I believe this may be the stake in the ground someone else mentioned. When getting a project out of one’s head, identifying the next action on that project serves as a proxy for planning at the moment. He has a recent series of podcasts going through a live seminar and uses the phrase to describe capture then later discusses parallel tasks and full planning.
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As an aside, I suspect many of us use the P.AR.A method, probably in conjunction with elements of GTD; I certainly do.
My P.A.R.A setup and tools are intentionally simple:
Projects: Reminders, Calendar for events and blocked time for project work
Areas: Reminders and Notes–they mirror each other–Strategic Priorities, Work, Personal, and Someday/Maybe
Resource/Reference: Obsidian (research) and Apple Notes (project and meeting notes and reference material)
Archives: iCloud/Finder, Email archive, Notes archive folder, and a Reminders “archived projects folder”
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Sure do!
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Right - it’s probably because most well-defined projects have one next action, not a bunch. And at the “runway” level, where you’re actually working, if a project has multiple next actions there’s a good chance it’s because the “project” is actually a bunch of projects. “Launch new online course” is likely at least half a dozen projects, and probably doesn’t have any direct “next actions” until you’re ready to actually flip the switch and go live.
For example, I worked with a lady who had to plan a Sunday service, and had three musicians to contact about getting videos for the music portion. “Plan Sunday service” was a project, and “Get video from Dave / Susan / Sam” were all sub-projects, with their own defined next actions (“email Dave to figure out when he’s sending video”).
I’m guessing DA is always focusing on the singular “next action” because the emphasis of GTD is not planning huge strings of dependent actions, and people just can’t seem to let that go. 
I think “wrong” in GTD is mostly “misunderstanding the idea of the system”. I saw somebody on the GTD forums who was convinced that GTD required breaking every project down into two-minute actions (front loading that planning, of course), and wouldn’t listen to the longer-term GTD folks when they were trying to explain that he’d misread the book. 
That guy was “wrong” in the sense of what GTD was, and probably “wrong” if he was thinking that approach would ever work for him. But as long as one is capturing everything, making decisions, and getting stuff done, there’s a lot of wiggle room in GTD.
There’s a flip side to this as well. I know a guy who works for a major insurance company at a very high level. His day is scheduled in 30-minute blocks. And the next level up is scheduled in 15-minute blocks. And it gets shorter from there. Quite literally, that’s the longest “time block” he’s allowed.
I think time blocking is fantastic for those that have the ability (and the work culture) to allow for it, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But when you’re “head down” for your block, that doesn’t beat back the onslaught of to-dos - it just gives you defined time to work on whichever one of them you’re currently doing.
You still need to make decisions about what you’re going to actually do, which is where most people fall down with GTD.
Agreed. The only real solution to complete task overload is less work.
And if I could emphasize “when you have a complete understanding”. Somebody else dumping a ticket in an online system doesn’t mean diddly squat if you don’t get it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve opened something like a trouble ticket at previous jobs and had such an unclear jumble that I almost had to start over.
Companies trying to “simplify” frequently add complexity, and create systems that are fundamentally not useful to the people under them - especially when the people defining things aren’t working through processes and defining useful starting points / tasks. Frequently, this results in a need for employees to keep their own “system about the system”.
Want to guess which organizational system anticipates this? I’ll give you a hit - it has three letters, and starts with a “G”. 
This is why GTD (and just about every other useful system) is a personal system, not a company-level system - because the individual is the one that needs to understand what’s going on, and that looks different for different people.
The ideal, IMHO, is to provide organizational tools to corral inputs so we’re not burning as much time dealing with that stuff, and provide some protection for peoples’ times (i.e. not sucking them into irrelevant meetings constantly). Then let people define their schedules, and give them the freedom to do things like block off a morning for a big project.
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After rigidly adhering to a GTD approach throughout my PhD program and my pre-tenure years, I’ve all but abandoned it. I found that GTD became a kind of personal dogma that created too much overhead. I had turned myself into a manager, and I was managing myself and my tasks more than I was enjoying the work of doing. Ryder Carroll’s bullet journal book was a comparative breath of fresh air for me. His approach felt organic, emergent, and flexible. I’ve been doing a personal variation on bullet journaling for a few years now, and I find that a lot of my task management overhead has disappeared.
Personally, I find that the logic of GTD correlates well with software design (and especially software built around databases), and it’s easy to get pulled into a particular orbit of software features that are loosely GTDish but serve the developer more than the user.
I’m also struck by 1) the number of accomplished people who don’t need systems like GTD, and 2) how many of the GTD proponents (or PARA proponents, for that matter) only write about productivity. It’s as if GTD is a good system for writing about GTD.
