ACX Book Review Contest Entry: Getting Things Done by David Allen
reposting this here, mostly as a reminder to myself to keep thinking about it
Note: this was written for this contest.
Note: This wasn’t one of the winners or finalists, and I searched all the book contest related ACX entries for whether or not you can repost your review elsewhere afterwards and couldn’t find anything. If I missed something, please let me know. My heuristic is that since this never was posted on ACX, just in the Google Doc, it’s probably fine (and I’d like to have my writing at least somewhat in one place and might want to refer to it later.)
I.
“Productivity systems” like Getting Things Done (GTD) have a bit of a bad reputation in certain circles. Imagine the cool kids in the back row yelling: “All you accomplish with GTD is turning yourself into an even more efficient cog in the machine!” Meanwhile, the diligent student in the front row points out that if you already have good productivity habits, GTD is superfluous and you’re wasting your time reading this essay. Go polish your GWWC pledge pin, or something.
Both are wrong. Yes, GTD is known and marketed as a tool to become maximally-high-performing at a paper-pusher job – but it can also be used if the work you want to get better at is bringing about "a total revolution of everything". And strictly speaking, it’s not really a productivity system. A better description would be that it’s an easily actionable method for acting with greater integrity, in every single area of your life.
In his opening address for EA Global: Bay Area 2023, Effective Altruism co-founder Toby Ord reflected on the challenges the EA movement has been facing recently, and on what he termed the “importance of character”. There is a section of the talk that could be labeled “How to guard against accidentally or carelessly inflicting tremendous amounts of damage on EA“. In it, he reflects on, among other things, virtue ethics. He says:
“There are virtues that help anyone achieve their aims, even if they were living on a desert island. These are less distinctively moral, but worth having. Things like: patience, determination, and prudence.
There are virtues relating to how we interact with others. Such as: generosity, compassion, humility, integrity, and honesty. I think we’re pretty good at generosity and compassion, actually. And sometimes good at humility too.
I think integrity deserves more focus than we give it. It is about consistently living up to your values; acting in a principled way in private — living up to your professed values even when no-one else is there to see. One of the features of integrity is that it allows others to trust your actions, just as honesty allows them to trust your words.”
GTD is another tool that can “help anyone achieve their aims”. If Ord’s speech inspired you, but you’re not sure how to go about actually increasing your integrity, then this is one method you could try.
(This is probably the most appropriate place for me to insert the obvious disclaimer: GTD is not a panacea. But for a select number of failure modes – not the low-hanging fruit you’re already familiar with – GTD can be of immense help.)
II.
A caveat before you start implementing GTD: It’s likely that your first implementation of it will fail. Most people need several attempts before it’s automated to the point where it’s just “how you do things”. There’s a fairly obvious chain of causality behind that:
You approach or hit a limit of your ability to stay on top of stuff in your life → You become interested in methods to get better organized/more productive, finding GTD → Setting up a GTD-like system requires additional cognitive bandwidth, using up the remaining slack in your system → a minor additional demand (work deadline, social occasion, whatever) pushes you over your limit → giving up GTD is more feasible than giving up anything else → You revert to your previous system of organization.
It’s normal to go through this multiple times.
The outcome we want isn’t to have an organization system requiring huge amounts of ongoing maintenance. It’s the exact opposite. We want to be relaxed and on top of our responsibilities without having to extend mental resources to maintain this state. No frequently broken commitments, no “surprise” events or deadlines that were foreseeable, no ambiguity of what needs to be done when and by whom. In order to achieve this, your implementation needs to be right for you. The multiple iterations process adapts the system to your needs, but it’s generally a good idea to start by copying someone else’ successful implementation. If this outcome sounds desirable to you but what I’m about to describe makes zero sense, it may be helpful to search around the internet or YouTube for other implementations until you find one that “clicks”.
III.
The central principle behind the success of GTD is this insight: Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them. To clear the space, you must take everything clogging up your mental bandwidth – everything, however minor, that is not how it is supposed to be and that you have accepted even the tiniest amount of responsibility for – and get it out of your brain into a trusted external system that you review regularly. That’s it. The rest is commentary.
