Getting Things Done

The best inbox in a book and the weakest on judgment: it files everything and ranks nothing.

Getting Things Done, David Allen, 2001.

The best inbox in a book, and the weakest on judgment. It specifies exactly how to file everything that might be done and says almost nothing about which of it deserves doing in the first place.

Allen argues that anxiety comes not from having too much to do but from tracking it inside one’s own head, and that a trusted external system, captured completely and reviewed weekly, frees attention for the work itself. The method runs on one repeated question, what is the next physical action, applied to every open commitment until nothing remains undefined. It assumes that once everything is captured and clarified, the right priorities become visible on their own. They do not. The book is honest that intuition ultimately decides what to do next, and mostly silent on what makes an intuition worth trusting.

Two things. The next action question, since most of what stalls on a list is not the size of the task but the fact that the first physical step was never named. And the weekly review as a fixed appointment rather than something that happens once the backlog gets uncomfortable, since a system only stays trusted if it gets emptied on a schedule instead of in a crisis.

I run the review every Friday at four, thirty minutes, same recurring block for the last four months. Sixteen reviews done, two skipped outright, one done from a phone in an airport and done badly. The next action question has all but eliminated the tasks that used to sit for weeks because they were really three tasks wearing one label. What it has not fixed is the someday list, now ninety one items long, which has not lost a single entry to actually getting done since I started keeping it. That is less a flaw in the method than a fact about which ninety one things I apparently do not want, dressed up as a system for wanting them later.