156: The State of GTD

He actually has a “Weekly Review” audio resource, and I’m about 99% sure it’s on that somewhere. :slight_smile:

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Here is the quotation from the book:

Most people feel best about their work the week before they go on vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, organize, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. You do this so you can relax and be present on the beach, on the golf course, or on the slopes, with nothing else on your mind. I suggest you do this weekly instead of yearly, so you can bring this kind of “being present” to your everyday life.

David Allen, Getting Things Done, p. 98 [Chapter 2: Getting Control of Your Life: The Five Steps of Mastering Workflow] (Rev’d Ed. Penguin 2001).

I also believe I heard this from D.A. in either the Weekly Review audio resource, or excepted in one of the podcast episodes. Like @ryanjamurphy, I’ve seen it quoted in a ton of places, too.

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I would expect, that DA has used this phrase a lot of times, to explain his points.

Yes. Let me put some meat on the bone @markjantzen tossed out here. Following are some observations I had. I offer them not to persuade anybody that GTD is great or that they should adopt it. Rather, I offer it for others who may want to do GTD but are confused by some of the statements made like ones in this podcast.

  1. Starting at about 9:22: They argue that GTD makes you more efficient at doing things but does not help you question whether you should be doing things. One of the main points of GTD is to do this very thing. GTD separates its methods into horizons, using airplane altitudes as the metaphor. Higher level decision making — i.e., questioning what things you should be doing — is done at higher levels. That is not the same horizon in which you are doing your weekly review or your day-to-day tasks. (Dave and Mike do mention this horizon system in the podcast, but for some reason they still indict GTD for not enabling this. I found that strange.)

  2. Focus on the minutiae rather than the results (approx 15:50). This makes zero sense to me. The only point of doing the minutiae is to accomplish the results. GTD is a system that enables you to make sure that things are moving forward toward completion on projects that you decided were important to you to do. If you are just doing pointless minutiae, that is probably a fault more of our digital tools that enable us to have a checklist for every tiny chore that we do and crowds out the things we care about. This is not a GTD failing because GTD is not a tool to make us efficient. It’s a method that enables us to decide on priorities, think through the tasks we need to do to accomplish those priorities, and find room to get them done. The whole point of the method is to front-load thinking so we can do the things we want to do w/o thinking about them at the “do” stage (and maybe it is this function of GTD that makes it turn into a scary efficiency machine if your are not intentional about what you put in the system.) See Getting Things Done (Revised), Chapter 13 “The Power of Outcome Focusing.”

  3. Next Actions (30:00). David Allen does not teach breaking down projects into a series of next actions. (See Getting Things Done, Chapter 10 [Getting Projects Under Control].) He talks about defining A next action for each project. Yes, you can have a series of next actions outlined. But the point of the next action is to have a kick-off to make progress on a project. Often for me, I’ll have one next action that once completed enables me to do a flood of other next actions on the project, or possibly even bring it to completion. It does not have to be a mechanistic process of making a series of 200 next actions for each and every project. indeed, I think this is where computer tools (like OmniFocus, which I use) that group project plans with next actions creates the problem. GTD does not require you (or even encourage you) to break projects down into a whole bunch of next actions in advance and put them all on your list.

“next action—The next physical, visible activity that progresses something toward completion. It is specific enough so that you know where it happens, and with what tools (if any). What “doing” looks like.”

Getting Things Done (revised) at 306.

  1. Contexts (~45:00). I do agree that contexts are harder to define today then they were when GTD was first written. But I think the biggest complaint people have about them relates to defining next actions. The point of contexts is to enable a GTDer to batch process a bunch of more-or-less mechanical actions. Group your calls together. Group your errands together. Group your agendas together. These make sense. What do you do when your context is “write the Smith proposal”? Yes it goes on a computer, but so does maybe 90% of the work we knowledge workers do. That’s fine, define contexts that make sense for you. I have a context called “scribble” for times I want to draft things that require me to brainstorm or think about something in my head, as opposed to “compose” when i have to write some long form contact that requires me to reference other materials. I have a “finder” category for any things that I have to do that require a lot of file management work; I don’t even look at that when i’m on my iPad.

Contexts are highly controversial these days, but I’ve heard David Allen and his team even tell people they can have one single list (i.e., a single context) if that’s all they need. The idea of contexts is far more customizable then people realize.

Sparky uses the example of his “Monthly Priority” tag and says that’s not a context, but he’s wrong. That’s a perfectly valid GTD context. It’s just as good as creating a context called “Prepare for Trip to Spain,” where you put everything you want to get done before leaving for Spain. We often look at contexts so narrowly, but GTD does not require this.

As you begin to implement this methodology consistently, you will invariably find inventive ways to tailor your own contextual categories to fit your situation. Though sorting by the tool or physical location required is most common, there are often other uniquely useful ways to filter your reminders.

Before I go on a long trip, I will create “Before Trip” as a temporary category into which I will move everything from any of my action lists that must be handled before I leave. That becomes the only list I need to review, until they’re all done. ”

Getting Things Done (revised) at 206.