In contrast, Jeff Huang has a truly impressive resume, and he’s done it all with a single text file. Alan Jacobs—also an accomplished writer and professor—manages everything with his calendar. One of the most prolific people in my field keeps tracks of tasks in a Word document. I’m not saying any one person is an exemplar or model, but a lot of productivity talk ignores or even disparages those approaches to work.
The problem with GTD, as I see it, is that it requires you to buy into a way of seeing the world that is very managerial. That might be great for CEOs, and I’m sure it works for some other creative folks, but I think the method has had an oversized influence on software design, and I think it has preempted us from seeing and imagining other approaches to work.
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That was how I interpreted your original post, and I appreciate the thought exercise it spurred. I am frequently looking for ways to refine my understanding of what I think I already know, from managing my life to the mechanics of hitting a softball.
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I’m not sure that is true. They just manage those components differently. Be it a single txt file or a calendar, they still need to track projects, project support, deadlines and the like. That’s all GTD is doing.
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This is a very real symptom of how we approach productivity methods. GTD – especially the way it is implemented in some digital tools – can definitely lead to this. But it is not supposed to be overhead. If done optimally, one is expending as little effort as possible to keep one’s self reminded of a next action or project or whatever. Our computer tools add lots of layers of complexity because it’s so darn easy to track all sorts of metadata in a computer database: when is the task due? when can you start it? how long will it take? what goals apply to it? Where can you do it? What energy level do you have to be at to do it? Can you do it on your MacBook? What about your iPad? Can you do a certain task on either your iPad and your MacBook but not your iPhone? YIKES!!!
Computer task management tools also make it easy to crowd out really important and fulfilling things with thousands of reminders for doing the mundane things, like paying the gas bill.
Who wants that? But GTD as a process is not supposed to be a thing that then occupies all your time and energy. It’s supposed to get out of your way so you can do real things and not be thinking about the system for doing them. It’s the background.
The same is true about cranking out widgets. It’s not supposed to sap your energy. It’s supposed to be a way to get granular tasks accomplished that enable you to make progress on a project without the overwhelming feeling that there are 12,000 tasks you need to do to actually complete the project.
If you work on one task from Project A, one task from Project B, and one task from Project C – when you have available time – then you have made each of those projects a little closer to being completed. So, the point of the widget analogy is not because we should be productivity machines, but to enable us to do things mechanically so we don’t have to spend time thinking about things that we already determined are important to us.
I also work like someone else mentioned. Sometimes, I can check off a bunch of next actions in a particular context. But many times, I’m spending a block of time working on a variety of tasks in one project. I have to complete Project D, but I have to 8 things to achieve completion. So, I do each of those next actions in one setting. I suppose in that case, the project has become the context (as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, from a certain point of view).
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Fellow academic here — these comments deeply resonate with my experience with GTD (and also many of those marketing “second brains”)
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Thank you. This is actually an excellent example of what I ran into early in my use of GTD, and I saw it happen again and again when I tried to help a few people adopt GTD (which was a mistake I don’t make anymore, by the way — I am thoroughly convinced that you have to let people find their own way into a productivity system). In each case (including my own) the person lost patience with the model as they began to realize it wouldn’t make their decisions for them — or that it appeared to them that the system was driving them toward wrong decisions.
The allure of contexts is very strong. When I was learning the model, a lot of it seemed like well-applied common sense rather than a clever or revolutionary way of thinking. But the concept of contexts really kind of blew my mind. It was such a powerful reframing of the same information I’d always had but had never noticed. I’m sure I’m not alone in having had that experience. Like many others, I got very hung up on contexts — in particular, I spent a lot of time worrying that there were important ones I was missing, and I devoted a lot of energy at any given moment trying to make sure I understood what context I was actually in at that moment.
And, like many others, for a while I lost sight of the fact that, in GTD, context is just one of four factors to consider when going through the process of deciding where to direct your attention next. And it’s only the first step in that four-step process. When I was homing in on @computer because I happened to be in a chair in front of my computer, I was letting the first step sway me inordinately. I wasn’t giving nearly enough consideration to time, energy, and — most important — priority. Priority is tough. It’s messy and variable and infused with all of the political and interpersonal workplace junk I thought GTD was going to help me circumvent. It’s all still there, and you still have to deal with it. That’s the step where you understand: I can’t crank all these widgets; I’ve got a two-hour bear of a task I need to get to done by 4:45 today.
GTD didn’t completely click with me until I understood that all context does is winnow my list of possible next actions down to what I can realistically do next, right now, in that moment or in that space, with the tools and resources I have at hand there. It spares me of the need to go through my entire list of next actions and assess priority for all of them, whether or not I can actually do them now. But I still had to be the one to make the call on priority. No one and no thing could do that work for me.
