Oh, I’m sure that was a typo? In the context, “many people” seems to be the intended phrase, right?
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That was a typo/screen reader error for “many people.” Sometimes digital tech is not helpful.
I can remove the post if it’s a problem.
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Not at all, please don’t remove it. I had a reaction to the typo given the current avante-garde approach to all things gender related. I’m profoundly grateful I did not respond as doing so would have been both inappropriate for this forum and mistaken. 
Your thoughtfulness and kindness are appreciated nevertheless. Besides, I’m grateful for individuals like yourself who are acquainted with the ancient texts and thinkers. Not everything new is better.
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Not really, What seems to be the issue is that folks don’t understand the combination of simplcity and expandability that is GTD.
Common complaint is that the contexts of computer etc are invalid. Maybe, for some folks, but there are still valid contexts. You just have to do more work to figure them out for your situation and how you think. Rather than take the given ones as gospel consider them examples instead. If you look at more recent research in the cost of switching modes then contexts can be things like mental state, or in my case specific software package. And more to your point. Even now when the majority of my day is spent in my office attempting to program I am routinely without a computer . Even if I have my phone I can be without any connectivity for hours at a time just 15 minutes from home on our other property where I need to do things like check irrigation and work on cleaning up trash. It’s folly to assume always an available computer or connectivity.
Another common complaint is that GTD doesn’t handle higher levels (major goals or purpose in life) Again, I maintain that they just haven’t really understood what the various levels are for. Sure GTD starts with the bottom, what has oyour attention right now. Because, to paraphrase, If you are eating dry cereal beauce the milk is sour because it wasn’t on a grocery list it’s kind of hard to think about what you want your life to look like in 15 or 20 years.
Even another complaint is that GTD doesn’t handle habits or routines. Again, there are references to checklists as one tool and also ideas on working to get things on autopilot.
That’s the whole point of handling Work as it Appears which I know is discussed in all the books. GTD gives you a framework to feel good about blowing off a day and reading a nice cozy mystery (like I did yesterday)
Also the whole review time and 1 next action etc are NOT in the books as far as I know but I haven’t read them all in the last 2 years.
Again go read the books. It’s pretty clearly stated in one of them about blocking time for critical work or closing the door for projects or tasks. GTD is NOT anti-time blocking at all.
This is SO true.
Umm, I haven’t been “in the system” for over 20 years but GTD is critical for me to accomplish the tasks I consider important and the projects I want to work on.
But that isGTD! Again NOTHING about don’t block off time, and also nothing about having to stick to a context list all the time. I am also engaged in a major software project but I batch things based on which part of the code I’m working on. The Android Java mobile app or the Python Desktop app or the SQLite database implementation. All three take a very different mental approach and I use different tools. For me I have contexts for the IDEs I use (Android Studio and PyCharm and then a generic SQLite context because I use a bunch of different database tools)
That is the essence if why I still use GTD exclusively. My implementation is changing but the core is the same. I am one for long lists of possibles. I’ve usually got between 150-200 current active projects. I also have over 40 different contexts so that I can easily read in one page all the items on a given context list. If I had to search through all that to get to what i have time, energy and tools for that is a high priority for me I’d never accomplish anything.
Now this discussion has brought out to me that it’s time for me to go read all 3 books again. Every time I re-read them all in sequence I get more out of them, they age very well IMO more like classic Dickens or Heinlein.
As I am in the middle of making major changes to my systems I think I need the refresher.
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I agree 100% that was Cal’s point. It’s a shame his publishers chose a thoroughly misleading, clickbaity title for his article, and that the title seems to have shaped much of the resulting discussion (not necessarily on MPU!)
The conversation it tends to spark is along the lines of debating “car vs. semi truck” when it comes to getting groceries. It’s just not a sane discussion. Both pieces are important, but they’re completely different parts of the process - not fungible alternatives to one another.
I think this is really the challenge of all productivity - the thinking through of “how to make it work for you”. A lot of people (myself included!) would love a “done for you” sort of solution. But that’s not what you’re likely to get from an article on the Internet, or even a book. You get the principles, and then you have to implement.