My overarching thought is that GTD commentators confuse the methodology with the tools, and that they treat a variety of GTD concepts in very inflexible ways. The fundamental points are (1) create a system that enables you to achieve all your goals, (2) that does not let things slip through the cracks, (3) that keeps the concrete things before your eyes so that you can complete them, and (4) most importantly, allows you to relax when you are doing one thing because you don’t have to worry about the fact that you are not doing some other thing. The methodology is supposed to bring peace. (At least with respect to managing the things that you want to do!)

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Agree completely with this assessment. A healthy dose of the areas of focus sections in GTD involves saying no, so I could not track why that was missing from GTD in the episode.

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This is an excellent and fair critique. In fact, it is so good, that I’m saving it in my repository for future reference. If you were one of my grad students you’d get an A+ (but I’m an easy grader :rofl:).

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I found the conversation interesting because we have heard over the years how the hosts have morphed their task management systems beyond any one influence and incorporated elements from multiple “system” approaches.

That said, this was presented as viewed through a GTD lens… I would say the lens was smudged & a bit out of focus on this occasion.

It was a commentary on the GTD sediment of David & Mike’s systems after years of modification & the distant half forgotten memories of what the hosts think the books said.

It feels almost blasphemous to suggest the hosts were underprepared but on listening twice to the podcast I think a review of the primary GTD material would have clarified some positions as noted by @iPersuade above.

I think this is one of the rare occasions where I know enough about the subject to see the cracks in the discussion. I think Merlin Mann would have a great guest for this topic.

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While you may be an easier grader, going into your repository is the true test. I am humbled. And I’ll still take the easy A+.

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To expand on the idea that contexts are not dead, I think that the contexts in modern knowledge work have shifted more around energy management than around a physical state of being. I know that I’m incapable of doing productive drafting work between 1-3pm - that’s why I use that time to return my phone calls or have in person meetings. I use the tag “to call” in Todoist, and when I get to “it’s early afternoon, let’s go seek attention from a coworker” I instead to go to the to call tab and call a client. It doesn’t make sense for me to look at my entire to do list, or even my planned to do list for that day if I know I won’t do good work at that time.

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I guess context are easily discarded because we tend to assume everybody is around a computer these days, but there are still many people not working behind a computer the whole day.

I work in IT and are working with a computer most of my time, for some tasks i need a specific computer because i cannot access everything on a client network with my own (employers) computer. When i’m using the client laptop, which can be at home or at the office (so not really a fixed place), if possible, i like to do all the things i need that computer for when i’m using it.

Very specific situation off-course… but that is what i like about GTD as a system, it is flexible enough for most things.

I agree that contexts might not be useful, or at least limited for many users. Still contexts like Waiting, Location-based, or communication type (Call, Message, etc.) could still be useful for many.

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Exactly this! I sometimes do this, but more as a checklist in repeating projects, but for many projects i would advocate against this. A next action should trigger you to work on a project, and in many cases you will get in a certain flow without the need to create a detailed task list. If you are done working on a project a new next action can be created so you know where to pickup the next time.

Example:
Next action: Fix bug Y in software X is all i need to trigger (and off-course project support material)

I could break down to a list of tasks like this:
Fix bug Y in software X

  • Pull project X from Github
  • Fix bug …
  • Deploy to test environment
  • Test in test environment
  • Deploy to acceptance enviroment
  • Plan user test with user Z

But this would be silly in my opinion… I would just do alle these things in one go (iff possible) and if done could create a new next action named: Wait for end users test feedback

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Historically, my most useful contexts aren’t things like @Phone, but things like @Dave, @Larry, @Susan, etc. Lists for things for specific people. That way if I’m talking to Dave, I can pull up @Dave and see EVERYTHING I have to talk to Dave about. It’s huge.

Yeah. Next actions are just “where to start next time you pick this thing up”. You start a game of (American) football with a ball in the middle of the field. The rest unfolds naturally as you go - you don’t pre-plan every play you’re going to run in advance. That’s the idea of a GTD Next Action - pointing to where you start, and giving you freedom to adapt as you go.

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I enjoyed @iPersuade assessment of the GTD episode, though I would agree that contexts, as laid out in the early days of GTD, are dated.

Here is my rub with modern contexts: the fact that I can perform an action on my phone or iPad does not mean I should. A computer, for instance, is a far more effective and efficient device for me to process email, produce video, or file documents than a mobile device.

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Let me take a crack at this one. This is an important point about the highly personalized nature of contexts. My situation is not unlike yours. There are at least a half dozen tools that I can use to get something done, but not everyone of those tools is ideal to get the job done. Nothing wrong with that, just define the contexts to take advantage of that. For example, you can associate a next action with computer and that means tasks that you will only perform on a macOS machine. I used to have my contexts oriented in a way where I would select the context for “the least amount of machine necessary to get the job done efficiently.” That way, I knew if my task was tagged iPad then I could do it on my Mac or my iPad. if my context was “workstation,” I knew this was a weightier job that would be inefficient to do on a mobile device. I changed that because it was not ideal in a variety of situations.

