The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done
-a reference to an organizational hack, the “tickler file,” described in Allen’s book.
– In an introductory post, Mann wrote, “Believe me, if you keep finding that the water of your life has somehow run onto the floor, GTD may be just the drinking glass you need to get things back together.”
– He published nine posts about G.T.D. during the blog’s first month
– Traffic surged
– The site became so popular that Mann quit his job to work on it full time
When we try to keep track of obligations in our heads, we create “open loops” that make us anxious
anxiety, in turn, reduces our ability to think effectively.
- G.T.D.’s solution is a multi-step system that begins with full capture
- Maintain a set of in-boxes into which you can drop obligations as soon as they arise
- During reviews, you transform your haphazard reminders into concrete “next actions,” then enter them onto a master list.
Bottom Line
The benefits of top-down interventions designed to protect both attention and autonomy could be significant
- In an article published in 1999, Drucker noted that, in the course of the twentieth century, the productivity of the average manual laborer had increased by a factor of fifty-the result, in a large part, of an obsessive focus on how to conduct this work more effectively.
- By some estimates, knowledge workers in North America outnumber manual workers by close to four to one-and yet, we have only begun to scratch the surface of the productivity potential of the knowledge worker.
Until now, there has been little will to instigate this shift in responsibility for productivity from the person to the organization
To get more done, it has been sufficient to simply exhort employees to work harder
- COVID-19 increased the need to carefully organize tasks and intricately synchronize schedules
- Individual efforts are not enough
- 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
A system that externalizes work
Virtual task boards where every task is represented by a card that specifies who is doing the work and its status
- With a quick glance, you can now ascertain everything going on within your team and ask meaningful questions about how much work any one person should tackle at a time
- What if you began each morning with a status meeting in which your team confronts its task board? A plan could then be made about which handful of things each person would tackle that day?
- Instead of individuals feeling besieged and resentful about additional tasks that similarly overwhelmed colleagues are flinging their way, they could execute a collaborative plan designed to benefit everyone
As the popularity of 43 Folders grew, so did Mann’s influence in the online productivity world.
In 2007, he gave a G.T.D.-inspired speech about e-mail management to an overflow audience at Google’s Mountain View headquarters
- He outlined a new method for rapidly processing e-mails
- Read each email only once, then select from a limited set of options-delete it, respond to it, defer it, delegate it, or “do” it
- The goal was to apply these rules mechanically until your digital message pile was empty
Mann started a blog called 43 Folders
they were trying to be more productive in a knowledge-work environment that seemed increasingly frenetic and harder to control.
- What they didn’t realize was that they were reacting to a profound shift in the workplace that had gone largely unnoticed.
Productivity, we must recognize, can never be entirely personal. It must be connected to a system that we can study, analyze, and improve.
There are ways to fix the destructive effects of overload culture, but such solutions would have to begin with a reëvaluation of Peter Drucker’s insistence on knowledge-worker autonomy.
The Future
We can derive a clear vision of a more productive future by returning to Merlin Mann
- Mann no longer uses the full G.T.D. system
- His day is now structured in such a way that he can spend most of his time focussed on the autonomous, creative, skilled work that Drucker identified as so crucial to growing our economy
- Most of us are not our own bosses, and therefore lack the ability to drastically overhaul the structure of our work obligations, but in Mann’s current setup there’s a glimpse of what might help
What Mann and his fellow-enthusiasts were doing felt perfectly natural
they were trying to be more productive in a knowledge-work environment that seemed increasingly frenetic and harder to control.
- What they didn’t realize was that they were reacting to a profound shift in the workplace that had gone largely unnoticed.
Peter Drucker, the creator of modern management theory
Before there was “personal productivity,” there was just productivity: a measure of how much a worker could produce in a fixed interval of time.
- In the nineteen-fifties, the American economy began to move from manual labor toward cognitive work, and Drucker helped business leaders understand this transformation
- He coined the term “knowledge work,” and argued that autonomy would be the central feature of the new corporate world
- Drucker predicted that corporate profits would depend on mental effort, and that each individual knowledge worker, possessing skills too specialized to be broken down into “repetitive, simple, mechanical motions” choreographed from above, would need to decide how to “apply his knowledge as a professional”