I'm not sure what changed with COVID, but something has been much worse in the last 9 months. I've always used a personal system similar to what I understand "GTD" to be based on the article but everything about it has broken down. Instead of focusing on a task until it's completed, I'm constantly being yanked back and forth by whoever is yelling at the moment.
My personal theory is the ~60% of useless middle managers have nothing left to do without an office. They now split their days into asking for constant status updates on every conceivable detail, and "breaking down walls" which is pestering whoever is holding up a project by a couple hours because they are focused elsewhere.
I've disabled my IM client which made them shift to phone calls, and the next step is turning off call forwarding.
Don't know which industry you're in but it feels like my managers work burden has increased, and not because they pestered me more - as an IC my work are more or less unaffected, as even in office my development environment is cloud based anyways.
I'd agree. As a manager, conversations that used to be side of desk are now 30 minute meetings. The entire day is wall to wall Zoom calls. I try not to pester my team but it's a fine line between that and failing to keep communication lines open in a remote environment.
I know the whole world is obsessed with zoom calls currently, and sometimes its a good thing to see peoples faces in meetings. But I've found that just talking over the phone to be much less taxing than zoom. The fatigue is real! To the point where me and a few co-workers can just be conferenced in over the phone, and sometimes not talking for minutes at a time while working, but then collaborate at a seconds notice as if we were sharing an office again. (not that i'm advocating doing this for hours on end)
Also, I don't know if this is in my head or just speaker or mic quality, or on phone/network noise cancellation, or what, but I've found landline calls to be much more clear and easy to converse than zoom or cell phone calls. I think that may be where some of the fatigue comes from.
Might be latency. Landline travels at the speed of light, while some video calls I’ve been in had latency measured in _seconds_. It turns meetings into carefully orchestrated back and forth and makes any kind of spontaneous communication impossible.
> It turns meetings into carefully orchestrated back and forth and makes any kind of spontaneous communication impossible.
This is my (and my team's) main problem right now. We like working from home but it broke down any kind of interactive process/exercise, every meeting for a workshop becomes this choreography of: how to ask for a spot to speak, how to leave space for others to take that spot, who will facilitate that. It kills any spontaneous take or realisation that you could bring up in a meeting room. It feels like everyone has to stay in a queue to have time to speak. A lot of times it's happened that people forgot what they wanted to say or the conversation went way past that point and people don't feel like backtracking the discussion.
I can say that people feel like they should only speak up and state *really important things™" but often the small unsaid things are really valuable.
It really sucks, I thrive in environments where I can pick up bits and pieces of information and glue them together into something meaningful to my team, I can't really do that remotely (not without pestering people or trying to have scheduled coffee breaks to just chat).
for some of the spontaneity, and interactive process, I feel like using a group chat (we use our own IRC server) for the bulk of technical talk works, and keeps everyone up to date, even if they aren't paying attention at any given time. Its like a big long meeting that never ends. But you can leave for 2 hrs, and come back and get all caught up in no time. Granted, my team is <10 people, so the room never gets overwhelming, and it's easy to break out sub rooms or direct chats for whatever else, or join rooms from another team for whatever reason. All that being said, in the past few months I've tried to also keep some light hearted banter going in the room too, I like to think it helps some co-workers to participate more than they otherwise would.
Or maybe I'm just a luddite that likes landlines and IRC....
I've been taking notes during meetings just for my own benefit, and often refer to them later in that same meeting to bring a topic up that I missed. Also helpful to review at the end to see if there are unclear action items, etc.
When hanging out with friends online (and when doing something else such that we don't need video) I've been using Mumble for voice chat. Not sure about the other "gaming" voice chat software as I haven't really used it, but I've found Mumble's latency at least to be miles ahead of the videoconferencing software I've had to use for work.
Makes me wish I could have work meetings there, honestly.
An old POTS landline would be nice too, but my understanding is a lot of landlines now are basically VoIP anyway.
>> but my understanding is a lot of landlines now are basically VoIP anyway.
Yeah I think you're right. VOIP and landline and probably one and the same these days, and as long as whatever voice application you use doesn't use excessive compression or any added complexity, or route you halfway around the world, you've prob got landline quality.
It's kinda funny, but I sort of wish I had a landline again because of Covid. Spending much more time in phone calls (mainly using WiFi calling due to reception issues, which may be part of the problem) and spending so much time accidentally talking over people and awkward silences. It's been quite a while since I used POTS, but I remember it being so fluid and natural.
It is the latency, yeah. And it doesn't have to be seconds, even 200ms is enough to turn a fluid call into a very awkward "wait now talk". "wait, now talk" dance. Similar energy as driving and going from stop light, to stop light. Phone calls are way better at this.
It is the silence detection as well. Nobody can hear you taking a deep breath before speaking up, or giving assent by a slight "hmhm". Human audio communication is more than just words, but software forces it to be just words.
Ye. I can't stress enough how bad these anti-noise filters are. Just make people mute them self and use push-to-talk if the meeting is too big. Any natural "eehhumhum" before saying stuff goes dead. Surely it adds latency to, since the stream need to process some time before it can decide to start transmitting to everyone.
When I was using self-hosted Ventrilo playing with friends we didn't have this problem. It was like being in the same room. The ping was like 5ms and sound latency not noticeable.
I hate the video call latency. I feel like the major apps are overoptimizing on video smoothness. I wish they would have the guts to deliver choppy artifact-laden video but with < 100ms latency.
Honestly I don't really care about video at ALL. I almost wish they'd replace videos with Animoji or a kind of animated avatar like some Twitch streamers are using.
I care a lot about video when doing calls to keep in touch with family and friends, but I find it's really not pertinent or useful at work.
Tuple is great at this. It's for pair programming (which requires low latency desktop streaming) but turns out it's just a good experience for video calls too.
My favorite part is how low-effort the video calls themselves are. It makes me far more likely to end the conversation instead of waffling around looking for other things to shove into a meeting
Haven't noticed that audio issue on Webex Teams but some of my coworkers with poor internet connection use PSTN callbacks so while their audio sounds a bit more "tin can", at least it's a predictable quality. And that still works along with video sharing.
Talking on the phone at least means I can make a sandwich as we’re talking about what to talk about in the zoom meeting to have a briefing about the 2021 roadmap planning meeting.
