I dabbled with GTD in the late 00s/early 10s. This coincided with growing the team at my startup and generally needing to keep more balls in the air from a management perspective. I even used OmniFocus for a while. But as I moved into larger companies where efficient collaboration is the limiting function, I realized that my personal productivity system is not where the value is.
Essentially as a leader in a larger engineering org, the productivity systems that generate more value are the ones that are shared. Even though I can't control them directly I can create more value by A) getting onboard with the way that collaborating teams want to work and B) influencing people and nudging these systems in the direction that makes sense based on my expertise. This often feels like herding cats, but it's a core job of a manager. In addition, all software workers, whether manager or IC, need space for deep freeform thinking. It's imperative that whatever systems we use not come in the way of this.
With this in mind, my personal system has to be lightweight and flexible so that it minimizes overhead and doesn't impose any constraints on how I am working with others. To that end, I've largely reduced to using Workflowy for all tasks / notes / plans. I do this in a reverse chronological style w/ regular chunked archiving. I also star every "important" email thread and bookmark every relevant doc or page that comes across my desk. In this manner I can go back and search history comprehensively as needed, but my working space for any given project or domain is always small and generally fits above the fold in the Workflowy context. There are a few little tactical hacks I use (eg. #action hashtag for todos), but those are ephemeral and I will discard or change them whenever it suits me. The key thing overall is that the system requires less than an hour a week of maintenance and is a single source of truth for my personal focus.
Essentially as a leader in a larger engineering org, the productivity systems that generate more value are the ones that are shared. Even though I can't control them directly I can create more value by A) getting onboard with the way that collaborating teams want to work and B) influencing people and nudging these systems in the direction that makes sense based on my expertise. This often feels like herding cats, but it's a core job of a manager. In addition, all software workers, whether manager or IC, need space for deep freeform thinking. It's imperative that whatever systems we use not come in the way of this.
With this in mind, my personal system has to be lightweight and flexible so that it minimizes overhead and doesn't impose any constraints on how I am working with others. To that end, I've largely reduced to using Workflowy for all tasks / notes / plans. I do this in a reverse chronological style w/ regular chunked archiving. I also star every "important" email thread and bookmark every relevant doc or page that comes across my desk. In this manner I can go back and search history comprehensively as needed, but my working space for any given project or domain is always small and generally fits above the fold in the Workflowy context. There are a few little tactical hacks I use (eg. #action hashtag for todos), but those are ephemeral and I will discard or change them whenever it suits me. The key thing overall is that the system requires less than an hour a week of maintenance and is a single source of truth for my personal focus.