When GTD Isn’t Enough: The Limits of a Productivity System

Written By Aaron Lawson

Photo by Tobi Oluremi on Unsplash

I have a problem. As a devoted follower of David Allen’s, ‘Getting Things Done’ system for two decades, I’ve hit a wall. I read the book soon after it was published in 2001 and dabbled, adopting parts of it into my daily work. In 2015, I re-read the book and decided to go all in. I ended up changing careers, traveling, and starting a side-business. I felt empowered, hopeful, and energetically looking forward to the future.

I felt “appropriately engaged with my world”, and connected to my long term ambitions, and with the daily actions that had the promise of getting me there. But tension was building. Inbox zero, and regular weekly reviews were slipping. I was gradually running into more resistance, unexpected difficulties, and faced with a growing list of the dreaded ‘Open Loops’. My swagger was starting to fade.

Creator-brain, and the back-bending supply curve

There’s a saying from David Allen that “The better you get, the better you’d better get!”. And the problem with letting myself daydream about new ideas during every weekly review, is that the Creator-brain already feels the thrill of achieving these new ideas just by picturing them. As I’ve pictured how I might feel in learning a new skill, taking a trip, or starting a group or business, creator-brain has taken ownership and investment in them as real things, before any work has been done to actually achieve them.

It is exhilarating. Ideas are boundless, dreams are adventure, and possibilities are everywhere! Creator-brain is living my best life. Just think it, and it is real. He lives outside of time, outside of constraints, where it is always now. But the rest of me does not.

Doer-Brain, and the backlog dilemma

Creator-brain just loves writing checks that Daily-me has to underwrite. And by my interpretation of the system, GTD encourages this creative ambition. (“Make it up, and make it happen”, right?) GTD does many things well, but teaching you to manage constraints is not one of them.

My first few years of 100% engagement in GTD at around 2015 were powerful. I was taking on more than I ever had, and it was working. I was getting results. And during this time, I started from a position of very few life variables. But each new endeavor that I committed to in my weekly and quarterly reviews created brand new situations and actors that could not be predicted.

There’s an excellent lecture by Carmen Medina, CIA analyst and co-author of Rebels at Work, where she describes the difficulty of anticipating outcomes, and the results of misjudging a system that you are operating in. Whenever you are encountering success, flow state, smooth sailing, etc, you may be operating in a Simple System, or perhaps a recognized Complex System. In either case, you have learned how to manage it and you understand the variables.

The problem for Doer-brain in new endeavors is that, not only is there additional work to do, and new skills to master, but it is very likely that I am now living in a whole new system that I don’t even understand yet. Every new employee, new business relationship, and new work process has brand new cause and effect variables that are creating unseen results. New ingredients interact with each other, and with existing ones in unexpected ways. And many of these new results will remain invisible until there are some negative effects. And during these new scenarios, you still have all of the existing commitments to keep up with, outside of these new adventures!

The end result means losing the initiative. Open loops. Unfortunately, more ‘Next Actions’ won’t fix this. They may even make things worse.

(from Carmen Medina’s lecture, link above.)

Creator-brain and Doer-brain are answer-machines

If you’re familiar with GTD, it is a ‘bottom-up’ system, that works on evaluating your immediate situation and helping you move forward with concrete daily steps. And it’s brilliant. Just the ‘What’s on your mind’ 5 minute exercise of offloading the circular thoughts that are burdening your mind, and turning them into an outside list is incredibly freeing.

But as you move through the tiers of David Allen’s Horizons of Focus, up to 50,000', Purpose and Principles, things get hazy, less actionable.

Horizon 5: Purpose and principles

What is the work you are here to do on the planet, with your life? This is the ultimate bigger picture discussion. Is this the job you want? Is this the lifestyle you want? Are you operating within the context of your real values, etc.? From an organizational perspective, this is the Purpose and Vision discussion. Why does it exist? No matter how organized you may get, if you are not spending enough time with your family, your health, your spiritual life, etc., you will still have “incompletes” to deal with, make decisions about, and have projects and actions about, to get completely clear. -From Getting Things Done, David Allen

The power of GTD as a bottom up system is that it helps you gain clarity on ‘what to do’. But you’ll find very little practical help towards the end of the book on ‘why’. All of my training and practice was devoted to closing loops, not resting with them.

