Slightly Off KIlter

I’ve been recommending Getting Things Done—The Art of Stress-Free Productivity to friends, co-workers, and techie mailing lists [see my review]. The following are some of the conversations my recommendation engendered.

Same Old?

My reaction to Vicki’s quick overview of the book – it
sounded like a typical time management system.

Interesting comment.

Interesting to me, because, from the time-management systems I’ve seen before, the Time
Management class I attended a decade ago, and David Allen’s comments on
other TM systems (scattered through the book) it’s really quite different.
Perhaps subtly different 🙂 but different nonetheless.

The book frequently makes comparisons and points out the ways it’s different.

• It doesn’t do “Importance vs Urgency”.
  
• It doesn’t number or letter code all of your tasks by “Priority”
  
• It doesn’t put tasks into your date book
  

It does compare tasks to context.

Context

The technique I developed is to partition projects into interest areas.
I never think about all my projects at once, so I don’t try to
manage them all at once. It’s more like “gee, I’d like to
do a house/garage/radio/garden project this weekend” and then
wander to that part of the list.

This is straight out of GTD (and LifeBalance) but not
something I’ve seen elsewhere.

Most time management systems seem to want you to arrange all of your tasks
into a single list and then work top down, no matter where you are or how you
feel. Take the ones at the end and discard them as “won’t ever do”.

I Still Can’t Do Everything!

After applying its methods for a few months (since March) it’s clear
that I’m never going to catch up, and that my open projects list is
going to keep growing indefinitely.

I think you somehow skipped over the part of the book that made it clear that
this IS how life works 🙂

I don’t see that as a bad thing – it’s what keeps life from being boring.
Also, if your list gets empty, you’ll have to start thinking about
what to do next, rather than picking off the top of the todo list.

My key insight about them is
they help you not have to rely on your memory to figure out what
you should be doing or where you should be.

Yes.

The key is to get this stuff out of your RAM and onto disk, as it were. Then
it’s not lost and, who knows, things change, maybe you’ll get to one of those
things in a year or two.

Another key is to understand that your list is NOT top-down. There is no
“bottom”. So there is no reason to assume that ANYthing on the list is any
more or less unreachable than anything else.

I think that’s one of the things I like about the process because it’s part
of how I thin anyway. I’m constantly rearranging and reorganizing my lists,
my file hierarchies, my email hierarchies, …

Priorities

The assignment of priority to scheduling tasks is a well-studied area. One
of the problems is that prioritization can’t be done in absence of a utility
function. The often forgotten assumption of scheduling systems is that not
all tasks get done. In that context, what do you want to throw away?

Let me make a point here. GTD is _not_ about prioritizing tasks. In fact,
it’s very much not about prioritizing tasks. That’s one of the key
differences between GTD and most time management systems.

GTD never forgets that not all tasks get done. Nevertheless, it’s also not
about “what do you want to throw away”? Everything is recorded; then you
don’t keep obsessing over it in the back of your head.

Unfortunately, priority setting for most people is conflated in their heads
with ‘importance’

The Time Management 1-day course I took ten years ago drew a box with four
quadrants, Importance vs. Urgency. They recommended you throw out all
non-important non-urgent tasks, try to stay out of urgent / unimportant
(because it’s stressful) and concentrate on important/ urgent first, then
important / non-urgent.

Life doesn’t work like that. The boss hands you “unimportant urgent” tasks all
the time. And, if you’re tired, brain-fried from another project, have only
10 minutes, maybe that’s a good time to work on less important and not very
urgent. After all “important” is a relative description.

GTD considers “priority” to be a qualitative, relative measure, “given the
context you’re in and the time and energy you have”. It’s not an absolute.
It’s one of many criteria and a distinction to be made based on the
relationship of other factors.

In the real-time scheduling arena one of the most effective algorithms is
what is called ‘rate monotonic’ scheduling. The basic trick (simplified to
the point of actually violating the underlying theorem, is to schedule the
shortest tasks with the highest priority. Thus you return phone calls
before you refactor large programs.

In GTD, you return phone calls because you have enough time to do that before
your next meeting and you’re near a phone. You start to refactor the program
when you have a larger amount of (“uninterrupted”) time available and you’re
next to the computer. You pick up mouthwash because you’ve just been to the
Post Office and you’re driving by the drugstore. You review your email Inbox
_in order_ top to bottom, deleting, deferring, responding (short), delegating
(forwarding), or filing for reference as appropriate, THEN go back and work
through the mail that takes more time.

As a result (and according to David Allen, he has seen this work with
hundreds of people) you stop getting the “rapid buildup of incomplete tasks,
many of which become more painful as they get older”.

Setting priorities is a very low-level technical task and unless you treat
it that way you are absolutely going to get it wrong.

I believe this fits with the GTD model.

Techie Reactions

Much of the discussion [on my technical programmer’s mailing list] raises echoes of my discussions with my spouse, Rich (trying
to get him to read the GTD book). He kept saying “Uhuh, I do something like
that already”.

My theory at this point is that we, the techie hacker programmer types,
already think in hierarchical, ever-revisiting, ever-reviewing,
ever-improving ways. For us, much of what’s in GTD is considered “common
knowledge”. We may not use the same terminology but we already incorporate
much of the philosophy in our lives and work.

But most of David Allen’s clients (he’s been consulting on productivity for
twenty years) are CEOs, managers, sales people, … “them”. They don’t live
this way.

So I read the book and say “Yes, here on paper is an explanation of how
things ought to be. If I make a few small shifts in how I do things, I can
improve the way I work and make it a more reproducible process instead of the
ad hoc system I’ve devised for myself over the years. Good stuff. Easy to
understand. Better said than I can say it. I’ll share this widely.”

They say “OMG! How could I have missed this?! This is New. It’s Great! It
works!”

They have epiphanies; we nod and smile and say “I knew that. This is slightly
different. I’ll try that bit there.”

But then, we’re also the type who are easier to convince that something is
right if parts of it already match our mental models.