So at one point, they adopted a brilliant scheme. The sysadmins - about four of them, I think - all worked in a shared office, and people like me would wander in and ask them to do things which, of course, always needed to be done immediately if they possibly could. My favourite example of a public to-do list, though, probably just predated the publication of GTD, and was not digital, even though I was working in a cutting-edge high-technology lab at the time. Software developers have been doing this for years, of course, but it’s interesting to think about how many other kinds of work might benefit from some of our techniques in the Covid age. You need to make your to-do list more public, so others in your organisation, and particularly those responsible for managing you, can see what you’re working on and whether you have too much (or too little) on your plate. In a distributed working-from-home world, he argues, techniques like Kanban boards - or the electronic versions encapsulated in products like Trello - can be more appropriate ways to manage tasks when your workforce is distributed. 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. When I don’t know how much is currently on your plate, it’s easy for me to add one more thing. This strategy, however, obscures many of the worst aspects of overload culture. Because so much of our effort in the office now unfolds in rapid exchanges of digital messages, it’s convenient to allow our in-boxes to become an informal repository for everything we need to get done. It seems likely that any successful effort to reform professional life must start by making it easier to figure out who is working on what, and how it’s going. might have helped Mann organize the hundreds of tasks that arrived haphazardly in his in-box daily, but it could do nothing to reduce the quantity of these requests. A highly optimized implementation of G.T.D. They only help individuals cope with its effects. They don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. In this context, the shortcomings of personal-productivity systems like G.T.D. It’s a good read here are a couple of short extracts: I typically have two or three part-time jobs at any one time, and many projects within each one, and something like OmniFocus can definitely help keep your world manageable especially if, like me, your brain is not one that is naturally drawn to rigorous and careful planning and organisation! In recent months, though, I’ve switched to the rather wonderful ‘ Things‘, which is for me the perfect half-way point between a simple to-do list and the all-encompassing and baroque structures I had previously created within OmniFocus.Īnyway, all of this meant that I was very interested when John linked to this New Yorker piece by Cal Newport, talking about the history of GTD and some of its limitations in the current climate. If you juggle lots of big and complex projects and are really into this stuff, OmniFocus is immensely capable, and I started using it as soon as it was first available as a beta release about 13 years ago. Over the following couple of decades, many software products sprang up to help you adapt the GTD task-management techniques to your new digital world the most complete and sophisticated probably being OmniFocus. He did for filing cabinets and in-trays what Marie Kondo now does for wardrobes and sock drawers. Allen was fortunate (or canny) in that most of his book, originally published in 2001, translated very nicely into the emerging predominantly-digital world. In case you’ve been living in a cave for a couple of decades and haven’t come across ‘GTD’, it was an appealing and genuinely useful system for handling, originally, the ever-growing flood of paperwork that people were experiencing towards the end of the last millennium. Like many people of approximately my generation, I have long been an advocate of David Allen’s famous ‘ Getting Things Done‘ methodology.
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