I’ve been using David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system for over two years now, and I’ve gone from having over 200 open tasks, to 80 tasks, to 40 tasks, and have gone from a task-level view to a (more-or-less) project-level view of what I’m doing. I’ve reviewed The Book several times and have gotten to what I believe is a steady-state in my task management.
From this experience, I conclude that productivity to me is comprised of four factors:
1. Follow through on (or renegotiate) promises
Getting Things Done is all about following through on promises: promises that you make to others or to yourself. GTD tells you what promise you could be working on at the given moment. Are you in the grocery? …then you could get these groceries you told yourself you wanted. Are you on-line? …then you could check out that web site your friend mentioned to you.
Notably, I’m emphasising “could” over “should.” GTD is telling you what your options are. It’s not making the call on whether you should really be doing those tasks.
Following through on promises is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of “productivity.”
2. Choose the “Right Stuff” to work on
GTD struggles with helping you choose what to work on: by starting from a ground-up, next-actions approach and working towards the project view, your one year goals, your three year goals, and your areas of responsibility, GTD helps you think about why you’re doing the work you’re doing–but GTD is not helping you much in figure out how to narrow your focus and choose the goals you really want to achieve.
GTD is a tool, but you’ve really got to be careful or you can drift towards burning your most productive time accomplishing goals you don’t really care about.
3. Don’t get bogged down in the mundane
With GTD, I do what my phone tells me to do. I don’t question why I’m going to the ATM once a week, and I don’t really think through why I spend an hour on e-mail a day.
The Pareto principle (i.e. the 80/20 rule) is more useful here: you should radically triage your work to maximize your time doing “the Right Stuff.”4. Work very hard, focusing on “spinning the flywheel”
To steal from “Good to Great,” this last component–”spinning the flywheel”–means that you have to choose a goal and stick with it, and orient all your actions towards that goal, so that all your actions and therefore the outputs are getting you closer to that goal.
That is, you’ve chosen your goal, and you know how to work effectively towards that goal, and you know that you can follow through on the promises needed for that goal: now you need to bear down and do the work, and continue focusing your energy on that work.
So, those are my thoughts for the year about how to become radically more productive, and how GTD fits in with all that. Right now I’m using GTD quite a lot, but my current “steady state” really means that I have a list of tasks that I know I can wait until the last minute to complete. I think these three subsequent points, to complement GTD, could really help me/anyone be more productive.