GTD? Try WNTGD Instead
I’m amazed at the number of postings and advice articles, let alone pieces of software, that are spawned by the GTD phenomenon. To me, it’s yet another symptom of today’s short-term mentality and our obsession with activity. Getting Things Done is useful, of course. I’m not without sympathy for people with bulging schedules and huge to-do lists, who seek a better way to organize themselves. But I think they would be better advised to turn their attention first to WNTGD: What Needs To Get Done.
It’s so easy to be overwhelmed with long, detailed lists of actions to be dealt with and so have your attention fixed remorselessly on the short-term. Business leaders succumb to this all the time. They obsess about next quarter’s results and targets. It seems that a majority of managers are willing to give up on important, value-creating projects to “make the numbers” for the quarter instead. Some even compromise the long-term health of the business in favor of short-term achievements, as I noted this week in Short-termism, over at Slow Leadership.
By and large, shareholders get the managers they deserve, and vice versa. Of course, leaders also get the subordinates they deserve. As JKB said in a comment on that same posting:
If the organization promotes and advances those employees who cut corners and don’t spend the time needed to develop long term skills and relationships, then employees, managers and shareholders will feed on the carcass of the company and suck it dry.
But back to Getting Things Done. I’d be prepared to take a sizable bet that most people spend their time doing a whole lot of activities that mean virtually nothing in the longer-term and wider scheme of things. They do them because they’ve always done them—or someone has, and now it’s their turn—or because its assumed those things are needed. And they are so busy doing them that they never manage to take the time to question whether such actions are truly necessary—or even useful.
Most procrastination and anxiety about your task list has the same, simple cause: you don’t want to do whatever it is that you keep putting off. It’s boring, difficult, unpleasant, or just doesn’t seem to have much point. If it were something you were eager to do—something interesting and plainly useful to you—people would have to drag you back from getting started right now. To-do lists and all the rest are mostly a way to help people force themselves to do what they don’t want to do, especially things that don’t seem as if they need to be done anyway.
Why not slow down and take a little time to see what can be dropped off the list altogether? After all, if you keep putting off those important, long-term projects to spend your time on short-term activities of dubious value to anyone, when will you ever get around to the things that really matter?
There’s the danger. When people feel rushed off their feet, it seems obvious to put off anything that doesn’t have to be done right away. There will always be time to get to those other things later, won’t there? Maybe. But important, long-term matters usually cannot be done in the blink of an eye. They take time to complete: maybe years of it. Suppose that you know you need to improve your qualifications. You’re probably looking at 3 or more years of effort. If you put off starting for a year while you concentrate on less important, short-term activities, it will now be 4 years at least before you can start to get the benefit of a better job or a new career. And so it goes. People put off their dreams and aspirations in favor of . . . what? Minor bits and pieces of administration; organizational tidying and throat clearing; attending pointless meetings; impressing the latest boss; meeting some crazy budget figure dreamed up by someone who simply took last quarter’s results and added 5%; filling in forms that are then filed and forgotten.
If you truly want to spend your time getting the important things done in your life, remember WNTGD, and ask yourself What Needs To Get Done? Take a long-term view and concentrate first (and exclusively, if you can) on what will bring you, your customers, or your organization real and lasting value. Then focus on that and drop as much as you can of all the short-term, itsy-bitsy, meaningless stuff. You won’t miss it . . . and nor will anyone else, once they’ve got over their horror that form FR678/3/45 hasn’t been completed (if they can remember why it’s there anyway). A good 50% or more meetings have no good reason for taking place, and probably 90% of PowerPoint presentations would be best filed in the wastebasket instead of being shown. Statistical returns have a habit of multiplying faster than rabbits . . . and they are much less cute.
Turn your eyes firmly away from what is short-term and supposedly urgent, though not important, and fix them instead of whatever is really important, even if it doesn’t seem urgent. Only then will whatever you get done actually be worth doing.
Related posts:
- Is the Jingle in Your Pocket Worth the Jangle in Your Head?
- Short-term Myopia
- Taking Your Time
- Speed, Simplicity, and Bad Choices
- Time, Decisions and Action
- Time: The Most Important Business Necessity
Adrian Savage is a writer, an Englishman, and a retired business executive, in that order. He lives in Tucson, Arizona. You can read his posts most days at Slow Leadership, the site for everyone who wants to build a civilized place to work and bring back the taste, zest and satisfaction to leadership.
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Comments
Mathias says on September 11th, 2006 at 6:15 am
Amen. That’s the way I adopted GTD for myself. If a task lingers around for too long on my list, I ask myself, if it’s really necessary to get it done. If it’s not, it gets dropped, not deferred, but dropped. If it’ll someday be important again, it’ll pop up all by itself.
Cheers, Mathias
Jens Poder says on September 11th, 2006 at 6:26 am
This is an interesting post focusing on a GTD problem, I have encountered in my personal and difficult GTDF-implementation proces. From reading loads of blogs on the subject it seems quite a common problem.
I started out GTD’ing with collecting and processing and reviewing, but somewhere along the line I simply lost my ability to keep focus.
My habit of writing everything down produced huge amounts of stuff that I had to handle. Quite soon I ended up having over a hundred projects on my project list, and reviewing them all weekly was next to impossible.
I think that focus Very Important Projects, is key to getting GTD to work. You simply can’t manage it if you don’t. It becomes a mammooth task instead of help, to do a weekly review.
Now I have revised my GTD-system, so that priorizing and putting stuff on relevant someday/maybe lists is very simple.
