A: Yeah.
Q: I think GTD is a scam and is a waste of my time.
A: You are correct.
Q: The point of GTD is to be good at being really busy, right?
A: No. It's to inhabit a state of relaxed alertness, get things out of your head that have no business clogging up your cognitive bandwidth, and make space in your life for the things that truly matter for you.
Q:Oh. I thought GTD was like for corporate executives and tech bros, and it's part of hustle culture?
A: It is, in the same way that ERE is just extreme FIRE. Most people use GTD to simply raise their ceiling of near-burnout levels of productivity in their lives, which makes them better wage slaves but worse citizens and neighbors. 'True' or 'deep' or 'advanced' or 'enlightened' GTD, however, is about mind like water. Do with it what you will.
Q: GTD is useless if you don't have a j*b, right? So the only utility of GTD is for people who are in the accumulation phase?
A: I value my GTD system more now that I don't have a real job, because it helps me organize my post-w*rk and arguably much more complex life. I have a lot more different things going on in my life now that I don't have a j*b hoovering up all my time. GTD helps me keep my freedom-to trajectory straight.
Q: I think I'll just do less stuff instead.
A: That's fine.
--
I've been GTD'ing since 2011 or so. I've used Evernote, Standard Notes, and three different paper systems as my primary GTD platform. At the moment I use Standard Notes with some elements living on paper. More on that later.
There is one main thing to know about GTD: everyone requires multiple attempts to habituate their system. Everyone 'fails' at GTD multiple times. No one who has habituated GTD that I know of was able to pick it up and run with it without falling out of the practice several times when they were learning it. Expect it. If you take falling off as a sign of permanent failure, you'll permanently fail. Just take it as part of the learning curve.
Here's the explanation for why everyone fails multiple times:
- People who are trying to implement GTD are either doing so because they are currently at the ceiling of their cognitive ability to handle their life-system, or see hitting that limit soon. They have hit the limits of their current organizational system, which may be "I email myself reminders" to "there are post it notes everywhere" to "I don't know, I just try to remember stuff, I guess."
- The promise of GTD is it is a system that requires less cognitive bandwidth to maintain a much larger and more sophisticated life-system. It promises doing more stuff while consuming less cognitive bandwidth. It promises to hold things for you, so you don't have to store everything in your head.
- However, GTD is a new system that requires an investment of cognitive bandwidth to spin up.
- So what happens is that people start GTD at some point where they've caught enough of a break to put some cognitive bandwidth to it.
- Inevitably, they soon hit a crunch. A deadline at work, a surprise in the home life, whatever. The combined demands of the deadline/surprise PLUS the initial cognitive bandwidth demand of GTD exceeds the individual's limit. They can't drop the deadline, but they can drop GTD. They fall back to their old system that they don't have to spend any cognitive bandwidth on. Out come the post it notes.
- This is fine! This is inevitable!
- Once you catch some breathing space again, pick the GTD system back up. Look at what happened and see if you can diagnose what was 'too much' about it. What was your weakness? What was feeling out of control? Work on that element. Then keep going.
- This will happen a couple times probably. It's part of the learning curve. Just get back up, evaluate, improve, and move on.
There are two ways of getting started with GTD:
1) Read the book > Find an implementation to copy
2) Find an implementation to copy > read the book
Either is fine. The nice thing about (2) is that when you read the book, you'll have a bunch of "oh thaaat's what they meant" and "oh that's why you do X". If you do (1), the book can be somewhat abstract.
The bad thing about doing (2) is that you'll screw it up and modify things based on what seems to make sense to you, and you'll be violating very sensible principles, and you won't know why your system is failing you. (It's because you're failing your system).
If you do (2), I recommend that you start reading the book within a month or two of your implementation. Otherwise you run the risk of grooving bad habits.
If you do (1), I recommend you read the book as quickly as possible, skimming sections that don't grab your attention, and then immediately go find an implementation. Then read the book again, slower.
Where to find Implementations
- The GTD website has implementation packages for various platforms that you can buy.
