makersschedule.html</a>

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201118005202&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;annals-of-technology&#x2F;the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201118005202&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyor...</a><p>EDIT - Switched URL from the archive.today version, as it only had part of the content.

Newport did not mention &quot;agile&quot; per se, but in writing &quot;Consider instead a system that externalizes work. Following the lead of software developers ...&quot; he is clearly referencing that set of systems for organizing work. Agile, in the way that Newport is writing, is a way to shift autonomy and accountability to teams. The team collectively owns the mission articulated by management. Bosses are in the background. The team is an intermediary between bosses and individuals and acts as both a smart way of allocating work committments and throttling device on inbound work requests. Merlin Mann is a straw man for a limiting philopsophy of &quot;doing it all&quot;; systems that externalize work represent a philosophy working deliberately. The unstated assumption is that organizations will perform better this way too.<p>I think the consenus here is that working deliberately and concentrating deeply are ideal ways to work. That is not a new idea to the New Yorker audience either. I think of that what is different in this time of the Big Weirdness is that are we are focused on adjusting tactically and situationally, and that we lose sight of the norms that are sustaining and strategically valuable. What&#x27;s happening is what&#x27;s always happened - we&#x27;re adapting, some organizations faster and better than others. With all that said, turning off most of your feeds for most of the time still seems like a good idea to me.

I would feel lost w&#x2F;o my GTD-like system (from what I understand anyway). My daily routine (like a &quot;self-program&quot;) with tasks, priorities, calendars, notes for review, habits in process of being formed, everything all smoothly integrated, inside this text&#x2F;desktop (keyboard-oriented) app I wrote (free, AGPL, uses postgresql but I might move it to Rust and SQLite someday to simplify installation): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;onemodel.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;onemodel.org</a> (aka OM).<p>Edit: In some ways, I tie everything to:<p>* pvsgeer: purpose, vision, strategy, goals, empowerment, execution, measure&#x2F;review&#x2F;report&#x2F;repeat &amp;c.<p>* roles&#x2F;goals (like Covey said in 7 habits, like, person&#x2F;child, spouse, parent, extended family member, neighbor, church&#x2F;group member, citizen, professional&#x2F;employee, others)<p>And things sort of flow from there, but baked into daily and periodic routines to help me stay on track <i>and</i> enjoy balanced life. Or at least that is the intent, and it helps greatly, as I continue learning.<p>* edit2: I have a prioritization system inside OM that I use to not get consumed with busy-ness. It also helps tremendously, to be able to sort things etc.

Back when GTD started to become the hot new thing, it was often compared to Steven Covey&#x27;s 7 habits.<p>IIRC, the main differentiation was that Covey&#x27;s was a &quot;big picture first&quot; approach whereas Allen was more of a &quot;take care of the details and the big things take care of themselves&quot;.<p>The clearest example was that Covey used the metaphor of the rocks&#x2F;gravel&#x2F;sand in the jar. If you put the sand in first (aka the little things) there is no room for the rocks (aka big things).<p>My take away from the above is that neither way is right, wrong or &quot;The Way&quot; but that there are different methods for each person, team, profession, company etc. Simple example: infosec and IP rules may not even let you have one digital application that you can access at all times for both corporate and personal tasks. YOU might not even want your personal tasks co-mingled with work tasks for privacy reasons.

I really liked Cal Newport&#x27;s first book, &quot;So Good They Can&#x27;t Ignore You&quot;, published in 2012 [1]. The titular sentence is great advice, one I&#x27;ve been following all my life.<p>Meanwhile a lot of time went by, I&#x27;m almost 40, and I have worked at 8-10 companies (incl. FAANG, my own startup). His later advice, from the book &quot;Deep Work&quot;, was not in line with my work experience [2]. The problem is, Cal doesn&#x27;t have a regular 9-5 job as a tech worker, at a tech company. He&#x27;s in academia (and self-employed), which is very different --- I know, I also worked in academia! And this shows.<p>For example, I was reading his book Deep Work while I was at Facebook, where the whole company is on Workplace&#x2F;Workchat internally, with frequent notification&#x2F;mention&#x2F;chat interrupts, and the culture is to have quick response times. So no Deep Work, yet velocity and productivity is very high. It&#x27;s not true that you need a lot of focused time to get things done, you can manage it in smaller chunks. It&#x27;d be convenient, but it&#x27;s not realistic.<p>Reflecting on this article, in my experience, the key thing to focus on for companies is not personal productivity but team organization. The topline differentiator between high-velocity and high-productivity organizations versus the rest is that these are a collection of self-sufficient cross-functional product teams. The rest, which is most organizations, usually run &quot;projects&quot; instead of products, and multiple departments and teams, with different reporting lines, goals, OKRs&#x2F;KPIs, etc. are exptected to work together to make it happen --- the result is the organization becomes one big waiting&#x2F;blocking graph, with 80% of projects being blocked at any given time. This also makes personal productivity harder, because more &quot;sync&quot; and &quot;alignment&quot; type email threads and meetings are needed. In this model people have to work with more people they don&#x27;t know&#x2F;trust, so more people are communicating with each other who don&#x27;t know how to communicate with each other, they may not even know the other person&#x27;s exact job description or timezone location.<p>Having said that, I appreciate Cal&#x27;s perspective, and I&#x27;m happy to support him by buying his books.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1455509124" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You&#x2F;dp&#x2F;14555091...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1455586692" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted&#x2F;...</a>

Tried to read Deep Work, which just seemed like a much simplified rehash of Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Then the replication crisis happened, which may have tagged some of the ideas in Flow as questionable. I don&#x27;t think I would read anything more from Cal Newport.

GTD is only a productivity system, you can choose between several ones. Also, there are a lot of productivity porn (apps, BuJos, YouTube gurus) and so on. The thing is that you need to understand what you can and cannot do with your time, and either you embrace it or you change it.<p>Productivity apps work for me on a personal level (habit tracking, personal projects, recurring chores...). But for work it&#x27;s much more complicated so I have stopped trying to shoehorn my schedule&#x2F;non-predictable todos into an app (it&#x27;s just Google Calendar).

Reads like a call to increased micromanagement...

Folks might be interested in <i>Hacking Life</i> (available under a CC license at MIT Press). I have chapters on the history, practice, and excesses of hacking time and productivity.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;</a>

My feeling is that GTD is powerful for its stated goal but provides limited guidance on prioritization (among my personal weaknesses). It is a tool in the toolbox, but not a holistic approach.<p>The notion that you can offload cognitive load to an organized system, a tenet of GTD, is really essential for me.

I like the idea of GTD, but when you are not given a set of priorities, the whole thing falls apart.<p>If your in a position of fighting fires everyday, this system will not work for you.

Oeh look forward to read this