One of the things that @Bmosbacker’s thought exercise in this thread made me realize is how little space Allen devotes to context in the book. That was an eye-opener, even after all these years of being comfortable with not caring that much about context. I’m actually kind of embarrassed to think of how much time I spent worrying about context when I see how comparatively minor it appears to be in his overall discussion. Kind of like The Princess and the Pea.
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I think it is showing it’s age, yes. I’ve read it twice, once when it came out, and again a year or so in the latest edition.
I’m not saying it’s “bad”; but I think there are problems in the way digital tech is overlooked.
I also am finding, as a woman who both worked in technology and in higher ed, and whose partner is a farrier, that like many of the productivity books, Allen is rigid in his perception of gender roles, and his blindness to class and gender issues.
I have similar issues with Cal Newport.
That said, I know many people who find GTD extraordinarily effective, and I’m happy for them. Mostly, aside from some precepts that it shares with any kind of rational work flow, I find GTD not really that helpful for me as a collection of methods, and annoying as a book.
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This …
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Very well said. I’ve been a follower of GTD since I attended a two-day seminar in Chicago in 2003 given by David Allen himself. But I don’t follow GTD rigidly. As with any system I adopt, I take what works for me and ignore the rest (and what that means changes over time).
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That’s one of the aspects of GTD that I ignore. While I do use contexts, I think in terms of projects and that’s how I organize the work I need to get done.
I hope I don’t need to apologize! 
Thanks for the encouragement; I hope you’re right about “being closer to the right spot.” I feel good about my current system. It is not as sophisticated and automated as many workflows shared in this forum and I’m only using the free default apps. But, the workflow is working well; my work is getting done. 
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I think it’s the reverse - that the sorts of people likely to take to the Internet and write about productivity, especially in the early days, are the sorts of people to whom GTD was appealing. David Allen has even acknowledged this.
There is the broad issue of productivity writers being detached from the real world, and whether a lot of that writing is even relevant to somebody working at the proverbial 9 to 5. But I think that’s a separate issue from whether or not the systems work for people with regular jobs.
When we’re talking about people that were successful without it, I would also ask how many of those people were largely in charge of their own schedule, free of too much outside influence. If the latter is true, I think that a more formalized system like GTD, PARA, or whatever else is far less necessary.
But again, we need to make sure we’re comparing apples to apples.
Neither of these people use “just a text file” or “just a calendar” - they each use both.
Jeff Huang puts everything on his calendar, and shuttles things back and forth between the calendar and his text file every day. It’s not “just a text file”, but rather a system of scheduling everything for a day / time, even if it’s just to think about it more - and then adjusting as necessary.
Alan Jacobs manages things with a calendar and a task list, and actively records what would logically be described as “next actions” with those tasks and calendar entries.
I’m willing to bet they’re both routinely capturing all of their incoming stuff, making decisions about it, etc.
How far are they actually from at least the underlying principles of GTD?
I would tend to agree, but again, more because it’s easy to design software around groups of lists with things like reminders and tags. GTD lends itself well to software implementations.
Exactly. If you’re on a plane, you can’t go to the hardware store - even if “go to the hardware store” would otherwise be the most important thing for you to do.
I could be wrong, but I feel like contexts are like inboxes. You should have as few as you reasonably need to categorize your life, and no more.
That said, where I actually found the biggest help from contexts is “person-specific” contexts. If I put six things in an “@Sally” context, then I can run through all of them next time I have Sally on the phone. I’ll happily have a (digital) context list for everybody I have to have a discussion with, because it streamlines things a ton.
Yup. I think that’s the project management “holy grail” - software that can prioritize. I feel like systems get criticized a lot, and people flip from system to system never really being happy, because that’s what they’re looking for. And it doesn’t exist, at least not to my knowledge.
That’s what I think is missing about a lot of people that write about “workflows” - the work actually has to flow. 27-step complicated systems stop being “workflows” if you’re spending too much time Macdinking (macdink) the system and not enough time actually doing things.
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Oohh… interesting. Care to elaborate? Do you find class and gender issues are bleeding over into the method causing negative outcomes? These are important questions that I really would like to learn more about.
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In software delivery, that gives us common systems like Jira, and in IT Operations, we get ITSM ticketing systems. It gets rigid fast, but with the benefit that it can be relatively easily standardised across large teams. For personal productivity, I’d say you still need a system in addition to the company wide, common systems.
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It may be best not to go there as surely it could turn political, which is why I resisted responding to the phrase “ man people”. I’ve been guilty of unintentionally making a post political so take it from one who has made that mistake, we’d better stick to workflows.
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Granted but I think Cal’s point is that the best personal productivity systems can only go so far because institutional culture, systems, and inertia can torpedo the best personal productivity system.
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