Musings about Getting Things Done

Tl;Dr: Everybody knows you need priorities, dates and… Why not just a ranked list?

Getting Things Done (GTD) is one flavor of Productivity strategies. The basic idea being: you can get more done if you are organized about it. Seems pretty obvious, there are books, apps, diaries, about it. They range from pretty simple to full of shared team project management software. And they all follow some pretty common themes which were set out by David Allen in his famous book, uh, “Getting Things Done”.

The common themes are: tasks, priorities, tags, and some kind of bucket system.

And I buy it – these things are helpful. At very least, keeping a list of things you want to do will help you avoid doing only what other people want (actually a pretty easy thing to do).

It’s often useful to run a thought experiment to understand why these things are useful, and how best to use them.

So here’s the thought experiment:

Why not just keep a ranked list of Tasks?

Assuming there are things you want to do, make a list. Then, sort them in a ranked order: First thing to do is #1, 2nd thing is #2… This is a ranked list. Sometimes called a Backlog.

It’s an incredibly simple an useful tool, but it’s simplicity hides a shit ton of other work: deciding what’s more important.

For example: should I go to the grocery store before the mechanic? Or  can I put groceries off until tomorrow and go for a bike ride instead? How would you decide? We all make up stories to justify the intuitive decisions we make (maybe quite elaborate stories if this is your profession).

The alternative to intuitive decision making is to be systematic about your prioritization.

The purpose of the GTD organizational tools is to systematize ranking tasks.

The tricky thing is that there are a lot of different tools proposed by different people. Understanding how they are similar and different, when to pick one over the other is challenging. Especially when the systems are all monetized and marketed.

I hope to write a bit more about this in the future, so I’m can understand the why of the GTDtools, so that I can spend more time on what I value most..