I clearly remember the President of the company I worked for in the late 80s and early 90s telling us that he was empowering us to do what was needed. I saw it as an abdication of his responsibility to provide useful direction. In my mind, GTD arose as employees found out they were on their own to get the job done.
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This is actually âintended behaviorâ in GTD. Your ânext actionâ just records where you start any given project and/or where you left off last time, and when youâre done with whatever youâre doing you record new ânext actionsâ to let you know where to pick things up next time.
Thatâs all NAs are - flags in the ground to give you a jumping off point.
People in the same roles are horrible at estimating it too. 
The issue you begin to run into with âother people putting tasks into your systemâ IMHO is that it becomes easy to start getting back to waterfall-style planning, which is the usually the polar opposite of what GTD is trying to encourage.
I would wager that even DA does GTD differently from how he used to, based on the fact that heâs revised and updated the books and changed around info in his seminars. Same principles, but different implementations based on changing times.
To me, âempowermentâ is useful, but itâs only one part of it. âEmpowermentâ means âyou can make your own decisions regarding what needs to be doneâ, but itâs missing the follow up question from the boss, âwhat do you need from me?â
Employees need things like:
- No âdotted lineâ to five different department heads that can all dump tasks on you
- Aggressive protection of employeesâ time from useless meetings
- Support from the boss if they have to make a judgement call
- Setting reasonable departmental expectations regarding things like email, etc.
Those can be addressed at the managerial level, but are frequently next to impossible for an employee to deal with.
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Oh, he said both parts because thatâs what was in the management book he read. But he wasnât talking to his direct reports or even his management team. We were sales and support and coders at the bottom of the pyramid and at a disadvantage in that equation.
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Your visceral reaction is fine. I also would rather bring my own system. Iâm like you in that I like to work in environments and industries where I have a high degree of latitude in how and when I do my work in all respects, not just how information is organized.
I thought the idea Cal was making, though, was that there are many organizations where most people hired have no idea how to organize the work on either an individual or group level, so in order to get out of the current information volume trap, those organizations will, out of necessity, need to stop assuming only their Merlin Manns/cornchips/svsmailus employees benefit from being organized, and start doing some combination of training, work structuring and system prescription.
Kind of like how personal computing eventually came for nearly every job and not just ones for people who really like computers, and the computing for people who donât like computers and had no plans to mess with them out of curiosity has been more command-and-control.
Did you happen to inherit a spring from Juan Ponce de LeĂłn? If so, do you sell bottled water?
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Of course, for a price. but the water comes âas isâ with no warranty and no refunds. How many do you need? 
If it is âFree shippingâ, I would take a 6-PackâŚ
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Certainly, shipping is included in the priceâdid I mention it is an ongoing subscription? After all, one doesnât want to get better looking only to revert back when the subscription ends. 
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Based on what I see in the mirror each morning I probably need all youâve got. 
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Sorry, but I looked in the mirror this morning and drank the whole lot.
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Iâd like to expand a bit on what Cal Newport is trying to address. He calls the way most companies work these days as the hyperactive hive mind. Itâs just a constant stream of unscheduled messages (email, IM, etc) and meetings to try and figure out how to accomplish a task. His idea, which I think is mostly correct, is that the communication takes up too much of the time spent working on the tasks. His idea is that the company (or team or whatever level of organization makes sense) figure out a streamlined process for accomplishing tasks that are regular and repeating. He makes the analogy with the way cars used to be made vs the Ford assembly line. A car used to be made in a stationary place up on blocks. Then different people would come up to the car and do the job they were best at doing. It took a long time and there was a lot of time wasted with people moving around to work on the cars.
Ford had the brilliant idea of having the people be stationary and the cars would move along and allow the cars to be manufactured at a quicker pace, which in turn made the cars more affordable. So he just didnât tell people to go figure out how to make a car. He created an efficient process that allowed the company to thrive and grow.
He sees the current corporate environment more like the pre-assembly line days. Managers give people a task, an email address and Slack account and tells the team to figure it out as they go along. This ends up being very inefficient and messy. There is way more noise in the system than needs to be.
Iâve taken 2 days off from work, I just checked my work inbox, it has 749 new messages. This is after all of my filtering rules are applied. Iâm sure the actual volume is closer to 2000 messages in that time. Isnât that a bit crazy?
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I would consider a tenth of that amount a bit crazy.
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Wow, I hope the majority of that is routine messaging about systems that you monitor and that are doing fine or are being covered by others while youâre gone.
P.S. No mater how much youâre making, I think you need a raise!