This isn’t a failing of GTD as a productivity system. It’s magnificent. But the problem is that if you try to live out all of your thinking inside a single system, you will miss the areas outside of view. And if you try to live out GTD as your full mental operating system for a long time, you will find yourself very comfortable answering questions, and less likely to be asking them. Executive function is not enough to live on. In times of significant change, we are in desperate need of sense making, and new questions.

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Open Loops

So twenty years have passed.

On the doing side, a lot has gotten ‘done’. Since I started in the world of wage-work, we went from brick-sized Nextel phones to little magic machines that do everything. I went from 10–15 actionable emails per day, to 10–15 per hour. In knowledge work, we have accepted a situation where there are exponentially more tasks to do than can ever be accomplished. Pushing back against ‘latest and loudest’ request used to mean putting it at the end of the priority list, but now it could mean, for the sake of survival, choosing to not do it at all. What worked in 2005 in the realm of ‘doing’ doesn’t work anymore, and each year it becomes less sustainable.

On the creator side, a lot more is possible than when I started. In the beginning of my time in the construction industry, roles were clear and a personal path was set. Academic types did the thinking, Entrepreneurs and Business owners did the owning, and Workers just worked. And if you played along with the roles, you could expect a stable career and position in your community. Things aren’t stable in that way anymore. (There’s a whole separate article to be written on philosophers dressing like loggers and running woodshops, and truck drivers studying Feynman, Merton and Watts)

The point is that ‘staying in your lane’ doesn’t provide clarity anymore in an accelerated age. The old way of doing, and the old way of creating doesn’t keep the open-loops closed anymore. The disruption of old machines left it’s operators in a precarious position economically and socially as well. And while you may not be interested in early retirement, it may be interested in you. Which brings up the real question; How many times can a person reinvent their skills and vocation in the efforts to keep pace with rapid change?

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ” -Alvin Toffler

To be ‘appropriately engaged’ in our overdeveloped and accelerated world requires a different approach to learning, to questions, and to communicating with others. It requires a new kind of Digital Agency that is currently best embodied in the realm of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM).

“A healthy world needs citizens who think, who question, who develop thoughts and ideas over time and build bridges across different domains.” -Nick Milo

In the meantime, here are a few of my own ‘Next Questions’:

How can I treat Thinking like a team sport? If you stay engaged in the broader world, there are too many things happening now to interpret on your own. You have to develop your own point of view and perspective, but it will be so much richer if it has been reflected back to you by other minds who see the world differently. Other people add 3-dimensional situational awareness to what you think you know, and how you express it.

How can I make the best use of Mental Models w/o drinking the KoolAid? There is a boom industry of Cohort-based courses, books, videos, podcasts offering answers to new questions about technology, how to engage, etc. How do I take the best parts of what’s being offered for solutions, without relying on them as a substitute for my own conclusions?

How can I find a healthy place in local and online community? Unless you live off the grid, you live online. And if you do not actively curate your online environment, you are wading through monetized, overstimulated garbage that brings out the worst in you, and the worst in everyone you know. You are being fed Pop-Rocks and Mountain Dew for breakfast every morning. How will you make a calm and grounded space for yourself, and for those you want to interact with?

How will I decide what to do while I am alive on the planet? Look for the logger-philosopher in the woodshop and buy him a cup of coffee. Hopefully they will offer some help. But deciding what we want to create in this short time on the planet, this is the real work. It is the uncomfortable, but the most essential work. So ask hard questions that you usually avoid. Sit with uncertainty often and for as long as you can.

Or, spend two decades ‘getting things done’ in order to avoid the question.

 

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed the article. Follow me for more articles on productivity, note-taking, tech, AI, and navigating the accelerated age.

Aaron Lawson
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