The idea of “contexts” is not–and this is just my opinion–dated. The idea that you define the tool you are going to need or place you are going to be to accomplish a task holds up well. What seems to be dated, perhaps, are the “stock” contexts as defined in the book (at least some of them). If one designs one’s system just using those contexts, it may fall flat for all the reasons described in the podcast, this thread, and your post.

I think GTD is bigger and more flexible than that.

Also, what might be dated–from the book, although the podcasts and other resources address this–is how to think of what constitutes a context when we live in an always-on, always-connected, pretty-much-paperless, virtual world.

If you consider contexts as tools to batch groups of next actions, then how we batch them efficiently is one way to tease out a context.

Here is another illustration from my own system. I found that a lot of what I did was discover information (from reading, studying, or the like) that I needed to store or do something with later. (E.g., Witness says X about a document during an interview; I don’t want to forget that for the deposition of another witness or to use as a trial argument.) Most of that kind of stuff is not complicated or extremely time consuming to capture and often doesn’t require any additional processing/thinking at the point of capture, but it’s hard to always do in the moment that I discovered the information. What I did was create a context called “integrate.” It’s a perfect context to work through when I’ve got a show, podcast, or music going in the background. It batches an activity that often gets neglected because other more important things take precedence over adding something to Zotero or pulling some information out of an e-mail and putting it into my case management system.

The context actually creates an opportunity for me to get something done that I want to get done but otherwise would neglect.

Not all work is batch-able in this manner. And my system is nothing special, except that it works for me. My point is just that if we shift our thinking about contexts more expansively, we can find that they fit in fine in the 21st century and offer what some may find helpful guardrails and backstops around the inventory of “things to get done” that they (we) are sitting on.

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That is, from my point of view, one of the big advantages, I can take out of Omnifocus, as I can set multiple Tags there, and call them in different context-views, to get my stuff done.
So, something I could do on the Mac and the iPad, I tag with both. So I could still tag tasks, that I could do only on my iPad, with iPad (but not Mac), to not get disturbed by entries, I could not do in the particular context.

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This is exactly right.

The classic GTD approach to defining contexts is what’s wrong, and I think it always was. It is trivial to think of contexts like “desk,” “phone,” “Internet.” It’s that lack of effort that makes them useless.

I tried to modernize my contexts a while back with classifications like “Outlining,” “Reading,” and “High energy.” In practice, however, these contexts were useless as well. Whenever I was in one of these contexts I was only doing one task at a time, and I didn’t need the context list to tell me what my next action should be in those contexts.

The more practical idea David Allen was trying to get at is simply “What other useful ways can you query your next action list besides per-project?”

That’s the question that generates valuable “contexts.” “Quick,” “When reviewing,” “Low energy,” “Meeting with supervisor,” and “Running errands” are all examples of useful queries for me now. “At desk” or “OmniGraffle” are not.

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Yes, and No!
As far as I understand, it was never David Allens Intention, to have those contexts as a fixed part of GTD.
They are simply examples, and he was forced to give some in his book and during his trainings, but as far as I understand, they where never to be understood as to be “The Way”.
You have to understand the underlying method, and then adjust it to your personal situation.
You can’t press your life into GTD, GTD has to be adjusted to your life.

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GTD has a lot of great ideas and insights which I still use to this day. But the issue I had with it is that for me, I could spend an entire day checking off tasks in Things and see in my logbook that I was busy, but sometimes I would be frustrated that I didn’t do the most important things. I found that GTD is very task focused and even though he does talk about the horizons of focus, I didn’t find much good advice on how to make sure you focus on the most important work each day. Is that a flaw of GTD or me? Sounds like a lot of people have this same issue.

This is why I now prefer the Cal Newport method of time block planning. I create a quarterly plan and then a weekly plan where I look at my calendar and decide the 2 or 3 most important projects I want to work on each day. For example, I saw that for Monday, I had 5 meetings, so not much time to work on projects. So for my weekly plan on Monday, I have 1 important project I will work on in a 1 hour time block. When I was just doing GTD before, I probably would’ve just checked off a bunch of small tasks in between meetings and not done any work on a bigger project.

This also makes me understand my week better. I see I have to work on 3 important projects this week, so it will make it easier for me to say no to some meetings. Sorry, need to work on the xyz project. It also tied back to my quarterly plan, which is a guide for when I make my weekly plan.

The things that I still find valuable from GTD are the Waiting and Errand contexts. I enter a task in Waiting and usually a date. If I haven’t heard back from Jim by Friday, Things will remind me and I’ll send Jim an email. Of course Errands makes it so when I see I’m low on orange juice at 7:30 am, I’ll look at my Errands list at 5 pm when I leave the office and remember to buy OJ.

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So, why could you not do the same decision, when you used GTD in the way you think it should work?

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It’s covered in pretty exhaustive detail in chapter 9, and I would say the gist of it is this: Those decisions are up to you. Your system is something you design and maintain in a way that helps you make those decisions with some degree of confidence, but it won’t make those decisions for you.

If you read that and then later discovered that something else worked better for you, that’s not a flaw in GTD or you. That’s just your perfectly valid preference.