<a href="https://archive.vn/BvAtC" rel="nofollow">https://archive.vn/BvAtC</a><p>Life just got so complicated. I tried to fight back, to have less stuff to think about, but it's an endless onslaught of abstract microtasks. No wonder that white collars dream of a homestead<p>These systems try to force humans to disregard their unpredictable lives, and produce with the predictability of machines. It's not right.<p>I'm at my happiest when I wake up without an alarm, and work on what feels right until I feel done for the day. I let the most important stuff float to the top, instead of shaming myself into satisfying my past ambitions.<p>Aside: This title pattern rubs me the wrong way. The rise of this, the death of that. Half the time, it's either something happening in California, or in a very small twitter circle. The other half, it has not risen, or not fallen. Its a the "it was a dark and stormy night" of headlines.
> Consider instead a system that externalizes work. Following the lead of software developers, 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.<p>I read this whole thing just to find out it's an ad for Jira?<p>I still do things in a GTD-like way <i>despite</i> Jira because every epic/story/issue/task/subtask is always horribly underspecified when it's not written by another dev and I still need to keep track of that work.<p>Often there's some overlap of the work, but I dare not show those cards. The best I can do is give a story point estimate and say if it can be finished by this sprint. If not for some kind of personal productivity methodology where does that aspect of work go? Jira boards can lead to micromanagement in the wrong hands because the broader organization lacks the specificity and rigor of the devs. They simply don't understand the work they're describing well enough. Nothing has changed in at least the last 30 years from the perspective of the knowledge worker.<p>What will really change things is to stop promoting non-technical people into leadership roles when technical work is the core competency.
The article was oddly unsatisfying.<p>For me, GTD's biggest contribution was the focus on "Next Action". Which was mentioned exactly once in the article. I struggle with the perfect lists and I just can't get the Weekly Review figured out. But looking at some project and figuring out the exact Next Action (and sometimes associated Critical Path) is ridiculously valuable.<p>I've read a bunch of other productivity books. They have different ideas and approaches, but all of the practical ones seem to have this moment "and figure out the smallest, actionable thing you can actually do on that". But often, that bit is not front and center of the methodology. I suspect in the "3-day master course" for those techniques, they would actually practice such focus. David Allen just really put that front and center, explicitly.<p>Similarly, the Cognitive Behavior Therapy also uses this "Next Action" idea to get the person to move forward.<p>In that sense, I felt the article failed to truly look behind the curtain and just focused on a rise and fall of individual movement influencer. I did not see any mention of Lotus Notes (David Allen's own preferred solution), active GTD LinkedIn group, etc.
My one philosophical takeaway from GTD is the idea of offloading the record keeping and logistics of tasks to some slower external system.<p>This allows the "RAM" or faster context of your thinking to be focused entirely on what you're doing.<p>Every system built on top of this (including GTD itself) is just an interpretation of this core idea that GTD points to that have unique selling points.<p>For example, ticketing systems inspired by toyota-scrum-agile externalize work in a way so that you can debug bottlenecks. GTD itself focuses on capture and filtering. Newer "second brain" stuff focuses on the knowledge management itself.<p>These external systems tend to grow until they require a dedicated cabal of priests to manage them. Since these systems measures all "progress", individuals then become incentivized to align with the priests (or become one).<p>Eventually the finger that points to the moon becomes the moon itself. The system was intended to allow you to focus on The Important Thing but instead becomes The Important Thing itself.
