What does your to-do list look like? Is it a hodgepodge of reminders, information, and projects from all areas of your life? Are you getting anxious just thinking about it?
In this chapter, we’ll talk about why your current system isn’t working and how the Getting Things Done program takes a different approach.
Significant changes to daily life in the last half-century have overloaded people with work and personal responsibilities, so people need a more dynamic way of managing it all.
First, most people’s jobs are no longer restricted to the hours of 9 am to 5 pm nor to the confines of the office. These days, people are always on call via phone and email, and the effects of globalization mean you could be working with people nine time zones away. There are no boundaries to your workday, so it easily steals time from other parts of your life.
Second, the nature of work has changed from more industrial, assembly-line type work with clear, visible tasks to so-called knowledge work with much more ambiguously defined projects. Previously, you knew what your task was (for example, assemble these parts) and you knew when it was done. Now, one task can eat up a lot of your time because there’s no clear signal when you’re done.
Third, modern life requires near-constant communication with more people. Most organizations require increasing interdepartmental collaboration, so workers are no longer limited to their specifically defined roles and departments. In your personal life, too, there’s more pressure to stay connected with friends and family via the Internet and social media.
People have no clear boundaries to work and personal commitments, leaving them with little to no free time—or making them feel guilty or pulled in other directions when they do carve out free time.
Established time management tools were developed to organize life the way it used to be.
You need a system that can accommodate today’s faster pace of life and the information that comes from all directions. A modern organization system needs to incorporate minuscule daily tasks as well as big-picture goals, and it needs to be simple enough to save more time and energy than it requires.
Many organizational systems promote organizing your life from the top-down, first determining your goals and values, then breaking that down into the projects and tasks that fall in line with them.
However, a top-down approach often leads to three problems:
Instead, the bottom-up approach that the GTD program promotes is more feasible: Once you have a system to keep your small-scale tasks under control, it’ll free up your energy, focus, and creativity to consider larger goals. Additionally, big-picture goals will inevitably break down into smaller action steps, which will be easier to tackle if you already have a system in place.
There are two ways to manage your commitments and actions:
GTD is designed to accommodate both management systems because life requires both horizontal and vertical planning.
Most to-do lists are made up of “stuff”—plans and commitments that you haven’t yet broken down into actionable steps. Lists full of stuff are ineffective and overwhelming.
An effective productivity system doesn’t manage your time, information, or priorities; it manages your actions. The GTD program teaches you how to take this stuff, give it meaning, and turn it into “next action” steps using three objectives:
When you have an organized external system of actionable items and trusted reminders, your brain doesn’t have to juggle all these thoughts and information—which is good because your brain doesn’t do a great job of it anyway.
Research shows that your brain can’t help but continually remind you about all the things you have to do, which is more of a distraction from your current task than a motivator to accomplish those pending tasks. How often do you think of something you need to do at random times when you can do nothing about it? Not only is it ineffective, but it adds to your stress and anxiety about all the things you need to do.
If you throw a pebble into a still pond, how does the water react? Its reaction is directly proportional to the size of the pebble and the force of your throw—the water doesn’t overreact or underreact.
An effective productivity system makes your mind like water, reacting in direct proportion to the size and importance of the task at hand. When your mind is calm and in control, you can attack each task and project in a state of calm focus and productivity—a “flow” state or being “in the zone.”
In contrast, when you get overwhelmed and don’t feel in control of your life and to-do list, it’s easy to overreact to small demands and underreact to important ones (for example, flipping out when your boss adds a relatively small task to your plate, or not putting enough energy into an important presentation because you’re too overloaded).
Many people live in a constant state of at least mild stress because they don’t have the tools to manage everything. The GTD program gives you the tools to regain control so that you can access that water state of mind.
The source of many people’s stress is having too many internal commitments or not managing them effectively. These commitments can be as big as hiring a new employee or as small as replacing a lightbulb—anything that’s floating around your mind and nagging at you.
In the GTD program, these are called “open loops.” Open loops pull your attention away from the task at hand and need to be addressed to get them off your mind. But you don’t have to actually complete the task in order to get it off your mind. You just need to take these steps:
Even though you haven’t actually taken any steps to complete the task, these simple steps make you feel more in control because you engaged your mind in how to resolve the problem rather than just thinking about the problem.