Flicking through Twitter at the weekend I noticed an interesting post from @jessicaknows – “If GTD was the last decade, what’s this decade all about productivity-wise”.
I tried to throw up some of my personal thought on this, but failed miserably to make any sort of sense in 140 characters. As such, I though as it got me engaged, I’d try and fail to make any sense in a blog post too.
I would caveat this with the statement that this is just my thoughts – If I knew the answer then I would be registering www.RichCo.com and making a fortune from seminars and laminated process maps.
People have been getting things done for millions of years (or thousands of years depending on your choice of bedtime reading). And I think the overall principles have never changed – you do everything you have to do, and some of what you would like to do. If you forget things you have to do, then you starve/get eaten/get attacked by the Vikings/loose your job. If you forget the things you like to do then life is just that little bit less fun.
Until the 90s the volume of information hitting us was quite reasonable, and more importantly the timescales expected for resolution were much greater. If you have to wait for the postal system to get documents between people, then your expectations are in days not minutes. As such, a paper to-do list is all you need. You can see what needs doing at a glance, and you have your your world on one sheet.
Then the world suddenly gets very close. Mobile phones, e-mail, and t’interweb. The greater the opportunity for interaction then the greater the volume of interaction; and the shorter the time needed to make contact, then the shorter the time expected for a reply. All this means we have a lot more to do – and a blurring of the line between what we need to do, and what we would simply like to do.
So systems start to evolve – be that more organisation of your sheet of paper, your to do list on your Palm, or the development of the Covey or Get Things Done methodologies et al.
You see, GTD is nothing new. It is just one man’s (well marketed) spin on how to organise his lists. Before GTD, most people kept a list of things they needed to do at work, a list of chores on the fridge, and a groceries list in the draw. What are these if they are not David Allen’s Contexts?
But as Jessica infers, GTD was designed in a time of buckets of paper. It’s foundation is in your local Staples store. GTD worked wonders then. And it still works very well now, but try as they might to squeeze GTD into Outlook, Omnifocus, or Remember the Milk, something doesn’t quite fit. You have to compromise this, or compromise that.
These days we all have smart phones. We all work from a computer. A lot of us work from a number of computers. Our diaries and mail are in the ether. We need and expect to be able to have access to everything now, and do things yesterday. We want electronic items to work as smoothly as paper, and paper to smoothly become trees again. What we don’t want is 37 folders just to keep flyers in, a label maker that weighs 4 tons, a folder to carry around for every single item we have to do.
So what is the GTD of the next decade? History has shown us that what we do doesn’t change – just how we do it. I think that the days of a unified methodology have gone – instead, it’ll be this ‘what we use to do things’ that will define us. For example, rather than saying “I’m a GTDer” or “I use the Covey System to keep track of my tasks”, we will be saying “I use Omnifocus” or “I use Toodledo”. These applications will learn to do two things – a) Stop trying to accommodate systems like GTD and start to create their own niche for how their technology best helps their users; and b) Become all encompassing by providing to-do, calendar and e-mail for users’ computers, smart-phones and tablets, providing effectively a dashboard for our digital lives.
Of course, David Allen might release a GTD application and his system will continue into my vision, but you know what, he’ll have to compromise somethings to make it work…