I spoke to Cal for this article though I don't think he used much of our interview. I developed GTD software back in the first as Kinkless when became OmniFocus after I joined Omni for a year.<p>Today I don't use any "super specialized" tooling for task management. Intentionally. I don't like being wedded to any given app. My tools are Apple Reminders (universal for my family since we're all on Apple devices) and Obsidian (or really just plain text / markdown, accessed currently through obsidian).<p>Lots of thoughts about all this but in short there were some good ideas I took from GTD (universal capture being the biggest, but that's not really a GTD unique idea) but most of it I've jettisoned.<p>(my obsidian / markdown usage is basically "take notes, sometimes notes become projects, those projects automatically show up in a dashboard" and mixing notes, content, and tasks organically)
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Quite a lot of this resonated. A long way through though:-<p>> What if you began each morning with a status meeting in which your team confronts its task board? A plan could then be made about which handful of things each person would tackle that day.<p>Maybe it's the kind of software I work on (non-web), seems a bit unreal to expect developers to deliver a "handful" of non-trival things per day. Fastest thing is generally (which fits with higher up the article) ask for one thing to do done, and to leave the developer alone (at least, until they miss a milestone - and even those need to be appropriately set).
I feel most of the time these "Productivity tips and tricks" are like the "lifehacks" for the work like, they're more trouble than their worth some 99% of time<p>The current fad is Notion and all the minor templates for productivity guided people (the ones that need to follow their morning schedule with minute precision)
My approach to time management(Like anything else I do using a computer) is tech-first. I look for the patterns that are a natural fit to the readily available tools(Creating new tools isn't an option unless you like minimalist stuff or want a new major project).<p>So I use a to-do list in Google Keep, for things that don't have a particular time schedule, a future ideas list for even less urgent things, a shopping list in the same, and calendar reminders for things I need to do soon.<p>I have Google Assistant listening so I can always add something to a list without stopping what I'm doing.<p>It's not perfect, but unlike other organization systems I've tried, it's very low overhead.<p>I don't really need any more system than that, the tools I have don't support it. Going more structured would be more effort I could instead put towards actually doing stuff.<p>At work, I use whatever system is available. Usually nothing, because nobody wants to implement anything more than unstructured whiteboard notes and WhatsApp chats and pushing for that is hard. Pushing for other stuff like version control is more important at some places.<p>I no longer use Obsidian for anything like that, the friction of waiting for it to load was too much and made me not want to organize at all.<p>I still haven't figured out journalling. I don't want to do that in something tied to the cloud that might lose personal stuff if it vanishes, manual backups are a hassle, and obsidian is slow. Maybe creating a new app makes sense. Maybe even trying paper again would be reasonable.
I never used GTD, but for ~15 years have used a mail plug-in for task management, deferrals, etc.<p>I have two main issues in recent years. There are now more requests that are 1 task in the requestors mind but are actually 5 to 10 tasks of various complexity. Then of those 5 to 10, only a portion are mine. It ends up being work to get the requestors into whatever ticket system they are supposed to use, and then keep myself separated from the stuff I have nothing to do with. A lot of people are just wired to want to have one person to deal with all their stuff.<p>The other is Direct Messaging. At one point slack seemed like a godsend as we could route all the Dist List spam and membership management into channels. DMs happened but were infrequent and generally from a handful of people on your team. This lasted for a few years until the corporate masses moved over to it. At that point it was "anyone could bother anyone else at any time" for something "urgent".
cal, i love your work but please reevaluate the ticketing systems that you recommend; ticketing makes things fall through cracks because the nature of the incentives for the participants in the ticketing process all drive that way
I get a lot done (4 kids, 2 companies, academic researcher) by ensuring that I create as much free time for myself as possible. Almost free days 2-3 days a week, remaining days have meetings. 2 hours in the morning for family and 4 at night. My free time allows me to work at my best, doing what I want to do. Of course, it’s hard to avoid meetings, but I try! My most productive days are when I can run at 8, 420 at 10am, and have 6+ hours of flow. I don’t watch tv and HN is my social media. I’m news addicted and I love chatGPT. And I have really, excellent amazing people around me to whom I give a lot of inspiration and autonomy. Big time ADD, but I love it.
I'm in a biased situation by working in software engineering, where there exists software to interpret productivity. Is the point of this article that other fields should use similar productivity awareness tools? I mean he suggests at one point that maybe teams should essentially do "standups" to start their days...is this the revolutionary idea to transform work in other fields? I need help interpreting this article.