Harder to do that over zoom because of an org policy that include the words “camera on”
My three month lockdown was basically "i don't have a camera", followed by "i'm waiting for the `amazon concurrent know to be slower` order to arrive" and then "sorry, this driver doesn't work on my kernel" (yes i did downgrade my kernel for this). By the end of the lockdown i still didn't have a camera and my manager stop caring.
I have the exact opposite experience. I can't have a phone call while doing something else since I don't have a hands-free set.
With a wireless headset connected to my computer I have much more freedom, and at least I can continue some low-key work during meetings which aren't all that interesting or have a lull
I am about to look for a new job and i'm hoping there are some companies out there that don't video zoom -- i feel like the video part is bad info, wasteful, stressful, etc.
I hate it when i get a voice message from my family through whatsapp.
Reading stuff is so much quicker.
One college asks me if i have time to do a short video chat for the update i need; The coordination take sprobably a higher effort then just writing it down.
All the "crap, I got the answering machine instead" anxiety multiplied by also having video to worry about.
That it is intentional does not really help, because you still have to deal with the inherent awkwardness of not knowing if your tone and message come across correctly in a one-way conversation without feedback.
Wonder if you could set up a chat system that only starts PMs on the hour. So if a conversation has no interaction for more than two minutes, it "dies" and you need to wait until the next full hour to restart it.
I think there’s something different about real time conversation (whether typed or spoken) for certain problems, especially ones that just need to be solved ASAP with a good enough solution.
Too much overhead or something with asynchronous communications, or having to “spin” up your thoughts regarding the issue every time feels taxing. As opposed to a quick back and forth chit chat that addresses any concerns that come to mind and then closing that task out.
To me, most of the benefits of async communication go out the window when you require me to listen (or watch) it as if it were synchronous.
Putting in some effort on the sending side to express your thoughts as text makes things a lot more flexible for the receiver, and pays off big when you want more than one person to consume it.
It's the second heading, right at the top when you click the link - "Cut down on meetings & calls with voice messages, searchable transcriptions & async screen sharing"
Ah, cool, assuming the transcriptions are high quality. I was speaking more generally, not about this specific product, but it's nice that they see the value in text as well.
The amount of useless emails has gone through the roof, with a lot of the content being managers reminding people they are still there.
Everyone cc's everyone now. If someone wrote an email to the ALL distribution group back in the day and there were more than 2 replies to that email, someone would immediately lose their shit and tell everyone to stop replying-all. Now those reply-all email chains happen weekly, with junior VPs laying hot takes all over the place.
A counter to this is Stripe's practice of ensuring that almost all emails end up on a mailing list so they aren't siloed just to the participants. I can find and search for relevant conversations that I wasn't first party to.
The key then is to make sure your inbox only contains items directly to you or from specific mailing lists.
This probably sounds crazy but I barely even read email anymore. Everything real is handled in chat and group calls now, so I don’t have time to organize/clean that stuff up anyway. I’m changing jobs this week and leaving behind about 13,000 unread. Work has gone from asynchronous to synchronous.
This has been one of the main benefits of Teams for me, and I have pushed hard to get large group e-mails moved to Teams.
You only have to @mention the people who really have to see. All the other's who would have previously have been cc:ed can simply review the messages if they are interested at their leisure, withou being pinged.
Except Teams default is to ping for everything. Someone writes in a chat channel for a meeting from a month ago, watch your phone vibrate. It's madness.
Its the responsibility of you to communicate your state so people can act on it. you might not be very good in transporting to people who need to know, what you are doing and how it is going?
And don't get me wrong but when your solution is to disable/block communication ways instead of communication with others on how you want/need to communicate, then the issue is on both sides.
Your solution is similar to mine, but I've gone a step further and put in times in my calendar when I'm available for questions/updates/requests etc. It doubles up as the admin-part of my day where I update my GTD-style inbox of tasks that may have come up and then allocate times in my calendar when I'll deal with various tasks in future.
There is a larger problem you're touching on that in most knowledge-workcompanies there is little to no attention paid to the production line process of how that work is 'produced' with the inevitable miasma of low-value busywork ('quick question, where are we with X','thoughts on X??' etc)
Some theories suggest only 10%ish of the information we use to communicate is speech, the remaining 90% is body cues. Makes sense from an evolutionary perspective; speech came along later.
With so many people acclimated to putting on themselves, and translating, office friendly body mechanics, working at home may indeed cause subtle anxiety from loss of habit.
At the web app layer, software is a simpler world to design and ship at any scale versus a decade ago. All the logistical nonsense needed to manage office life could very well be bullshit from a GTD standpoint. Satisfying last generations memes on corporate structure versus more atomized social networking abilities.
Just wait until they can't provide a status report to the people who decide budgets for your department, decide that since not much is happening there there's no reason to have the department, defund it, and you lose your job.
I've noticed that people whose jobs I would describe as "appear busy" have really upped their game around arranging unnecessary Zoom meetings (where nothing comparable was necessary before) - to appear busy while remote.
So I'm one of the longest running implementors of GTD (almost twenty years now). I'm also one of least into "productivity pr0n." I switched from a Palm Pilot to OmniFocus, and that was my only major shift. I dread when I leave macOS and have to shift again. I've tweaked the system a bit, and it's been many years since I've read any of David Allen's books, though I've corresponded with him a bit, so I don't know how far I've diverged.
It's interesting that Cal Newport chooses to mention GTD in his title, because what he's complaining about is stuff that David Allen has complained about, too...and, to be honest, Merlin Mann and that whole community never understood. It's not about the task lists or tickler files or whatever.
It's about being able to take complete stock of your life on a regular basis.
Everything else is based on that. You get everything captured and in one place so you can look at it and say, "Okay, is this working?" David Allen explicitly suggests similar activities for teams, and high functioning teams generally do this.
I think Newport is absolutely right about the chaos and distraction that characterizes so much white collar work today. I'm not sure how fair it is to lay it at Drucker's feet. My view from the software world is that there are twin gaps in strategy and leadership in most organizations. Strategy provides the framework in which groups deploy tactics. Leadership provides the framework in which groups adopt tactics to deploy.
> It's about being able to take complete stock of your life on a regular basis.