The Secret Weapon - Youtube, I assume.
- Google around and go with whatever appeals to you. Different implementations will make sense to different people. Some really popular systems make zero sense to me. I've spent hours explaining my system to friends and got nowhere. YMMV.
How I learned GTD
- I read the book.
- I made something using paper and maybe Excel.
- It failed miserably.
- I found The Secret Weapon for Evernote.
- I followed the instructions.
- All of a sudden GTD 'clicked'.
- I failed a couple times and dropped it, each time picking it back up.
- Evernote had a big update that made it basically useless for someone who isn't constantly bathed in the EM field of cell towers and wifi. I switched to Standard Notes, and am happy with it.
My system is basically just The Secret Weapon, with my own idiosyncracies and modifications that work for me. There's a lot of canonical GTD stuff I don't use. For example I don't really use context (most people don't these days).
FullRes.
How to name things is a big deal in GTD. You'll notice that my project is called "Add latches to NW Window", not "Window latches". What about window latches? How will I know when project "Window latches" is done?
How to name and think of Next Actions is a big deal as well. "Add latches" isn't a next action. It's a project. A project is anything that requires more than one action to accomplish. A Next Action is something like "Look for latch hardware in that box in the shop." The action after that might be "Look at the NE window and measure the bits of wood I used to get the dimensions for the latch correctly."
FullRes.
If you aren't doing a Weekly Review, you aren't doing GTD.
You can find WR templates online and in the book. This is mine:
---------------------------------------------------
[Date + Location]
### Mindsweep and Reflection on the Past Week: What has your attention?
>
*Triggers: What's been on your mind that you haven't written down? What have you been procrastinating on? What inconvenient thoughts/dreams/desires have you been attempting to reject/repress?*
### Process and Review: Get Clear
Process all inboxes to zero:
- [ ] Personal Email
- [ ] Journal entries
- [ ] Any loose papers
- [ ] artstation
- [ ] news
- [ ] ereforum
- [ ] Signal
- [ ] Untagged
- [ ] Check $ accounts
### Get Current: THIS IS THE CORE OF THE WR PRACTICE. DO IT.
- [ ] Review Project List. Get eyes on (at minimum) every project and AOF.
- [ ] Review/Update Next Action, Soon, and Later lists.
- [ ] Review previous week's calendar data. Anything still an open loop?
- [ ] Review upcoming calendar (short and long term). Any communication that needs to happen, Next Actions created?
- [ ] Review waiting for list
### Plan
- [ ] Review [long-term objectives document], quarterly plan.
- [ ] Write out weekly plan in timeblock planner. What is the most important and deep stuff for me to do this week, that will contribute to my flourishing and long term vision for my life?
**Get Creative**
- [ ] Review my new Manifesto, and my Personal Mythology/Spark image folder.
- [ ] Scroll the internet, looking for sources of new and good information to read throughout the week. Follow links from Farnam Street, james clear, solarpunk people, twitter, medium, etc.
- [ ] Write: What do you want out of life? And what are you going to do about it this coming week? What do you want in 5 years, 10 years, when you're 60? What are you doing about it? Do you actually think you're making progress? If not, what are you going to do about it? Is there any bullshit in your life you can cut out, perma-ignore, delegate, ghost, or next? Anything causing you grief that you don't need? What minimum 1 wild cool thing are you going to do this coming week?
.
----------------------------------------------------
Some Resources
- Allen's second book, Ready for Anything, is very good. I recommend reading it no later than about the six month mark. It helps make the big picture make more sense.
- I haven't listened to it in a long time, but the GTD Podcast was good for picking up solid hacks, ways of thinking about my system, and just maintaining general stoke for keeping my GTD system strong.
- David Allen was on the Stoa. Twice.
I couldn't find a dedicated GTD thread on the forum, although you can't search for just 'GTD' so maybe there is one. At any rate, may this thread be a place for general GTD discussion, questions, and resources for ERE folk who are into GTD.
