This has been an interesting thread and I’ve appreciated the opportunity to reflect on what I get out of GTD and where I’ve found friction.
I think a key place GTD has felt challenging for me is navigating between “shoulds” and “wants.” Even David Allen suggests these are still at play for him:
For me, GTD breaks down when it reduces to a set of lists of obligations that I feel resentful towards. As others have noted in this thread, the ease with which certain aspects of GTD are instantiated in software processes (capturing ideas, displaying and filtering task lists with associated metadata) makes these aspects take on an outsized importance in practice, overshadowing the other aspects (the natural planning model, the importance of keeping in mind what “wildly successful” outcomes one is working toward, navigating the multiple “horizons of focus”).
What I have been most interested in over the last several years are tools/methods for increasing the importance, visibility, and ease of engaging in these less formalizable aspects. How do I avoid simply recording obligations? I tend to go back and forth on whether the frequent work and updating I need to do on this front is a limitation of GTD itself or a weakness in the community’s lack of interest in developing and sharing tools/methods for doing this broader reflective activity. Of course, there’s also the more idiosyncratic aspects of my own tendency to get stuck at the more existential-angsty levels of the horizons of focus rather than the “cranking widgets” levels.
At any rate, there have been a few tools which have updated GTD for me. Often the creators of these tools suggest they are offering something better than GTD, but from my perspective what they offer is simply better than the existing tooling but often still in keeping with the basic GTD principles (which others have outlined succinctly in other messages above).
The key tool that has shifted my relationship to my task list is Complice. You can hear the creator of this tool (Malcolm Ocean) discuss how he thinks it differs from GTD in this interview with Khe Hy, or you can listen to him monologue about the tool’s principles in this video (which was part of a series where David Allen also presented). Basically, Complice works by asking you to form key goals, then every day you define what you’d like to do that do to move those goals forward. At night you review what you’ve done and reflect on whether you’ve “done enough” on that goal and then choose what to do tomorrow. If you don’t complete what you planned, the tasks don’t stick around–you start fresh every day. As you can see, this isn’t a system for folks who want checklists or to remember all the widget cranking aspects of their complicated jobs. You can, as I do, use the Complice goal focus alongside the task manager memory tools. While I don’t use Complice itself (I don’t like the web app and I have customized most of the reflection questions), I have used the methodology it represents for a few years now and have found it a good antidote to the tendency to get resentful of lists of obligations.
Even this Complice method, though, can sometimes feel too formal and obligatory and so the other method I’ve found incredibly useful lately is Kourosh Dini’s “anchor and sail” technique. You can learn how to do it by signing up on Kourosh’s site, where he will email you a PDF about it. Basically, you just use a notecard and write down all the stuff you want to do. It could be something from the task list, it could be something from the Complice goal list, it could be to watch TV or go for a walk. Write it all down. Then choose one. When I find myself in conflict about what I want to do, this technique has been teaching me how to trust that what I want is what’s best for me and for my goals. Too often I have used my task lists as a way to beat myself up, to suggest that I can’t be trusted to do what’s right and I need to use firm discipline. This has only created more resistance for me in the end. At the end of the day, I think this is totally in line with David Allen’s core GTD tenets–that you need whatever level of formality to help yourself feel fluidly engaged with whatever you want to be doing and achieving.
The place where I’m still feeling a lot of tension with GTD is in the capture / open loops frame. You can read an interesting thread with a bunch of people discussing that from back in may. If I really write down everything that is on my mind in order to “close the loop,” I end up with a minor part time job managing all that stuff. There’s a fear that if I don’t write it down then the idea or “cool thing to check out” will be forever lost and it might have been exactly what I needed at some point and I won’t have it. Like a kind of existential FOMO. I’d love better tooling / process for navigating that. I’ve been trying to just throw more and more into the black hole of DevonThink and hope the serendipity search mechanism will turn it up when needed, but that just feels like a band aid sometimes.