Yes! This so much! I spend time in r/gtd, and I see that kind of misunderstanding (“productivity pr0n”) not infrequently. People want a system they can use to tell them what to do, and that’s not what GTD is about. I usually reply with something along what you said, paraphrasing David Allen: GTD is not about getting things done; it’s about being engaged appropriately in your life.
My first implementations were clumsy because I wanted to get fancy with my system with sequential projects and deeply nested tasks (in OmniFocus), but I eventually evolved to realize that the book really was right. I use a fairly minimal system that hews closely to what the book says. The most liberating thing was understanding that I _shouldn’t_ necessarily plan all my future actions out. I can document things I know I need in my support material, but those aren’t next actions, and GTD is about capturing and clarifying next actions.
Another comment here mentions that the book sometimes isn’t easy reading. I can definitely agree with that. There are places where it gets into the details before it properly introduces a concept and why it’s useful. Contexts are widely misunderstood because of this. The book leads with what they are (tools, people, places, etc), and people conclude that since we’re connected almost all the time, we don’t have contexts. The reality is contexts are just filters, and they’re useful because they help you manage having lots of next actions.
Well, it is, but it’s not in the productivity pr0n sense. It’s not about compiling lists of tasks and planning everything out, so you can churn through them like a machine. The point isn’t to maximize how many things you do. The hyperbole gives me an opportunity to address that misconception.
When I first met my wife, she commented on how I would capture everything. To her, it seemed like I had to plan everything out, so how could I be spontaneous? It’s actually the opposite. By knowing my landscape, I knew what I had to hand off at work while I was away visiting her, and what I could let wait until I got back.
I barely engaged with my system while I was visiting her, but that’s okay. It was still there keeping all my responsibilities safe while I was away, so I could focus on my time with her instead.
And to be fair, sometimes people want a method that tells them what to do or how to make decisions. GTD isn’t that method, but it can help you manage your next actions once you figure what they are.
I heard David Allen on a podcast muse about this and whether he had chosen the right title for his book. I think in his mind, the really important thing is the "stress-free" in the byline.
"It's about being able to take complete stock of your life on a regular basis."
Yes! Merlin is very entertaining but for someone who spends so much time talking about his life, it's amazing how little of it he seems to grok.
One of the best things that has really kicked into gear my utilization of GTD and also helping with my ADHD is learning about and incorporating the Pomodoro technique with my use of Omni Focus. I found a great little play/work timer on Amazon for under $20 - 30 minutes on the right side, 5 minute on the left side and a big toggle button on top that reminds me of a chess timer. It's very satisfying to whack the physical button (no stupid touch controls here - tactile feedback baby!) at the end of a session to start the other. Once you get into a rhythm it's amazing what you can accomplish.
I also block time on my calendar with meetings to give me chunks of time when I need to get stuff done. Meeting creep is real, especially now that the former hallway wanderers can only do virtual drive by's :p
I realize I've subconsciously ended up doing this with spaces on Mac OS. I have a set of "Productivity" spaces and a "Goof off" space and I've been trying to toggle between the two in 5/25 minute splits. I even end up running a work browser and a personal browser. It's ended up working really well, but the addition of a chess timer seems like a brilliant idea to keep me from getting too drilled into Wikipedia rabbit holes.
As someone who has been following productivity/GTD for 10 years, this is the clearest explanation of the "why" behind GTD I've seen. Thanks so much for sharing it.
So much of the productivity world is still lifehacks or tricks to get an "extra edge". Anyone who has gone down that path knows it only goes so far. Same for the folks who focus solely on the tools, except that path is an endless circle.
Yet what matters most is being able to embrace the process of life, recognize where you are now, and make adjustments on the way to improve.
There's a lot missing from that. How do you track things you are waiting for or that will take many steps over potentially months? How do you look at how much is going on in your life and decide how to trim that if needed? How do you use that inbox to judge whether you're working toward things you want? Where do you put things that you would like to do at some point but not right now?
Again, that's what a lot of people miss. When you have everything in front of you, you can look at it as a whole and say, "Alright, what do I want to be different?"
Well, not really. Taking stock is the activity, but the goal is to relieve you of the stress of keeping many things in your head (and fearing dropping some). The open loops, as they say. By leaving stuff in your inbox (say, a bill to pay), you never really put that loop to rest unless you actually pay the bill. With projects support, context lists and a regular review process, you can still get it out of your way and know with confidence that you won't forget to pay that bill in time because you trust your system.
> My latest article for The New Yorker, published on Tuesday, is titled “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” It’s not, however, really about David Allen’s productivity system, which longtime readers (and listeners) know I really admire. It’s instead about a deeper question that I hadn’t heard discussed much before: Why do we leave office workers to figure out on their own how to get things done?
When I was a manager and onboarding a lot of graduates this was something I noticed. We would have explicit training on how git worked or how the build system worked or how the messaging system worked.
But there was never any explicit training on things like "you need to accept or reject meeting invites" or "this is how to correctly use Slack/wiki/email ... And all three are different."
I think a lot of it goes back to the current trend of companies not investing in employees and expecting someone else to have done that for them.
> expecting someone else to have done that for them.
And then... when someone else did do that investment - as in, you come in to an org with actual real experience - you somehow are "doing it wrong" or "don't get our culture" or whatever the pushback may be.
There's a lot of soft-ish or meta skills that don't get taught, mainly because most orgs don't place much value on them (as you have noticed), but also because it's not a well-studied field. I'm different enough from those I work with at the day job that I don't feel a one size fits all approach will work for everyone. I don't want to be a square peg shoved into a round hole.
I do take a very eclectic approach to productivity systems, and tend to pick what works for me while leaving behind anything I consider fluff. I've built almost, but not quite, TDD teams this way (organically from the ground up), and it helps us stay lean and agile.
> Why do we leave office workers to figure out on their own how to get things done?
Maybe I'm dense, or oversimplifying, but the answer seems obvious to me: because there's no one size fits all solution. Sure, people can be lost and confused, but being told there is one and only one way to things feels like a straitjacket to me. It's the same reason I despise the term "best practice" as if some arbiter of "best" determined that every other way of doing something sucks.
I'm very much of the eclectic school. I don't follow GTD strictly, but I pulled what I found useful from it and went from there. Honestly, it's been so long since I reviewed the method, it's probably time to go back and review it again. You can't just rest on your laurels; as another good (but often overpraised) productivity book put it, you need to sharpen the saw every once and a while, and this includes always questioning "best" practice.