Exactly. And, FWIW, dovetailing with the “how to make it work for you” that nobody does, the higher-level stuff is harder to write about because it’s much more individual. It’s hard to write an article about “how to get your 50,000 foot vision for your life”, but relatively easy to write “five GTD contexts that will help you get organized”. So much low-effort content has been produced about “runway” level stuff that a lot of people think that’s all GTD actually is.
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Perhaps part of the tension is that we’re not recognising the uniqueness of each individual? David Allen’s systems works best for him. Call Newport’s system works best for him. The mistake is trying to use it wholesale.
I believe we can learn from others and seeing how others do things can help us tweak our systems, but need to develop our own. This is why to some extent I think an organisational tasks system is not going to get the best out of everybody.
I’ve noticed that most people are using bits off different systems that other people have shared about and that they’ve not all chosen to use the same bits. I think this is how it is supposed to be.
No one size fits all.
Edit
Perhaps talking about productivity principles would be more beneficial?
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David Allen formulated his GTD as a result of his observations he made during coachings he did.
It is not a system he made for himself…
The mistake is thinking, that it is a wholesale!
GTD is a kind of a framework, that has to be adjusted to everybody’s individual needs.
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It is pretty simple, if you “stick” with GTD, you are doing within those two hours the next actions, that you do have on your “Project-List” within @code_editor_xy.
A list @computer makes no sense, if you are sitting 24/7 in front of one.
If you are the manager of a grocery store, running around your store the half of the time, a list @computer could make the same valuable sense, like a list @shopping_center for you.
GTD is not a religion.
The examples of lists mentioned in the book, and at the coachings (and so on), are only that, examples that could fit a lot of people.
And everybody else has to think for himself, and adjust those examples towards the special needs, he has within his own life situation.
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This is a very wise question.
No value judgment in anyone’s profession intended here: I see a correlation between those who seem to think GTD has gone stale with working in a field where the conditions @webwalrus raise seem to be the case. I am not an academic but when I taught ROTC, I came into contact with several. Cal Newport is a tenured professor. Effectively self-employed, sharply focused, and in possession of wide professional latitude, I can understand how his view of productivity is skewed by his particular set of work conditions.
I wish we could all focus on the thing that matters most, pulling work tickets at a pace we can handle within an organization that supports that pace, but the reality is that people are messy and wherever a group of them exists and some are dependent on others, the messes tend to compound. The principles in GTD are helpful in making sense of the personal commitments tangled in that mess so that, hopefully, we can make appropriate decisions about what to do while working to find a better way to work.
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Noting that while work is definitely a big part of it (potentially the largest part of it), I wasn’t intending to limit scope to work. GTD certainly doesn’t. 
For demands on time, throw in anything like…
- A spouse / significant other
- Kids
- Pets
- Involvement in a civic / religious organization
- Sick / elderly parents to care for
and you (a) will almost certainly not be completely in charge of large swaths of your schedule, and (b) will likely have constant inputs from them to process.
As a random non-work example, we have a geriatric dog that requires us to do specific things with her (food, medications, walks, etc.) at relatively specific times, about 5 times per day, or Bad Things will occur. It’s not super-onerous, but it’s definitely a constraint that has to be factored in when scheduling other things.
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I thought the important idea from Cal Newport’s “fall of GTD” essay was that such systems shouldn’t be left to employees to implement ad hoc, if they do at all. If we go that route, then it greatly matters which systems are better than others, and for which levels of individual skill and aptitude, because they will be pushed onto employees if seriously adopted. Like any other top-down initiative, it will be hard to know what is really working well across organizations and feedback will take years.
I think elements of GTD would work well implemented across an organization, but it would need to be packaged differently. Some missteps are harmless when self-inflicted, but could be hurtful if done thoughtlessly to others (deciding what’s a two minute task, for example, or misunderstanding the place for X0,000 foot levels, putting employees through uncomfortable questioning.
(Same difficulty with time-block planning. How awful would it be to go through calibrating your blocks under your boss’ eye or having to explain any way the right daily column played out differently from the left.)
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Personally, I believe that is a dangerous road to go down. It’s ok if you’re the boss, but not if your not. This thread has highlighted just how differently we implement our productivity. Forcing employees into one way of working would be disastrous.
I can see value in training employees in productivity principles and having common shared locations for projects and material, but that’s as far as I would go.