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âToday, carmakers like Ford are moving away from traditional assembly lines, and to conveyances that are reminiscent of the carts that carried early cars around assembly plants.â
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A good amount of it is routine, but doesnât fit the rules I have to filter that stuff out. I would love it if my Inbox just had messages from people who are trying to communicate with me. Instead of being one of the 50 people CCd on an email thread I donât care about.
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I think stuff like this is lower-hanging fruit for optimization. There are relatively few emails that actually make sense to circulate to 50 people, and frequently when I see stuff like that itâs more in the category of reference info rather than something thatâs actually being asked of me.
Consolidating the reference info into a centralized place would largely solve a good chunk of the email problem.
Some of the emails (I get these too) are just automated status updates. If we made those updates a little smarter, such that they only wind up in your main inbox (or even get sent at all) when thereâs something you need to see, that would help.
And as a related example, in many companies, thereâs no consequence to calling a meeting of a dozen or more people when only a few of them would actually have to be there.
These are all areas where management could provide some direction and free up peoplesâ attention so that they could get useful work done.
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Right, if I understand Newport, you, and the other posts in this thread correctly, thatâs the kind of thing that Newport is arguing for in his article(s). These are the kinds of things that employees canât really deal with, but management can, and itâs kind of separate from GTD. I think itâs more about âGTD can help you handle these problems, but there are things that can be done as an organization to minimize them in the first placeâ.
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I can get beside this and I would argue a similarly about his (Newportâs) stance on work within an organization. The part that I have the biggest issue with is his antagonistic attitude toward GTD extends beyond the level of his New Yorker article and bubbles up repeatedly in his podcast. He pitches his own philosophy, calls it different and more streamlined, but in reality, itâs just a GTD Liteâ˘ď¸ system without the refinement GTD Classicâ˘ď¸ brings; capture, configure, control with projects listed by role is pretty similar to capture, clarify, organize with projects listed by area of focus. In either system, failure to question priorities, habits, and how all of this fits into oneâs higher calling leads to dissatisfaction. Listening to his podcast makes that as clear as the many, many voices arguing that GTD didnât work for them. I suspect if each of us put as much effort into questioning our purpose on this earth, a lot of these dilemmas would sort themselves out.
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I think itâs natural for us to blunt the idea in that article until it becomes something remedial like fewer notifications.
I wonât belabor the point any further, but I would look at the five room work building in Deep Work to get an analogous idea of what might be coming from some organizations to gain an advantage in competitive information work. I see a straight through-line to the New Yorker article.
Individual GTD can be practiced to an extent in such an environment but it is second priority.
The overall GTD culture in the David Allenâs own organization might be a more familiar reference point, if any of you have encountered or read about it, and is less extreme but very much not individualistic.
I agree that GTD and CCC (Newportâs system, Capture/Configure/Control) have many similarities, and that they both require some sort of higher-level planning to fit within, but I would not necessarily argue that Newport is antagonistic towards GTD or that one system is better than the other.
As someone that used GTD for a little while and has mostly used CCC (using it at the moment as well), here is my opinion on the two: The Capture/Clarify and Capture/Configure parts of GTD and CCC, respectively, are very similar (itâs in the names!). Where the two systems differ is in the third step, the organizational step. The difference lies in what Iâll call the âaxis of separationâ, or the method each system uses to divide tasks up into various buckets.
Allen, from what I understand, argues in GTD that the axis of separation should be context. That is, you should split up your tasks into your different âmodesâ, which makes it easier to filter out tasks that you really canât do at the moment (someone earlier in the thread mentioned going to the hardware store while on a plane), or finding tasks that are really suited to the moment (on a call with someone and finding other items related to them).
Newport, from what I understand, argues in CCC that the axis of separation should be status. This means splitting up tasks into different levels, similar to priority, but that also have semantic meaning. For example, you may have a âpostponedâ bucket for very low priority tasks, or a âactiveâ bucket for things youâre working on in the next 24 hr, etc. This makes it really easy to see what stage every task is in at the moment, and what things you need to move forward right now vs what you can ignore.
My argument is that the better system depends on you and your work. For me, almost all of my work would fit into a singular âComputerâ context. Sure, I could split it up into per-app, etc, but that is not particularly helpful. However, I have a lot of tasks that are in a lot of different stages, so Newportâs system is much more beneficial to me, because it divides my tasks up in a much more suitable way (multiple buckets, each with tasks at a certain stage of completion).
In the end, I think itâs about which axis of separation fits your work better: context or status. Pick the system based on which one fits you best.
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