There are many ways to write software but there some ways that are objectively bad and some ways that are objectively better, if not perfect or even good. Guidelines and trade-off discussions on these are taught in schools/colleges/universities.
The same type of guidelines and trade-off discussions could be taught in e.g. high school. I'm pretty sure just getting people to reflect on this stuff would bring huge improvements.
> The same type of guidelines and trade-off discussions could be taught in e.g. high school. I'm pretty sure just getting people to reflect on this stuff would bring huge improvements.
On this I agree. And even just putting out a single, simple, effective method, while mentioning there are other ways would be fine. Those that are curious should be able to ask after lecture as to what those ways are.
I do resent I was never formally taught any sort of study skills in high school, and I feel this falls under that same banner. But I still stand by my assertion that people shouldn't be punished for deviating from a "one true way", unless those deviations are objectively harmful.
> Why do we leave office workers to figure out on their own how to get things done?
Because we respect their self-sovereignty? The solution isn't more management as he proposes but for the worker to speak up and say what it is they need from others.
Just tell your co-workers that this is how your mind works best and not to disturb if these conditions are in place. Or that they shouldn't expect to be answered immediately if these times, this activity, etc.
I don't think that's the case and, as is often true with sweeping claims, it doesn't really stand up to a global survey.
Do societies that have less respect for self-sovereignty do a better job of getting office workers figure these things out?
No, definitely not. I live in an authoritarian country in Asia and I can assure you that isn't the case. So your claim seems to founder immediately when put to the test and there is almost certainly another explanation at work.
You're agreeing with me. If societies with less respect for the self-sovereignty of their knowledge workers can't improve their productivity the solution indeed isn't more management and never was.
My interpretation of GPs point is that even in cultures with less respect for self-sovereignty that have more management in general this particular brand of management is not happening and that is why the problems are the same in both settings.
I doubt it respects self-sovereignty anymore than holocracy managed to. Instead expectations are implicit and participants learn about them or fail. Going against the grain in that sort of environment will be seen negatively.
Agree. Always seems odd that organizations say they want people to be productive and then pepper them with email, messages, and meetings. Some of the better teams I've been on developed unwritten rules about when/how to communicate and the importance of time for deep work, but all to often it was just a free for all of chat pings. I think when people talk about culture this is a large part of it - how do you keep people working effectively together without swamping communication bandwidth?
So what is the takeaway? The insight that mankind can be divided into leaders and those who want to be led? And that leaders have to take over (again) this role of leading?
The relevant trend that covid has accelerated is giving workers more autonomy. I don't think humans are good at figuring out how to resist the perils that come with it. Absent willpower, or a job that's inherently aligned with one's natural interests, human nature inevitably drifts toward distraction.
I think that's partly because so many people yearn for more human connection, which in covid times is often expressed as unnecessary Slack conversations. Also, because humans are naturally wired to be drawn toward whatever is most recent; until a few hundred years ago, if an event happened nearby you, that was always the most important thing to which attention should be directed. Finally, I don't think that "avoiding distraction" is even a goal for many people, especially if they're meh about their job or they feel watching current social trends are more important/interesting than their job.
I doubt there is a generalizable solution for these "perils of autonomy." But if eventually we move away from the synchronous messaging that pervades modern office culture, that would be a step in the right direction. Slack needs a mode that debounces messages so they're delivered en masse once per hour unless a box is checked that the message is urgent.
In the future, when more people work as independent contractors, that ought to help too. This isn't a problem that a manager will step in and fix by imposing a new policy, as the story seems to imply.
> Absent willpower, or a job that's inherently aligned with one's natural interests, human nature inevitably drifts toward distraction.
I think the biggest testament to this is the 50%+ dropout rates common in PhD programs. You're starting with some of the most intelligent, diligent, bright-eyed young people on the planet and letting them work independently in a field that they presumably have a deep passion for.
All we ask them to do is write 100 pages or so on a topic of their choosing. They're given four or five years, which comes out to less than a page a week. Yet more than half will fail to complete the task due to attrition. (Yeah, I know this is over-simplified...)
And I think the obvious answer is that humans, in general, are horrendous at being self-directed on long-running, large-scale, multi-step tasks.
Almost anybody who consistently produces anything of real value works on a team, where at least there's some semblance of regular accountability to other humans. The rare example of truly productive people who can work in isolation are almost all (rightly so) lauded as atypical geniuses.
I think the biggest testament to this is the 50%+ dropout rates common in PhD programs. You're starting with some of the most intelligent, diligent, bright-eyed young people on the planet and letting them work independently in a field that they presumably have a deep passion for.
There's some truth to this, but the other reality is that academia is a pyramid scheme; the scheme worked from 1945 - 75, when higher ed grew rapidly, and has worked more or less poorly for PhDs ever since: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo....
The "deep passion" can also meet academic politics, the need for stable income, the insanity of the peer-reviewed journal system, sadistic or simply indifferent advisors, a lunatic dissertation committee, and so on.
There are likely some solutions to some of these problems; the elimination of tenure could be one, or the creation of the "teaching" PhD that consists of four years of coursework with a relatively small amount of research, with the degree awarded based on whatever papers have been written or contributed to, or whatever experiments have been done.
I think a big part of being "horrendous at being self-directed on long-running, large-scale, multi-step tasks" comes from not being trained on that set of skills. I'm not so sure it's an inherent human trait.
The traditional school system, at least in the US, is almost entirely focused on training obedience and completion of relatively short-term tasks. Homework, tests, maybe the odd paper that's "due in 3 weeks" but really can be done in a mad dash the night before.
Until someone tries to go for a PhD, they may never have needed to plan and execute a large-scale, long-running, poorly-defined task on their own before. School didn't train for that. And they're expected to undo 20+ years of that step-by-step spoon-fed approach, throw that all out the window... and learn a new way of working, mostly on their own, and tackle this huge project. No wonder the failure rate is so high.
> All we ask them to do is write 100 pages or so on a topic of their choosing. They're given four or five years, which comes out to less than a page a week. Yet more than half will fail to complete the task due to attrition. (Yeah, I know this is over-simplified...)
This is extremely simplified.
In my PhD program (engineering), you had to take more credits than a MS student does (and if you did not come in with an MS, you had to take those as well). A total of about 54 credits of just coursework - not research.