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As someone self employed and never read GTD (the book) I obviously have a different take than people in a busy corporate environment. I implement some of the principles which I find work fine, certainly for routine tasks like remembering to send annual invoices and the principles have certainly improved if not my “productivity” but my efficiency, doing things when they should be done.
I was a big proponent of tagging when using OmniFocus but since moving to Things I have largely abandoned them, I now just name tasks consistently ie CALL xyz or INVOICE xyz etc. I do keep areas of focus as these help breakdown where projects fit, but GTD (for me falls down big time when working on websites.
I I commit to work on a web design project I know I need my code editor I do not need tags to tell me so, plus the “next action” I planned on working on often morphs into something else or something extra and often something that overlaps with a future todo, I am not sure that a rigid system copes well with free wheeling thinking required when coding, especially if your not beholden to anyone for what your working on. The client is just interested in the finished result.
I have tried sprints, kanban etc etc. and I usually find myself just jotting down notes in the code editor. The task managers excel at the set up and admin parts but the actual creation process no, I think a simple notepad digital or otherwise may be better, at least for me.
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If you take the original book as the “complete truth” I think it is.
I still use GTD daily, and take enormous benefit from it, and so do my wife and children. But I do not implement it exactly like David outlines, and I’m not even sure he meant it to be copied 1 on 1 for everyone.
I think GTD is something that is very flexible and can be adapted to suit your needs and situation.
Roughly my system follows David’s guidance, but I’ve not implemented the contexts as he proposed, as for my a computer is omnipresent, so @computer does not make sense. But I heavily use contexts to indicate topics or state-of-mind (energy levels f.e.)
So to your quesion is it showing it’s age?
Yes, I think it does, but with age comes wisdom and beauty.
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There’s always a risk that enthusiastic managers implement a system that works well for them, but makes little allowance for different roles, personality types and interpersonal dynamics. When I worked in IT we ended up implementing a system that I personally didn’t love, but provided some flexibility across the organisation.
Interdependencies can be complex. I often judged, for example, backend design and processes to be the most important next steps. The sales team, however, often needed to show the client some visible progress, so they would prioritise user experience/front end design. They would usually win . As you say, though, people in different roles can often underestimate time required for people to do things, or the importance of sequence.
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This, to me, is maybe the most important thing to remember. As I recall, David Allen has always stressed that it is important to find and use what works for YOU, individually. He has a set of good suggestions on the how, but does not dictate. Who cares if your implementation differs from some arbitrary “standard” as long as it works for you.
There is no GtD Police.
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That rings true, I know I get better looking each year! 
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This is exactly how work goes for me consistently on an average day, and my fairly purist GTD system has served me well in managing it. I couldn’t do what you’re describing nearly as efficiently as I do now if I didn’t use GTD to do it.
You didn’t fail. GTD didn’t fail. It’s just not the right method for you. Thank goodness for diversity of thought. That’s where innovation begins.
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I read Getting Things Done last year, and plan on re-reading it this year. It definitely gave me lots to think about regarding how I organise myself, and I recognised a few scenarios that matched where I’d gotten lost in the past.
From my experience over the years with various productivity tools, and reading other’s experiences, I think there’s an issue with people falling into the trap of believing that their life will be smooth sailing if they just adopt the right tools or system, and seeing ‘being productive’ as an end in itself. Speaking personally, I’ve found that it’s sometimes better to step back and ask yourself why you’ve got such a huge to-do list or project folder.
I’ve now moved back to using Calendar and Reminders for most of my day-to-day planning, and am considering how to handle longer-term projects.
To David Allen’s credit, he has updated Getting Things Done over the years to reflect changing times, while not prescribing a particular way of doing things. So no, I don’t think GTD is showing its age. But there is no shame in adjusting the advice to suit your needs and goals. And definitely don’t get hung up on having a ‘perfect’ GTD system.
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This is a great thread. GTD + PARA really shifted my thinking and I can’t imagine life without them, though I should do a re-read of both GTD and reacquaint myself with some of the practices that go along with PARA.
If there are other systems like GTD out there, I’d love to hear about them! I’ve looked around and nothing ever seemed quite as valuable to me as GTD.
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