The Tipping Point of GTD

A tipping point analysis of David Allen’s Getting Things Done would surely provide interesting reading. As Malcom Gladwell’s book shows, social epidemics require three types of people: Connectors (those who know everyone), Mavens (those who know everything) and Salesmen (those who softly influence others with their charisma). The tipping point of Getting Things Done (or rather its sexier abbreviation, GTD) is fascinating because it presents the uncommon situation where the three people required for an epidemic are concentrated in the person of the über-blogger.

Connectors
I think I first heard about GTD when Jon Hicks linked to Merlin Mann’s site 43 Folders, but I can’t be sure. Both of these people are widely-read bloggers. 43 Folders is in the Technorati top 100. It is on lots of people’s blogroll and much linked on del.icio.us etc. You can’t get much more connected.

Mavens
What is a geek if not a Maven. These are people who not only read a book but spend hours discussing its finer points. Admittedly, a book about organization is incredibly pertinent for those who spend much of their days online, tempted by the infinite distractions of the internet (aka procrastination at the touch of a button). Mann is so much of a GTD geek that he has created a site devoted to just that one subject and the implications of its teachings.

Salesmen
Charisma is an innate quality that can’t be affected or taught. Nevertheless, there are certain stylistic ticks that apparently inspire trust:

“Here’s the deal”
“come on: something’s gotta give.”
“Well, heck.”
“Disco.”
“pretty freakin’ ace in practice.”
“Plus, kids, do remember”
“This is a truly great time to be alive.”

Mann is upbeat, cute, and slightly zany. It is sickening, yet not particularly grating. Perhaps the subject matter (productivity) makes it impossible to avoid self-help clich tropes. Of course, if you’re reading about it, you probably need pepping up. (I am reminded of Martin Amis’s attempt to imagine Samuel Beckett’s working day: “Beckett was the headmaster of the Writing as Agony school. On a good day, he would stare at the wall for eighteen hours or so, feeling entirely terrible; and, if he was lucky, a few words like NEVER or END or NOTHING or NO WAY might brand themselves on his bleeding eyes.”)

There you have it: worldwide domination for Getting Things Done (at the time of writing no. 49 on Amazon.com and 143 on Amazon.co.uk). Does it work? Well, it certainly presents an intriguing theory of the mind that sounds convincing. We are distracted by small actions that clog up our thoughts, we do need help to get in the zone, but there’s so many other parts of the jigsaw. Project planning, time management, dealing with soft addictions and self-discipline — none of these things are adequately addressed in GTD. It isn’t a magic cure-all, but then, there’s no such thing as a magic cure-all so why would you look for one in the first place? Oh, that’s right, because everyone keeps recommending it.

18 Nov 2006

Dress Down Friday

Yesterday, despite all my scruples, I took part in a charity ‘Dress Down Friday’ at work. I had thought about following the advice of Guy Browning (no.12) to dress up, not down, but feared the social consequences of isolating myself from my colleagues at this early stage. One fellow jeans and T-shirt wearer didn’t understand why we – in the IT department – couldn’t dress down every day: we rarely get visitors and rarely visit others, so why not?

Personally, I can’t imagine anything worse. Dressing up is one of the key psychological tools we use to get ourselves in the right frame of mind for an activity. As Browning says: “If you are wearing a welder’s helmet people expect rivets, if you are wearing a suit people expect business.” It is worth noting at this point that Keats always put on his best clothes when he was going to write poetry. Work – from writing poetry to writing code – is a performance.

The question for any employer, given that work is such a psychological activity, is how do you get your employees motivated? The answer falls into two categories: carrot or stick. The stick approach is generally used in low paid jobs where employees are expendable and in the public sector, which don’t tend to reward performance. The carrot is the preserve of the private sector, particularly those which are sales based. It is the stick approach that I am most familiar, so I was delighted to get a carrot, which was getting to see the Glasgow premiere of Casino Royale. At the time I thought this was just a kind gesture, but on reflection the choice of Bond was a masterstroke of motivational management. For what could be more aspirational than James Bond? A lavish lifestyle of girls, champagne, caviar, and fast cars, a sense of purpose, despite Tony Blair’s dubious foreign policy, and immense, truly immense self-confidence; if the workers are imbued with even 1% of James Bond’s qualities, their performance would improve by leaps and bounds. It was a very canny move and the film was superb.