Then you have advisors who will not let you graduate unless you have published N papers (and N varies widely) in their preferred journals. And then you write it all for your 100 page thesis. I know all students slow down a lot when they have to write that thesis, but for many students, writing the thesis is the easiest part, and only at the end.
This might be USA vs Europe – where the extreme situation would be no mandatory coursework and publishing no papers at all - the final hundreds of pages work not being a typical 'paper'. Though the PhD itself might be 'only' 3 years long.
> All we ask them to do is write 100 pages or so on a topic of their choosing.
What utter nonsense. You have to do research, that is found good enough and sexy enough to be published to get published. In the meanwhile you have all kinds of other tasks you have to do like teaching or being your professors slave, depending on where you do your PhD. Writing a thesis is part of it, but is just a little part.
I feel like needing structured environments has been increasingly stigmatized as hustle culture and entrepreneurship is increasingly popularized. It's not necessarily wrong but is it the best fit for everyone?
Of course if you are looking at a startup, needing the structured environment is viewed as a weakness, but the successful startup hub itself is a testament to how long a little structure can go.
I am someone who thrives in structure. For example, in academia, I'm not in need of resources, passion for learning, or direction. I simply need an instructor who expects things from me with hard deadlines.
For someone like me who reaches out for advice, all these self improvement methods of hustle and driving your own goals are really non-starters. I know I cannot consistently engage in them. From that lens I will always be a failure, although my work under various organizations is highly valued and well compensated.
The best way for me is to find the best existing structure who goals are aligned with mine, working within it to achieve maximum mutual value, and reassessing whether this structure is still the best for me, or looking elsewhere.
Learn to find structure elsewhere. As someone who struggles with ADHD one of the best things I stumbled across are accountability groups. I have no problem with focus, structure and deadlines when it's something I'm really into - but for everything else it can be a real struggle! Some groups are just like minded people who get together, in my experience the better ones are formalized as part of a paid program.
Probably because a bunch of people that don't do well with unstructured systems probably shouldn't be trying to run structured systems :) So we pay people who are good at organizing to do it.
I set my tasks and deadlines (and the group can help with that if I get stuck), and I have partners in the group that provide that deadline accountability and also the structure of checkins for regular progress. Something I scoffed at first but find to be valuable is just being on a zoom meeting with someone else while working on a task. Not necessarily interacting with them, but just knowing someone else is there helps with focus, tends to keep distractions/procrastination in check, etc.
Probably sounds crazy to most reading this but for those who are wired a bit differently strategies like this can make all the difference.
Usually a PhD requires you advanced science (usually the smallest possible step forward). This requires a lot of the skills you aquired as an undergrad, but what can get you through undergrad (beeing good at exams) is almost useless for advancing science. So we dont know if the people trying to do PhD actually have all the skills needed.
That's the problem. How many can say of themselves that they are pursuing the same issues with the same esteem as they did two/three years ago?
And as someone who was in academia and has a PhD: You don't write a mere 100 pages in four years. Instead you have to submit tons of papers in between to fulfill the scoring needs of the institution you are affiliated with.
I've spent 3 years in a postgrad program and dropped off good 22 years ago.
I have learned a ton of stuff, some of which was a key part of my day job in 10 years. I've read a number of brilliant papers, and a ton of so-so papers. I had a rather clear idea, which you can currently see mundanely implemented in many IDEs.
But my scale proved to be too grandiose, my understanding of it, too vague, going / flying to conferences scantly reimbursed, and general guidance which might have helped me find a realistic path to completion, mostly non-existent.
The industry, in its better parts, is a much more helpful community, people working both on open-source and commercial projects.
> You're starting with some of the most intelligent, diligent, bright-eyed young people on the planet and letting them work independently in a field that they presumably have a deep passion for.
Most PhDs I know have barely any passion and are just doing it because they don't want to work.
This isn't at all what the modern PhD is like today. They're given four to six years in which there is a pressure to be consistently producing slices of work that no one's seen before.
Just don't leave it running in a place where you see it and only check it every hour or so. A virtual desktop far away.
Turn off notifications.
Mute all channels, except ones that really matter to your work.
Feel culturally pressured to respond quickly? Set your status to "in a meeting". That will by default clear after an hour, mind you.
Until your company culturally agrees that "I did not meet my expected output because I was too busy on Slack" is acceptable, you are responsible to do what is needed to get your job done.
> Slack needs a mode that debounces messages so they're delivered en masse once per hour unless a box is checked that the message is urgent.
This isn't Slack's fault or a software issue, it's the cultural expectation that once you receive a message you must reply immediately. Just don't do this. Same as if someone texts you - it's up to you when to reply. Set the expectation that you'll reply when you get around to it.
It's not Slack's fault, but still having that mode would help things.
It creates a Schelling point for expectations setting, and thus people will actually set that expectation. Otherwise, the only available Schelling point is immediate response.
The author of this article wrote Deep Work, which stresses the importance of, well, deep work over more shallow tasks like responding to emails (it is stressed that shallow is not intended to be a deragatory term).
I've seen his opposition to GTD expressed before and was excited to see it in long form, but left a bit disappointed when it was essentially just recommending a kanban style approache and some limitations on interuprting another person. I understand it is an open question though.
Though I do empathize with the addictiveness of productivity systems. As mentioned, it disguises itself as a form of productivity and can be easy to get carried away.
I think ultimately it comes down to how one implements their GTD system; I use it to offload stuff I don't want to worry about remembering (including outlines for projects), and am careful to limit my view to only what's currently on my plate. This allows me more time for 'deep work', but this work however is extremely unstructured, and I've come to learn that's a feature and breaking it down into a GTD style checklist is not at all effective for me. I think that's why it may be hard to come up with an equivalent system for deep work; it just doesn't lend itself as well to a GTD style approach, so perhaps my criticisms above were misguided.
"17/ In more sanguine times, this is easy in theory. You just log off from Facebook and Twitter, and put your head down and do what people like Cal Newport call “deep work.”
18/ I personally don’t believe in the idea of unplugging for "productivity" even in sanguine times, but in choleric times, it is a recipe for doing tone-deaf projects nobody cares about.
19/ Unless you work in pure mathematics or physics (and perhaps even then), your work is capable of creating meaning only if it is responsive to, and consciously situated in, its social milieu."
