The Tyranny of Getting Things Done.

And why it causes overwhelm.

Time management and, by association, productivity problems were solved years ago. They are based on a few simple core principles:

• Collect stuff.

• Decide what’s important.

• Schedule time to do the critical work.

• Do the work.

There’s no need for complicated lists of stuff you think or might need to do sometime in the future.

These principles were taught by people like Ivy Lee, Earl Nightingale, Peter Drucker, Hyrum Smith, Stephen Covey, Jim Rohn and many others.

The thing that has changed is the tools available to do our work. Before email, there were letters and memos, the number of which was equivalent to the number of emails we get today. Before instant messages, there were slips of paper dropped on our desks.

The difference today is people expect faster replies. Yet just because an email can be written and sent in minutes doesn’t mean you should write and reply within minutes.

(Interestingly, the fastest way to communicate with someone, the telephone, has declined in recent years. I suspect this is because people don’t want you to respond quickly; the faster you respond, the sooner the sender has to do something.)

The idea behind GTD (Getting Things Done).

Getting Things Done by David Allen, published in 2001, became a standard productivity text in the mid-2000s and still dominates the time management and productivity field today.

If you are unfamiliar with GTD, to-do lists are organised by context. This means you create lists based on tools, such as a computer, phone, or car; a place, such as your office or home; or a person, such as your boss, spouse, or colleague.

The idea is you choose what to do based on where you are and with which tool or person.

Two issues with GTD can cause problems. The first is that the book’s concepts are based on what David Allen taught in companies as a productivity and time management trainer in the 1980s and 1990s. (Much of which was based on Charles Hobbs’ book Time Power)

I remember working in the early 1990s; in those distant days, it mattered where you were and what tools you had. If you wanted to respond to your mail, you needed to be in a place where your mail was because, for most people, there was no such thing as email. And even in the Late 1990s, when email became more prevalent, you needed to be at a computer set up for your email.

If you had a personal email account, you had to be home with your “personal computer” to reply. For your work email, you needed to be at your office and in front of your desktop computer.

So, for a simple task such as responding to your mail, you had to be in a specific physical location (home or office) and be in front of your computer (the tool).

The second issue is how GTD defines a project. In GTD, a project is anything that requires two or more steps. Theoretically, arranging for my car to be serviced or to get my haircut becomes a project (I once had hair that needed cutting). Based on this project definition, you will have hundreds of projects.

David Allen mentions that the average person will have between seventy and one hundred fifty open projects.

That’s a lot of projects for an individual like you and me to manage.

For most people, working on projects is part of their job. If you are a software engineer, your daily work will be working on software. You may distinguish between “projects” by client name, but when you do your job, you will use your skills and knowledge as a software engineer.

When I worked in a law firm, it could be argued that each client was a project. Yet, instead, we had processes for doing the work. When letters or faxes came in, they were processed and added to the client’s file. Any additional work resulting from those communications was added to the work pile. It was as if when a new client was acquired, they began a journey on a conveyor belt.

A project would have been an office move or refurbishment. It would not have been an individual client.

The issue is that whether you group your tasks by project or context, you end up with a lot of lists, many of which will fill up rapidly.

For instance, given that most of your work is likely done using a computer, your at-computer list will become massive. That then means deciding what to work on will be challenging.

The glue that makes GTD work is the weekly review. At the end of the week, you review all your projects to ensure everything is up-to-date and current.

With between 70 and 150 projects, this takes a long time. On average, it takes between two and four hours to complete a weekly review. That’s a lot of time—time most people do not have.

In essence, GTD is all about organising and creating lists. While keeping things organised is a good practice, it should never be how you measure your productivity.

It’s important to understand that you cannot measure the productivity of a knowledge worker. How do you measure somebody coming up with a solution to an existing problem? Or a lawyer thinking about a case involving their client. These are not measurable units.

We can measure the productivity of a factory floor worker by the number of widgets they produce per day?

What’s the better solution?

A knowledge worker needs to manage their time. They need to know what is essential and what needs to be done today. All traditional time management systems solve this. There are three criteria:

• must be done,

• should be done,

• and could be done.

Must be done is straightforward; it must be done. It’s non-negotiable. Should be done are things that, if you get time, you will do, and