Three Ways to Get Things Done and Get On With Your Day
I love a good time management system, and… I never seem to have one. But maybe, it occurred to me recently, the problem is that I always have too much to do. And actually, so does everyone.
In the New Yorker, bestselling productivity author Cal Newport writes about “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done”:
The time management system… called G.T.D. had been developed by David Allen, a consultant turned entrepreneur who lived in the crunchy mountain town of Ojai, California. Allen combined ideas from Zen Buddhism with the strict organizational techniques he’d honed while advising corporate clients. He proposed a theory about how our minds work: When we try to keep track of obligations in our heads, we create “open loops” that make us anxious. That anxiety, in turn, reduces our ability to think effectively. If we could avoid worrying about what we were supposed to be doing, we could focus more fully on what we were actually doing, achieving what Allen called a “mind like water.”
Newport goes on to analyze how the G.T.D. system — and other personal productivity systems — have influenced “knowledge workers” for decades. But in the end, he notes, personal productivity systems like G.T.D. “don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational…