That's an interesting piece. But I wonder if it's criticizing more the idea of "working in a vacuum" without taking into account what's going on in the world, as opposed to "focused work" (which imho, can still be work on something culturally aligned).
Just triggered a thought - what's so special about "what's going on in the world", especially when the majority of what people focus on with social media will never affect them and at best is the equivalent of local gossip.
Only now, because of the wonders of the Internet and social media, mundane crap from the opposite side of the planet can now feel local too.
> Just triggered a thought - what's so special about "what's going on in the world", especially when the majority of what people focus on with social media will never affect them and at best is the equivalent of local gossip.
I came to this conclusion years and years ago, when I stopped watching TV news because of ads, but had the unintended side effect that I became more informed about the world (because I had more time to invest in reading true journalism). When I tell people I don't watch the news, they scoff and claim I'm ignorant. I ask them what the most important thing was in the news two weeks ago. They never can tell me.
Yeah, I like your distinction. I like the idea of focused work that takes into account larger 'black elephants' going on in the world, stuff that may not be part of the popular social discourse of the moment but is still happening.
I don't agree with Venkatesh's characterisation of Deep Work. Cal Newport reads the whole newspaper from cover to cover every day, I'd say that makes him pretty well connected and informed. He doesn't check the "news" 30 times a day but what ultimately is the point of doing that?
Responsiveness is a key element of some jobs. So I agree that there cannot be only focussed work. At the same time super heavy operational companies like amazon are known for their rigorous approaches to deep work (reading time, 6 pagers). There needs to be a healthy mix of both types of work. That’s even more demanding to achieve.
I tried reading Cal Newport's books and have found them terrible, even given the quite low standards of the genre. I really wanted to get excited about the concept of digital minimalism, but his book of the same name was almost completely devoid of insight. I struggled to find any information in it that wasn't already contained by thinking the two word title seemed not-bad as a prospective lifestyle change.
He sells a lot of books, so I guess it's just my opinion, but I keep relearning the same lesson, as the topics he chooses certainly are interesting.
I find it darkly amusing that people need a book to tell them to turn off IM tools, phone, email and other distractions for a while. I also find it darkly amusing that GTD is basically a system for dealing with IM tools, phone and email for people who feel they have no choice (they totally have a choice; it is a bullshit paradigm -even the president has plenty of goof off time).
I have no place else to say so, but latency in zoom is annoying as fuck, and it totally didn't happen with twisted pair. Back in 2016 times, I insisted on twisted pair meetings. Even then, dipshits with ipotatos on wifi would find a way to fuck it up. Now a days, even I don't have access to twisted pair, so we're in a new dark age, similar to how old fashioned 7 gallon flush toilet bowls were vastly superior to the atrocities we have now. Most people only dimly aware of what has been taken away from us in the name of "progress."
I really enjoyed Deep Work because it solidified the idea of something I did sometimes anyway without realizing it so I could be more conscious of it. If you have had a long enough STEM education or career I almost think there has to be some deep work at some point, but maybe its already so ingrained that its nothing new. I don’t think there is an “epidemic shallowness” though, just that most jobs are mostly shallow.
> I think ultimately it comes down to how one implements their GTD system
In "Perfect Time-Based Productivity"[1], Francis Wade pulls this idea apart and discusses how you can create a system that is suited to the time-demands you currently have. eg. the system a CEO with days full of meetings needs is different to the postal worker whose time demands are fairly clear and dictated by someone else. The real gold in this book though, is about how you need a "trusted system" - ie. we all have multiple channels (work email, IMs, personal email, phone(s), family, colleagues, ...) creating demands on our time, and we each need a system suited to our own mind and our own siutation for remembering and organising those demands, which nobody else has permission to add to.
I used to be a huge advocate of GTD, and I’m still a moderate advocate of it, but I’ve found it not so helpful in times where I am overcommitted or overloaded. It’s hard to spot being in that state, and it can be mistaken for being unproductive. GTD is built on the idea of processing your inputs and distilling them into next actions, but when your inputs start arriving faster than you can process them, and you start doing email over the weekend just to keep your head above water, and you find all your time is being spent curating that list of actions but not actually doing them... at that point, you need more than GTD - you need traditional management skills like delegation and negotiation and organizing people to take over those responsibilities.
The biggest issue I had is not filtering what I put into my to do list. I was putting "ideas" or "to read/watch/review" in the same space as my "to dos". By throwing them all in the same bucket I would quickly feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I had to do. By separating ideas into Trello, to read being clipped into Evernote, and my tasks in Asana it significantly reduced the number of tasks I woke up to each day and reduced my stress level (which helped me focus better).
Last year I even moved a lot of my tasks out of Asana and into a bullet journal. This has further helped reduce the number of tasks that I am looking at on any given day.
Discussions of GTD aside, the article seems to be advocating for individual productivity to be externally managed (through “management intervention”),
> It seems likely that any successful effort to reform professional life must start by making it easier to figure out who is working on what, and how it’s going [...] we might use virtual task boards, where every task is represented by a card that specifies who is doing the work, and is pinned under a column indicating its status. With a quick glance, you can now ascertain everything going on within your team and ask meaningful questions about how much work any one person should tackle at a time. With this setup, optimization becomes possible.
which misses the fundamental point that individuals have different ways of thinking, and therefore varied approaches to organization. One of the crucial aspects of GTD (or any other system) is to allow an individual to adapt it to their needs, while also slightly moulding their own approach where possible. Attempting to externalize that to a bureaucracy of standardized processes seems like a Taylorist nightmare designed to thoroughly demoralize the process of knowledge work down to executing tasks which only incidentally happen to require some thinking/judgement.
(To understand the full extent of what that “demoralization” means in this context, see this talk by Barry Schwartz https://youtu.be/3B_1itqCKHo )
While I agree with you, I’m afraid that say a blacksmith could have made very similar arguments in the beginning of the industrialisation. At that time he was a skilled independent worker. His work conditions eventually became much worse, but the productivity increased enormously.
I read the book and tried to follow Allen's system until I stopped. But I did end up incorporating some of it into what I do.
One big thing I took away was a different way of looking at "someday" tasks - it is OK to record them even if they never happen - it doesn't mean they're useless.
The second one was review, and is probably a bigger deal for me. I never really went over my lists previously, which in retrospect was really stupid. Now I do, keeping things not done pruned and relevant.
