GTD is way tougher than it looks

Mike Wilkerson posted a commendably frank article about "hot tar" on his GTD superhighway. I congratulate him on his honesty and willingness to share what I think a lot of us face daily - the more we do, the more we leave undone.

Looking back on past times in my career (verb - to veer erratically in an uncontrolled fashion) I can hardly understand how I made some tasks fill the time that they did. But better organisation and focus seem to have come at the price of higher expectations and an increasingly feeble grip on how long things will actually take to do. Predicting how much can be done in a day, a week or a month is more political than scientific, and we repeatedly sell things to ourselves in the same way and for the same reasons that a project manager sells dreams to senior management. The inescapable practical details that Mike describes are the leaden boots that turn the vision of a sprint into the reality of crawling on all fours.

It's easy to indulge in thinking that you are under-performing and everyone else is doing better. Systems like GTD (or Covey, or RPM, or many more) offer the promise of a change to a higher level of accomplishment through a systematic approach. Without any doubt, there are people who use these systems who are very successful. But whether they are successful because of their system is debatable. If anything, it seems probable to me that successful people are attracted to systems that reflect their preferences, and begin the race from a different starting point. For the rest of us, lasting benefit only occurs if we can actually do the one thing that is alien, distasteful and nigh-on impossible  - change our habits, and change as a person.

For most people, habits that constrain performance are a comfortable framework that we love to hate and cannot tear ourselves away from. By adopting habits that have a predictable outcome, we have exercised a choice, and we prefer predictability over uncertainty. Even if we continually say we want to change and will change, only one or two members of the committee in our heads is actually convinced, and the silent majority still exercise their veto. This is perhaps the reason that changes in habit and approach arise from life-changing traumas and events - it takes something of that magnitude to actually enforce a change.

Since adopting GTD, I have learned to live with a to-do list that could keep me occupied for the next two to five years. I luxuriate in thinking that this is a bad thing and that I am failing to make significant progress each week, but in reality it's not like that. By taking action, I am taking decisions - deciding to do one task in a hundred and leave the other 99 unattended. Instead of beating myself up for failing to also complete the other 99 actions, I can tell myself that I chose not to do them. If they were truly important, I would have done them. Actions speak louder than words.

The existence of the list gives you a baseline to evaluate whether it was better to do that one thing than to not do 99 others. Without the list as an anchor, you will just go wherever the wind takes you.