To get there, David Allen’s book describes a five-part process: Collecting, Processing, Organising, Reviewing, Doing.
1) Collecting
Also known as “capturing”, this is when you go through everything that has some claim on your attention and write it down. People who do this for the first time usually take several days until their mind is emptied and stops springing new stuff at them. During this phase, what comes up can be anything. It could be “pick up clothes from dry cleaner”, “fix leaky faucet in kitchen” or “change oil in car”, but it could also be “cancel contract before it auto-renews”, “renew passport”, “clean up the mess on my desk”, or it could be “ask Tom about the problem he’s dealing with he’s shared with me”,“apologize to Laura for insensitive comment I made at the party”, “find out who has food intolerances re: dinner party”, or it could be “update my GWWC pledge page”, “brainstorm new outreach strategy”, or “murphy-proof my org’s new financial strategy”.
I encourage you to do this as you read along.
2) Processing
This is the process of deciding what to do about the items in your “inbox”. It’s also the area where most people, including me, have the most room for improvement. David Allen’s book features a flow chart for the decision process, which the friend who introduced me to GTD had printed out and put up above his desk for years.
The first decision: Is this an actionable item?
If not, it needs to be filed appropriately. For some stuff, the most appropriate bucket is simply “trash”. For others, it’s the category “someday/maybe”. Some real items I have in that category right now are “learn the harmonica” and “switch my note taking app to logseq”. The last category here is “reference”. Allen dedicates an entire chapter to finding the optimal tradeoff between [ease of finding stuff] and [ease of filing stuff]. This is highly customisable, but it’s worth it to get it right because otherwise the filing system is either not very useful or not often used.
The second decision is “What is the next action?”.
This is the process to go from “renew passport” to “make appointment with the relevant agency”, from “find out who has food intolerances” to “draft message to send to invitees”. Doing this is crucial. A pile of unclarified collected items is an energy suck. Your brain will try to refrain from even noticing it. Decision-making takes energy, which you’re not always going to have, and a mindset you’re not always going to be in. When you’re not, you probably won’t even be doing any of the things you would be capable of, but you’ll be feeling guilty due to a vague sense that there’s “stuff you could be doing”. But when your inbox is processed, you are in control. You can decide what the most appropriate thing to do is at any given time – and when that answer is “not doing anything”, you’ll feel better about that, too.
Once you’ve decided that something is an actionable item, the decision making tree branches out. If it will take less than two minutes, you should do it right away. That’s because this is the efficiency cutoff where sorting it into the system no longer makes sense. If it turns out to contain multiple next actions, turn it into a project. “Murphy-proof my org’s new financial strategy” becomes {set up meeting, write meeting agenda, assess likelihood that current funding sources will still be available next year,…}. For this particular item, you can probably fill in the blanks better than me.
If it will take more than two minutes and it’s not a project, the options are to delegate it or to defer it. If you delegate it, it goes into the “waiting” pile where the ball is in someone else’s court. If you defer it, then if it’s tied to a specific point of time it goes into the calendar, otherwise into the system. It’s important to only use the calendar for stuff that’s really tied to a specific point of time. If it’s cluttered with other items, you need to make decisions when referring to it, increasing its demand on your energy and decreasing its usefulness. (This was one of my greatest inefficiencies prior to discovering GTD: my calendar and my to-do list were the same app.)
3) Organizing the results
This is where the various implementations of GTD differ the most, and where it’s most useful to shop around until you find a tool you “click” with. Personally, I use Everdo. It’s a software specifically for GTD and costs ~80€, but I got the license key from a friend who switched to a different software. I find it very intuitive, but you might not. GTD is implementable with pretty much anything – Evernote, Standard Notes, Obsidian,… You need to find out what works for you.
4) Reviewing
This is another step that must not be skipped. The reason is that your brain needs to trust you, on a gut level, that the stuff you got out of your brain and into your system will actually be dealt with. Otherwise, it will keep reminding you of it and you haven’t freed up your cognitive bandwidth. Allen suggests doing this in a Weekly Review process. He says it’s the time to “gather and process all your ‘stuff’, review your system, update your lists, get clean, clear, current and complete”. Put differently, the goal of this step is to make sure your mind is clear and you’ve captured everything, and that your attention is directed appropriately in the time to come (so you’re aware of deadlines, etc.) This is another area where experimenting is worthwhile.
