Cal’s hot button is effectiveness, for sure. May I ask, what you mean by stating that he’s lost in the weeds?
Also: Cal has another book coming out in February (I think) and I believe articles like this are at least somewhat in part of a strategy to whet the reader’s appetite in a few venues, done so over weeks and months leading up to a new book release. This may be his way of capturing interest ahead of the launch, wherein he will dig up the weeds in his book? Purely conjecture on my part, but I think like a salesperson at times
Well…I would wager you might not want to become more efficient or effective as defined by somebody else’s objectives. But once you get to the bottom of “who one is” for yourself, I would think you’d want to be the best “whatever that is” you can reasonably be.
Existing in the modern world means a bunch of random stuff gets dumped on your plate all the time. Not just work, but mail / email, family-related stuff, etc. If nothing else, being able to more efficiently deal with all the stuff that you don’t want to do but have to do would make more time for the areas where you actually want to spend your time - even if that’s just hanging out outside, doing nothing.
David Allen actually addresses this, albeit piecemeal, in his books. The highest horizon of focus in GTD is “the big think”, and that’s the “who am I, why am I here, and what do I want to do with my life?” question. And he’s pretty much stated outright that if you don’t have all the commitments that you need to track, you don’t need (at least full-blown) GTD.
Isn’t that the truth, @beck. I’m becoming so overwhelmed and done with self-optimization and just want something simple to help me focus on what matters to me. There’s a deeper culture (both internal and external) that needs addressing.
Reading through the article, quotes not necessarily in the order they were originally:
When I don’t know how much is currently on your plate, it’s easy for me to add one more thing. When I cannot see what my team is up to, I can allow accidental inequities to arise, in which the willing end up overloaded and the unwilling remain happily unbothered.
I think this is the real core of the article, and it really has absolutely nothing to do with whether GTD “works” - it’s just an acknowledgement that if obligations are allowed to be (effectively) infinite, no system in the world will allow somebody to manage them effectively.
In this context, the shortcomings of personal-productivity systems like G.T.D. become clear. They don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. They only help individuals cope with its effects.
Has GTD ever really claimed to be anything other than a personal productivity system? Everything I’ve read from David Allen & associates reinforces that that’s all GTD is. This statement from the article kind of reads like “the shortcomings of this wrench are clear - it fails miserably at pounding nails”.
We absolutely need organization-level consciousness of these challenges - but do we need that instead of employees having a personal management system? Or are these things (theoretically) synergistic?
Mann no longer uses the full G.T.D. system… but the nature of his current work doesn’t generate the overwhelming load of obligations that first drove him to the system, back in 2004.
Bingo. If you don’t have as much to manage, you don’t need as complex of a system to manage it.
Actually, one of the better strategies I’ve heard is along those same lines. Basically you say that it’s a good idea, outline all the stuff that you’re currently doing - including your current highest priority task - and ask the boss where the new thing falls in the priority list.
Now…granted…that begins by conceding the point that the stuff being proposed is a potentially-valid addition to your task list. But it’s going to end up there anyway if the boss doesn’t change their expectations, and the list of “stuff on my plate” is one of the few business-relevant objections you can actually make.
And oddly enough, being able to quickly dump that outline is the sort of thing that a GTD system will likely be an immense help with.
Yeah, this gets at what bugged me about this article. I think his intent overall is good. He’s trying to illustrate that the real problem to be solved is way, way beyond the level of individual productivity systems. But he spends most of the article mired in discussion of individuals and then uses that to propel him to leaps of logic like the one you’ve highlighted.
I get why he does that. It’s a convenient throughline, and it engages the audience you want to target for book sales. But the story of how and why Merlin Mann became disillusioned with personal productivity systems has much less to do with the bigger picture and much more to do with Merlin’s own intelligence, scruples, and self-respect. He didn’t want to make a living encouraging people to spend more time worrying about whether they need to tinker with their personal productivity systems. He believed he had better things to do with his life.
A much better example would be someone who stayed employed in an organization, went full speed ahead with trying to make GTD (or some other personal productivity system) work in that organization, and then failed. But, turns out, that person’s story wouldn’t attract nearly as many readers as the story of a guy who has thousands of podcast listeners.
It’s also why that headline is The Rise and Fall of GTD and not The Rise and Fall of the Arbitrary Commitment to Autonomy in Knowledge Work and Its Impact on Profitability and Employee Satisfaction.
And, of course, the fact that Merlin had to make the autonomous decision to do something different. Both Merlin’s situation and his self-determinative way of removing the problem is a bad example in some ways, because the whole stupid problem is that people are subject to unreasonable demands from others that they can’t really escape, due to the ingrained nature of expectations within their companies. And that doesn’t really apply to Merlin in a meaningful way.
Right. I like Cal Newport, but that headline is very clickbait-y and misleading.
The main challenges seem to be that many companies don’t seem to have good visibility into the things that are detracting from value, because they’re “the way things have always been done” and nobody is actively looking.
That, and the fact that frequently nobody has been given the job of fixing some of these things, so nobody in the org logically has permission to devote their time to fixing them. Which makes spending time on them a politically-dangerous thing, potentially.
As a relatively-clear example, I just talked to a mid-level person at a company that was explaining to me how she had three meetings of significant length, each of which was with a person she reported to. She was reporting about the same thing to each person, so they could have very easily been combined meetings. They all called meetings separately with her, they did them sequentially so she didn’t really have the opportunity to streamline things (i.e. “done with that meeting, oh…Fred wants to meet.”), etc.
And the meetings, oddly enough, were about why the project was running late.
That’s the sort of thing that directly impacts the business, and really needs to be addressed on a top-down basis.
You are correct. Both the problem and the solution usually exists above us. I was responsible for an average of 150 users and the technical infrastructure of my company. And I was able to handle the workload because I had a great boss.
On really busy days I would set my phone to go straight to voicemail and only check email once every two hours or so. This only worked because she would occasionally intercede for me when I irritated people above my pay grade.
There is only so much a computer or GTD system can do when the world can add things to our Inbox.
I liked this article overall, but would argue that Cal’s weakness here is that he doesn’t really work in a team (many academics don’t). Nonetheless, he successfully identified the problems of using GTD when working across an organization. I think there are already lots of experiments being done in this area. Trello/Asana are more or less exactly the “task boards” he describes and the whole point of both of those applications is to be collaborative across an organization. Of course, rarely does any one person’s job consist solely of collaborative work. What I’ve found is that if you add in a higher-level layer for organization work optimization, now you suddenly have to keep track of both your Lists and what everyone else is doing. That’s made things worse, not better.
So my conclusion is that Cal has definitely moved the ball forward here…but not by that much and I don’t think he’s completely right…but nor is he wrong. Interesting read, either way!
Totally agree on this point. You can only take on so much, cranking out so many widgets, before things come off the rails. I get my best work done when I have 2-3 things defined that I need to have done for that day, not when I’m dipping into 20 things. Depth matters.
In the scenarios you’re describing, is everybody keeping track of what everybody else is doing? And are these projects that stubbornly resist compartmentalization, such that you can’t do work without knowing who has what ball?
GTD would say that you need to keep track of who has next actions that you’re waiting on, but the rest of the project - unless you’re the manager, and thus need to know what’s going on with all of it - could logically be pretty opaque to you as it’s not your outcome.