But more importantly, I review things I did, including saving lists of tasks for things that might happen again. That has made a huge difference, especially as I manage more people. When someone asks "how do I do that?" and I can reply with a checklist, it makes me feel like maybe I'm not so bad at this gig after all. But really, the lists are for me - it is amazing how much I half-forget of things that don't come up much, and having last time's list saves me so much time.
If you're good at getting things done you just get more BS work. The most successful people I know do the bare minimum of regular work and concentrate on doing what they really want.
I think phrases like GTD/GID predate these systems and bring that connotation already. No one uses them to describe a person who constantly makes progress "doing stuff" but doesn't accomplish anything impactful.
The phrase "getting the things you don't want to do but are far more impactful than the things you actually feel like doing, done" just doesn't make for a a catchy acronym.
>>If you're good at getting things done you just get more BS work.
There's optical solace derived by looking at long list of things you got done. This happens when you count and not weigh things.
If you are doing GTD, you probably also want to looking in to 'next tasks' and weekly reviews. Also get out of this habit of trying to fill up your diary with tasks.
More importantly opportunity identification and even creating them proactively is easier said than done.
GTD is just a process. And its a process without intelligence. The core of the idea is don't keep things in your mind and stress it out.
Newport's deep work theory isn't so contrary to GTD. Sometimes, your "next step" is to just schedule time to write your big report, or do your big numerical analysis, or plan out your new driver structure.
Allen was on to something when he claimed open ended tasks with no closure create anxiety. A system that records:
What I got out of that was the combination of work autonomy and email culture causes us all to work at different paces in different ways, all tied together by making random, unplanned demands of others via email as we go about doing our job. This generates a bunch of work not visible to management and the company as a whole. The author suggests looking at programming sprints as a time where we define the work to be done and just let people do it without being interrupted. I would leave it up to the programmers to respond if they're actually left alone to do their work or if they're sitting in the same amount of useless meetings as the rest of us.
I'm going to take it in a different tangent. I need less distraction. The latest one is MacOS Big Sur, anytime I open my MBP or actually anytime I step away and comeback it pops up a notification about my "Airpods Nearby" or something like that and if I don't respond it will do it again in 10 to 15 minutes (probably lost the signal for a moment)
It sounds great but it's not. Instead what happens is I see the motion at the top right of the screen and it distracts me, I lose my train of thought. I either have to manually click on it (more distraction) or wait 10-15 seconds for it to go away.
It the same with all the ridiculous badges in discourse. There's a notification or an unread (3) count and it's yet one more thing to distract me. Maybe it's a notification of a reply but if it turns out to be a notification of a badge then I've just been distracted and lost my train of thought.
We need designers and companies to take an pledge/oath to stop trying to distract us. I get Facebook and Twitter may never do that but I feel like a lot of designers who would just haven't yet got the message that they are not helping their users by distracting them.
This article really feels like some kind of straw man charicature of GTD, as I have seen before from Cal Newport. Ultimately a water tight productivity system, like GTD, allows one to choose for oneself what one considers the most important to work on. If you decide that the most important thing in your job is to always answer every email, that is great. You can create yourself a schedule with lots of room for answering email and move all other tasks to left over time slots. If you decide, on the other hand, that working in deep concentration on hard programming tasks is the main thing of your job you can do that too and reserve only half an hour a day for answering as much email as can be done in half an hour or for other adminstrative tasks. In all jobs there are usually more things that could be done than things that actually get done and a water tight productivity system, like GTD makes sure one can focus on what one considers important.
I think this is an important comment. Work (and life) doesn't have to be a grind. Grind is surprisingly ineffective.
The number of hours we spend working is arbitrary. It's 8 hours in our world. On another planet it could have been 186 hours. I remind myself of this slightly tongue-in-cheek idea regularly when I'm trying to carve out another 20 minutes of work on the weekend. There is a clear upper limit to how many tasks one can get done in a week. However, the impact of a week's worth of work can be almost limitless. I can spend the entire week frantically answering emails and putting out fires (that often come from the fires I frantically put out last week), or I can dedicate the week to, say, rebuild my website's front page to be clearer and more engaging and taking my daughter camping. I know which week I'll look back on with more satisfaction.
It takes a while to let go of quantity and accept that I don't need (and, indeed, shouldn't) fill every waking hour with work and focus on important outcomes instead, but whenever I've been able to do it, I find it more relaxing and that is has yielded better results.
First, I read David Allen's book and liked it. I will point out that although valuable, it is not easy reading. for example:
"To lead an effective life, we need to be able to make things happen -- to engage with our world so it will supply us with the experiences and results we seek."
That's the first sentence of the book and seems like something an engineer would write.
So, I sort-of-implemented GTD a few times over the years.
One thing Allen said is that is VERY true is that you need a trusted system to put everything into.
I've been using Omnifocus since it came out and it works well. I can put everything in it - and I do.
It is macos/ios based and you can self-host your data with webdav. (awesome, omni folks!)
Yet I probably do NOT implement getting things done correctly.
Omnifocus is sort of like a giant outline where you can arrange your life in a big tree structure, then look it up by context or just search it.
I would say that 90% of the stuff I put into the system is over-categorized but really languishes and is not used.
The other 10% is critical to my life.
I go to the grocery store and remember the 20 things I needed to get.
I go to my doctor for my annual checkup and have a list of questions.
I have a time-crunch project and as I'm working on part 1, ideas for part 2 or part 3 are recorded and removed from my head and I continue.
You are not alone! This is how I used OmniFocus for a very long time (I use Things now but basically the same way I used OF). I also found the same dynamic: a lot of things went in, not a lot of things came out, and the things that did were incredibly helpful and usually focused around some very unambiguous context, like the grocery store or my boss or a doctor.
Everything else mostly became soup, and while I’d make lists to manage somethings, I handled most things intuitively and used Projects as reminders to think about something. The tasks in them always got stale fast, though.
My understanding is that GTD is for management-type tasks and deep work is for creative tasks. Paul Graham also has an article about allocating half-day units (1). But I guess that this is for a different type of work, not, for example, a sales rep.
I do find things like the Pomodoro technique useful for routine tasks. It will be absurd to try to prove a theoretical result with a tomato timer's frequent breaks. As Tony Robbins sometimes calls it, the latter needs "immersion" or deep work.