5) Doing it.
You may have noticed that there is no sorting by priorities in the steps above. If you’re diligent about regularly reviewing and not putting stuff on your calendar that doesn’t belong there, you need day-to-day-prioritizing much less than you think. Nonetheless, many implementations include priorisation (including Everdo). Again, find what works for you.
GTD does include explicit prioritization. It happens in the second part of the book.
IV.
The process outlined above is only about half of the book. The rest includes reflections on how implementing this goes more smoothly, advice on successful planning (to wit: ask “why” a lot), and a guide to prioritization that aims at aligning your next actions and projects with your priorities at every level of resolution. To visualize this, Allen uses an airplane metaphor. He divides the reflection process in six categories:
50 000 feet: Life
40 000 feet: three- to five-year visions
30 000 feet: one- to two-year goals
20 000 feet: Areas of responsibility
10 000 feet: Current projects
Runway: Current actions
The farther up something is on the list, the less frequently it needs to be reviewed. It does, however, need to be reviewed. This is where Allen combines a bottom-up strategy with top-down. You need to decide what you want from life. What are you here for? What does this mean for where you need to be in five years time? And what consequences does this have for the actions you’re taking today?
Every now and then, you need to check whether what past you thought you wanted from life is the same as what present you wants. Get six sheets of paper, write a “height” on each, and jot down what comes to mind. Then reflect.Then make the necessary changes to your action and project lists. If you paid attention in the first part of the book, you know how.
Aligning all these levels is where the magic happens. This is how we make sure that our everyday actions are steeped in integrity, as Toby Ord describes.
I have a project in Everdo labeled “Communications”. This is where I record follow-ups on conversations. “Ask G. about carsharing”, but also “ask F. about shoulder injury” and “follow up with I. about her problem with K.” These are real examples. I made this category because, if I acted in accordance with my temperament, I would be inconsiderate and inattentive. Just deciding that’s not how I want to act will not magically change how I behave, but magic is not a required ingredient for change.
Before I got intentional about my organizing, I often had the feeling that I was juggling too many balls, and that I could only watch helplessly when some of them inevitably crashed and burned. In the interest of transparency, I have to confess that this still happens. But the number of balls I can keep in the air simultaneously has gone up a lot, by at least 30%. And they’re different balls. They’re no longer mostly “stuff I should’ve done years ago”. Instead, most of them are related to laying the foundations of what I want to do in the years to come.
The most important insight I drew from Getting Things Done is that every time we notice something that’s not the way it is supposed to be and then accept even the tiniest amount of responsibility for the thing, we enter into an agreement with ourselves. “I will do what is in my power to fix the thing.” We make multiple of these internal agreements each day. And when we let them slip by, or “never get around to them”, we break them by default.
This doesn’t mean that we have to do everything that catches our attention. No one could do that. Instead, there are three ways to deal with these agreements: 1) Not making them, 2) Completing them, 3) Renegotiating them.
“Not making the agreement” is not the same as ignoring the thing you see. That way, it will just continue to clutter your psychic RAM. No, “not making the agreement” is taking the item, and, during the “processing” stage, deciding to put it into the “trash” category. That’s a valid choice, and one that should be made often. But the key is that it must be a choice.
“Keeping the agreement” is step five: Doing it. “Renegotiating the agreement” could be putting the item in the “someday” category, or it could be defining a different but still acceptable outcome.
All three options are about giving the item in question the appropriate amount of attention. As David Allen writes, the things that are only in our psychic RAM, but not in our external system, “tend to take up much more or much less attention than they deserve”. Because not everything is equally important, we have to collect everything - so we can then allocate it the attention it deserves.
Deciding what promises I make to myself, and doing the best to keep the ones I do make, is the best “adulting” advice I have ever received. It’s a necessary precondition to being faithful to my agreements with others. It is literally synonymous with “acting in a principled way in private — living up to your professed values even when no-one else is there to see.”