Bitching about GTD
Having been a fairly vocal proponent of GTD for some time, this is one of those things that I’m happy to write after having removed myself from the throngs (and I mean *throngs*) of productivity/GTD bloggers. Ever since I launched The Cranking Widgets Blog, I’ve been singing the praises of this productivity methodology to any jackass who would listen. Now, after developing a little bit of discontent with the whole thing, I can bring it to you folks without having to fear a decline in readership. Here goes.
First of all (and probably most importantly), I’m starting to feel like GTD is really effing hard. The amount of time and effort it takes to (according to the book) manage a list of tasks, a calendar and some filing shit has become prohibitively long for me. I look at a scrap of paper in my in-basket, and I’m positively put off by the effort it will require to add it to the project list, choose the next action, pull out a blank folder, label it and file it away. Perhaps I’m just being lazy, but that’s the freaking honest truth.
Built-in anxiety is almost a guarantee. Unless you’re a poster child for GTD, you’re going to have shit slip past the defenses of your system. Hell, David Allen himself has confessed to “falling off of the wagon, repeatedly” on several different occasions. And if you’ve become such a loyal adherent, the very act of *not* doing the GTD thing will create stress. This might just be my own dumb brain thinking about this stuff the wrong way, but I’d bet the contents of your wallet that this type of mental spasm is more common than you think.
Call me stupid or thoughtless or a sheep or whatever, but I like direction for certain things. If somebody tells me they have the recipe for the best Snickerdoodle I’ve ever had, I expect some pretty explicit instructions. GTD gives you the list of ingredients, a vague idea how to combine the ingredients, then says “and just cook ‘em however you feel would be best!”. This annoys me. Execution is unequivocally the most important step in any productivity system/methodology/thing, yet it gets almost zero play from the David (other than the 2 minute rule). While I can understand his wanting to keep the whole thing flexible (so as to make it useful to a substantially larger audience), there needs to be a little more time spent on “doing” than just “pick your context and trust your intuition.” Assigning priorities to tasks, etc. is a completely natural extension of the “think now so you can act quickly and efficiently later” idea. If I have a list of shit that I can do at a computer - a list that I should have made no more than seven days before, mind you - I should have already decided what the important things are, too.
The whole airplane analogy is nice, but in all the time I’ve done GTD, I’ve almost never even though about the shit that’s “higher” than the project level. Frankly, I think a great deal of the stuff beyond that (long-term goals, purpose on the planet) is kinda dumb. Personally, I don’t have many long term goals that don’t already play a pretty up-front role in my decision-making already. I want to own a house, which means I need to get out of debt, which means I can’t go spending money on new computers all the time. Do I need a list that says “buy a house” on it to keep that in an influential spot in my brain? Nope.
The calendar philosophy is archaic and is not even close to universally applicable. My daily calendar almost never has more than 2 things on it, so why shouldn’t I add things to it that I’d *like* to do on that day? Seems perfectly reasonable that I can use this suitable tool to have ideas forcibly percolate right to the front of my mind on a day when I will very likely have time to do something about it (and when it would be a good idea to do so). This may not be the kind of thing that the CEOs could reasonably do when they have a half-dozen meetings on a given day, but for the rank-and-file jerkoffs who fill the world’s cubicles, this sounds like something that might actually work.
Having said (or, “spewed”, if you like) all that, I’m in the midst of a serious reevaluation of my personal productivity stuff. GTD (or, at least, some of the major tenets) could very well go the way of the dodo when all is said and done. But in the spirit of reducing my responsibilities and commitments where possible, GTD is starting to look like a very viable candidate for Antoinette’ing. We’ll see.
[I wrote this non-stop, very quickly. It hasn’t been edited or anything, so forgive any grammatical errors, but I thought that it would be best suited for reading in its most “raw” form.]
To the 4 people who will read this: comment away, seriously.