In the past year there has been growing talk online about a “backlash” against the Getting Things Done, the systematic approach to personal productivity espoused in David Allan’s book and across the rest of his coaching and consulting empire. For example, see this post from Chris Bowler’s excellent blog The Weekly Review and this more strident post at The Growing Life.

I can think of a number of reasons for this. Some amount to simple and predictable contrarianism — when something is as popular as GTD, there are people who won’t be happy until they’ve declared it to be crap. But in the most thoughtful responses to GTD, like those cited above, there is something more going on. I’ll consider some of those in this and future posts to 1 Thing Done.

BEYOND PUNDITDOME

One source of this GTD backlash seems to stem from the rise of a newer generation of personal development pundits. Naturally, one way for a new guy to make his name is to call out the big dog – and that’s been Allen for a while now, though others such as Timothy Ferris are quickly emerging as targets. For example, in his blog Ferriss gives a strong and clever response to a pointed example of this kind of sniping by Bit Literacy author Mark Hurst.

Not that it’s necessarily the authors and consultants themselves who start with the chest-thumping. Just as often it’s bloggers looking for controversy who start yelling “Let’s you and him fight.”

One of the most literal and weird examples if this is also from Clay Collins in The Growing Life, in the form of a mock MMA bout between David Allen (representing GTD) and Tim Ferris (representing his 4-Hour Workweek approach). After some amusing descriptions of the pre-fight build-up and “rounds” of comparison between GTD and 4HWW, Collins ultimately tips his hat to both systems and refrains from declaring a winner. Which is a good thing, because I don’t quite see the basis for the conflict.  GTD and 4HWW are different approaches to different things, so a head-to head comparison is like comparing a dump truck to a dishwasher.

The focus of 4HWW is a particular kind of lifestyle design. The very title of the book describes a particular outcome.

The focus of GTD is a systematic approach to making plans, capturing ideas and executing actions to help create whatever outcome you want.

I didn’t get a lot out of The 4-Hour Workweekthe first time I read it. Maybe that’s because I don’t find hammocks very comfortable, and because my idea of a nutritional supplement is the extra shot of espresso I used to get in the giant lattes from my local coffee shop. Recently I gave 4HWW another look, and gathered from it a number of useful suggesting about developing business ideas and markets, managing the inputs in my life, and in general being open and active when it comes to creating opportunities. What I did not find was anything that seems to conflict with GTD.

Certainly the nuts and bolts of GTD can enable an unfortunate amount of system-fiddling for fiddling’s sake. As Ferriss says in his blog, “GTD is a bottom-up approach to time management that — used in isolation — can lead to becoming very efficient (doing things well) but decreasingly effective (not doing the right things).” This is definitely a risk if one obsesses on the the “runway-level” workflow parts of Getting Things Done while ignoring the planning and “altitudes of focus” models that are presented in the very same book.

There are any number of ways to decide how you want your life and world to be. David Allen, Timothy Ferriss and others provide valuable tools and approaches. But in the end it always comes down to wanting an outcome, deciding on an action to bring the real world conditions closer to that outcome, and then taking that action. That’s where the simple heart of GTD pays off.

• Have you decided on an action to take, but you can’t take it right now? Record it somewhere. There’s no sense in wasting time and brain power having to think it up all over again.
• Where should you record it? Someplace you trust yourself to look when you’ll be in a position to act.

There’s GTD in a nutshell.

Now, this glosses over a lot of important topics, such as what goes into choosing an outcome, deciding upon an action, and creating gates and gate keepers to control what you have to think about in the first place. But if there’s some great innovation that improves on these principles — choose an action, then do it now or write it down and do it later — I’d be delighted to hear about it.