Something weird is going on. Even with the "full" article in the Wayback Machine, if the page is left open for very long it dynamically truncates to the short version.
Newport did not mention "agile" per se, but in writing "Consider instead a system that externalizes work. Following the lead of software developers ..." he is clearly referencing that set of systems for organizing work. Agile, in the way that Newport is writing, is a way to shift autonomy and accountability to teams. The team collectively owns the mission articulated by management. Bosses are in the background. The team is an intermediary between bosses and individuals and acts as both a smart way of allocating work committments and throttling device on inbound work requests. Merlin Mann is a straw man for a limiting philopsophy of "doing it all"; systems that externalize work represent a philosophy working deliberately. The unstated assumption is that organizations will perform better this way too.
I think the consenus here is that working deliberately and concentrating deeply are ideal ways to work. That is not a new idea to the New Yorker audience either. I think of that what is different in this time of the Big Weirdness is that are we are focused on adjusting tactically and situationally, and that we lose sight of the norms that are sustaining and strategically valuable. What's happening is what's always happened - we're adapting, some organizations faster and better than others. With all that said, turning off most of your feeds for most of the time still seems like a good idea to me.
I would feel lost w/o my GTD-like system (from what I understand anyway). My daily routine (like a "self-program") with tasks, priorities, calendars, notes for review, habits in process of being formed, everything all smoothly integrated, inside this text/desktop (keyboard-oriented) app I wrote (free, AGPL, uses postgresql but I might move it to Rust and SQLite someday to simplify installation): http://onemodel.org (aka OM).
* roles/goals (like Covey said in 7 habits, like, person/child, spouse, parent, extended family member, neighbor, church/group member, citizen, professional/employee, others)
And things sort of flow from there, but baked into daily and periodic routines to help me stay on track and enjoy balanced life. Or at least that is the intent, and it helps greatly, as I continue learning.
* edit2: I have a prioritization system inside OM that I use to not get consumed with busy-ness. It also helps tremendously, to be able to sort things etc.
Back when GTD started to become the hot new thing, it was often compared to Steven Covey's 7 habits.
IIRC, the main differentiation was that Covey's was a "big picture first" approach whereas Allen was more of a "take care of the details and the big things take care of themselves".
The clearest example was that Covey used the metaphor of the rocks/gravel/sand in the jar. If you put the sand in first (aka the little things) there is no room for the rocks (aka big things).
My take away from the above is that neither way is right, wrong or "The Way" but that there are different methods for each person, team, profession, company etc. Simple example: infosec and IP rules may not even let you have one digital application that you can access at all times for both corporate and personal tasks. YOU might not even want your personal tasks co-mingled with work tasks for privacy reasons.
I really liked Cal Newport's first book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You", published in 2012 [1]. The titular sentence is great advice, one I've been following all my life.
Meanwhile a lot of time went by, I'm almost 40, and I have worked at 8-10 companies (incl. FAANG, my own startup). His later advice, from the book "Deep Work", was not in line with my work experience [2]. The problem is, Cal doesn't have a regular 9-5 job as a tech worker, at a tech company. He's in academia (and self-employed), which is very different --- I know, I also worked in academia! And this shows.
For example, I was reading his book Deep Work while I was at Facebook, where the whole company is on Workplace/Workchat internally, with frequent notification/mention/chat interrupts, and the culture is to have quick response times. So no Deep Work, yet velocity and productivity is very high. It's not true that you need a lot of focused time to get things done, you can manage it in smaller chunks. It'd be convenient, but it's not realistic.
Reflecting on this article, in my experience, the key thing to focus on for companies is not personal productivity but team organization. The topline differentiator between high-velocity and high-productivity organizations versus the rest is that these are a collection of self-sufficient cross-functional product teams. The rest, which is most organizations, usually run "projects" instead of products, and multiple departments and teams, with different reporting lines, goals, OKRs/KPIs, etc. are exptected to work together to make it happen --- the result is the organization becomes one big waiting/blocking graph, with 80% of projects being blocked at any given time. This also makes personal productivity harder, because more "sync" and "alignment" type email threads and meetings are needed. In this model people have to work with more people they don't know/trust, so more people are communicating with each other who don't know how to communicate with each other, they may not even know the other person's exact job description or timezone location.
Having said that, I appreciate Cal's perspective, and I'm happy to support him by buying his books.
Tried to read Deep Work, which just seemed like a much simplified rehash of Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Then the replication crisis happened, which may have tagged some of the ideas in Flow as questionable. I don't think I would read anything more from Cal Newport.
> Then the replication crisis happened, which may have tagged some of the ideas in Flow as questionable.
Do you mind to expend? I am genuinely curious to understand what was debunked.
GTD is only a productivity system, you can choose between several ones. Also, there are a lot of productivity porn (apps, BuJos, YouTube gurus) and so on. The thing is that you need to understand what you can and cannot do with your time, and either you embrace it or you change it.
Productivity apps work for me on a personal level (habit tracking, personal projects, recurring chores...). But for work it's much more complicated so I have stopped trying to shoehorn my schedule/non-predictable todos into an app (it's just Google Calendar).
1. individuals are blasted with a firehose of data
2. individual-focused systems to manage this data--like GTD--are ineffective because the left hand (one person working autonomously) doesn't know what the right hand (another person) is doing, so they end up just creating more data
3. therefore, we need some sort of collective--as opposed to an individual--system so we can get a better picture of the whole and distribute work more effectively, thereby increasing productivity.
Maybe a good idea. But the "call to action" there is clearly addressed to managers rather than actually producers. They're the ones who'd control any collective system. And in my experience those always decay and get in the way...though of course that could just be me resenting limitations on personal autonomy.
I'll have to think this over more. One thing I dislike about the article is several places they say things like "Following the lead of software developers, we might use virtual task boards..." where I think I'd be more appropriate to substitute "engineering managers" for "software developers".
Folks might be interested in Hacking Life (available under a CC license at MIT Press). I have chapters on the history, practice, and excesses of hacking time and productivity.
My feeling is that GTD is powerful for its stated goal but provides limited guidance on prioritization (among my personal weaknesses). It is a tool in the toolbox, but not a holistic approach.
The notion that you can offload cognitive load to an organized system, a tenet of GTD, is really essential for me.
