Through with GTD

Today, March 22, 2021, I am declaring “Getting Things Done” (GTD) bankruptcy.

I crossed paths with “Getting Things Done” in the 2003-2004 timeframe. ¹ It was introduced to me by a friend named Mark, who I worked alongside as a computer tech support tech between 1998-2002. The book advertised several appealing concepts, such as “mind like water”, and “stress-free productivity.” Who wouldn’t want that?

As of right now, I’m 17 years into the process, and still feel like “less than novice”. Yet, when I look back on the last 17 years, I see that I have accomplished a great deal. No, it was not “stress-free”. In fact, I feel like a heavy component of the stress that I did feel could be attributed to beating myself up for not keeping my GTD system up to date. It would not be fair to say that I got zero benefit from the books and seminars and other ancillaries ² that I experienced.

Things I learned:

• I am now firmly in the notebook, and note-taking camp.
• I write down my commitments.
• Every few weeks, I go through my lists of commitments to decide which of those lists are trash-ready.
• I process my email now to zero, and have processes for marking the “action-able” one for further consideration

Things I already had quite well:

• I am a planner by default
• I can think thinks through very well

The parts that have never, and probably never will work:

• Thorough reviews
• Scheduling anything that happens outside of 8-5 on M-F
• Dealing with Next Actions

The GTD stuff was too much (infra-?)structure to maintain in any kind of sensible arrangement. I tried so many approaches: Omnifocus, todo.txt, Todoist, Evernote, Toodledo, plain paper systems (Marc Forster), file cards, etc…(there are so many that I tried)

The piece of Forster’s system³ that makes sense to me is responding to the task or project that grabs your attention. In his AutoFocus system, all the tasks are listed one to a line on paper. A person reviews the list pages and works on the first item that grabs their attention. All new tasks or things that draw attention are added to the end of the list. Check it out for yourself (if you wish).

An additional habit of GTD that has worked is the one that puts all the ancillaries and other work pieces into an available repository. The rise of Dropbox and Google Drive helped immensely here. Evernote’s appearance in 2008, and the advent of syncing notes across devices seriously changed the landscape.

Mostly, though the specter of reminding myself of all these hundreds of commitments wore me down. Maybe my filter wasn’t strong enough to keep the detritus from piling up, to keep the “pseudo-projects” away from the stuff that actually needed to get done, to keep all the project lists up-to-date. Because my mind keeps telling me… Yes, this will become important one day. I was not able to truly consign those ideas or pseudo-projects to the Someday pile. They kept fighting for attention.

I had a boss who wondered about the actual usefulness of maintaining a database of computers, with notes collected about each service call necessitated to fix them. He believed that a person could just get a lot more done in the time it takes to keep the database up to date. That’s where I am now.

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