So now I have a very small number of V.I.P. projects , and only focus on these.
So in a way I don’t quite agree with this posting. GTD is not anti-focus. It’s just a methology for handling your stuff. I think GTD has taught me a lot of useful tools.
But without effective project-priority I wouldn’t recommend GTD to ANYONE. You risk getting dragged down by the enormous job of maintaining the system.
- Jens Poder
Dan Myers says on September 11th, 2006 at 8:10 am
I think Adrian misses the point of the GTD system. The idea isn’t to catalogue the little stuff at the expense of focusing on larger priorities and the Really Important stuff. It’s to catalogue all of the little stuff so that you CAN focus on larger priorities and Really Important stuff.
If the little voice in the back of my head is nagging me to remember to buy bread, or send an email, or invoice a client, I’m not going to be able to focus on what should really get done. If I’m not aware of all of the commitments I’ve made to myself and others, it’s hard to prune that list.
GTD is supposed to be an intuitive system, which it obviously isn’t for everybody. But I still think the basic insight is valid: get all the day-to-day stuff out of your head so you can focus on what’s important, not so you can focus on all of the little stuff.
Matt says on September 11th, 2006 at 8:25 am
This seems to a perennial complaint about GTD–or at least about individual implementations of it. But from my own experience, I believe the complaint is unjustified. If you do the weekly review, you have an opportunity every week to compare your current projects and actions not only to your long term goals, but also to your higher “purpose” stuff. GTD is the first system I’ve found that allows me to chuck unimportant actions and projects with little hassle. The whole point of GTD is to get everything out in front of you not because you MUST do everything you think of, but rather because you need some way to review everything in front of you (and to discard or defer a good portion of it). Otherwise, all sorts of stuff will keep nagging your mind.
I think it’s best to have a project list with moveable parts (either digital or shuffleable index cards), rather than one long handwritten list. That way, it’s easy to defer or prioritize stuff quickly. If I had fixed lists of 100 projects and dozens of next actions, I’d be much less likely to prune my lists regularly. I think this is a huge problem with particular implementations of GTD. People build up monster actions lists that are difficult to review and revise.
I do very much like the emphasis on “What needs to get done?” I’ll be sure to start asking myself, “What will give me the most long-term value?” I think it’s also helpful to make the following question part of your two-minute drill: “Do I really need to do this?”
Grant says on September 11th, 2006 at 9:50 am
I have this suspicion that Adrian’s exposure to GTD consists of reading the back cover of the book at his local Borders.
GTD is nothing more than a system to handle the details (things you need to do, information you need to do it) of the commitments in your life. It doesn’t matter whether those commitments are trivial or extremely important, they BOTH generate the same kinds of “nitty gritty” that you need to keep track of and do. Adopting the mantra of “WNTGD” doesn’t change anything - you still have lots of things to keep track of, and do, to make that outcome a reality.
GTD still requires that you make the decision about what you should be doing; about whether it’s important to you. The GTD system doesn’t do that for you. If you lack the ability to differentiate between the useless and the useful, that is not the fault of GTD, and WNTGD won’t change that.
Adrian says on September 11th, 2006 at 10:02 am
For those people who have jumped to defend GTD, there is really no need. I am not criticizing the GTD system itself. What bothers me is:
1. How it is (often?) used, certainly to judge by many of the posts on the topic.
2. What people are trying to achieve when using it.
3. The emphasis too many people and organizations place on the short-term.
GTD represents, for me, a more fundamental idea: that “getting things done” is what matters most in this world. I would argue that what you get done matters far more. Just getting something done may even be counterproductive.
I hope this post will help more people think about what they are doing in their lives. That’s where WNTGD might help. If, having done that, they use GTD as a system to help them do it, whatever it is, that’s fine.
SR009 says on September 11th, 2006 at 11:07 am
GTD focuses on getting things done (efficiency). Adrian is on the right track - it’s not getting things done that’s most important. It’s getting the right things done (effectiveness) that is the key. By focusing on the right things, you can more easily schedule the activities properly - and everything else “can wait.”
Avdi says on September 11th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Adrian, I think you may be mistaking people’s intentions when they use GTD. If you’ve read the book you know that GTD is intended, in a large part, as a technique to clear your mind so that you CAN step back and contemplate WNTGD. It seems counter-intuitive, but sometimes you have to deal with the nitty-gritty before you can do justice to the big picture.
I know this from personal experience. I’d read a lot of personal development advice just like this post: that before you can organize your life, you need to step back and determine what’s really important to you. That always seemed eminently sensible to me, and periodically I’d go climb a mountain (literaly or figuratively) and try to determine just what it was that really mattered. And invariably I’d get bogged down in a million tangents, and I’d never get anywhere.
It turns out that I, like apparently many others, am just not psychologically outfitted to successfully think long-term until I’ve satisfied my panicky subconscious that yes, the short-term has been well and truly taken care of. And that’s where GTD comes in. It’s not just a technique for achieving your long-term goals; it’s also a technique for getting to the level of mental clarity and confidence necessary to BEGIN to plan those long-term goals. As the book notes, and as I have witnessed in my own life, once you have offloaded all your concerns into a trusted system it starts to become remarkably easy, and even natural, to begin thinking about the big picture.
Al says on September 13th, 2006 at 6:53 am
On my lens, I talk about a time management system that I came up with:
http://www.squidoo.com/miwaytimemanagement/
I am sure that some of the concepts are the same as GTD, but there are also differences. Check it out, may be it can help some of you better manage your time.
emma says on April 9th, 2007 at 4:39 am
cool blog!