18 Nov 2006

Against Nature

After only a couple of days at my new day job I knew that if I didn’t do something urgently I was going to be crippled. My right hand, my mouse hand, was so full of aches and pains that it was disturbing my sleep at night. I tried to shrug it off, I did some yoga and other assorted stretching exercises (itself now a dubious practice); I tried all the hints and tips in the hewlett-packard guide to safe computing (straight back, feet on the floor, head level with monitor, changing position every ten minutes), and yet still the RSI in my right hand was getting worse.

Clearly something had to be done, but what? Losing my right hand would be awful, imagine being a singer and losing your hearing or a food critic and losing your tongue.

It was at this point I recalled the comments of a girl who, when I was fifteen, maliciously informed me that one of my biceps was bigger than the other. I laughed it off – she was a deeply jaded young hag – but immediately started experimenting with using my left hand.

I had never used my mouse left-handed, though. Like playing the guitar and writing, surely the mouse requires the kind of fluidity you can only get from natural predisposition.

Well, at first, it feels unnatural, there is a lack of sensitivity in your hand/eye coordination, but soon enough it becomes functional. Unfamiliar actions, like highlighting text and then pressing Ctrl-c are clumsy and awkward at first, but soon become if not second then third or fourth nature.

The only worry is that all I’ll succeed in doing is ruining my left hand as well. I can see myself wearing a stick attached to my forehead, desolately prodding the keys like those Romanian orphans who banged their head against the bars of their cot for stimulation.

Still, at least my index finger doesn’t ache any more.

17 Nov 2006

Self-Portraits

Egoism, as well as being a terrible vice, is a very modern phenomena. The idea of reflecting on the insignificant details of your own life, when there is a whole world out there to be discovered, was unknown before the 17th Century. Only then did the penetrating, analytic, morbid self-portraits of Rembrandt, Fabritius and Bernini (to take three names at random) start appearing.

This I know after reading Five Hundred Self-Portraits, a fantastic Phaidon book edited by Julian Bell, which consists of a visual history of the self-portrait from Ni-Ankh-Ptah (2350 B.C.) to Maurizio Cattelan’s Spermini (1997 A.D.).

Before the the 17th Century (with the striking exception of Albrect Durer) the self-portrait is incredibly superficial. Its surface is placid. Like a white marble sculpture – the eyes don’t reveal anything. After the 17th Century, after the classical world has lost the freshness it had in the 15th and 16th Centuries, the familiar pendulum motion of classicism to romanticism begins. The Baroque (Gentileschi, Caravaggio) of the C17th is romantic, the formalism of the C18th is Classical, from the French Revolution onwards, romanticism dominates again and, except for the occasional blip, has continued to do so ever since. Only the graphic designers of the early C20th, like El Lissitzky, really escape the charge of romanticism.

27 Oct 2006

Getting Things Undone

David Allen’s Getting Things Done is fast becoming the Ur-text of the iGeneration. It has been analysed with greater fervour than most holy books and continues to stimulate questions and debates. Sites like 43folders.com and Lifehacker.com provide layers of commentary and exegesis that would leave St. Thomas Aquinas clockwatching.

The reason that it has been so succcessful is that it represents a paradigm shift in the way people process information about what they have to do. In the past it was easy to know what to do, becase there wasn’t all that much to do. Nowadays — with the internet! — there is so much stuff and information that unless you process it intelligently you’ll be overwhelmed by distractions.

Reading the book, thinking through the theory, one sees all of one’s accumulated psychic disorder illuminated. You can, for the first time in years, even envisage it being clear. It is a great experience that leaves one relishing the implementaton process. Allen himself lovingly details his use of the dymo macine, the inbox and the tickler files. Unfortunately, the people most enraptured by GTD have been geeks, whose only encounter with paper is when they go to the toilet. Geeks live on their computers. Work, rest, play, sex life: all of them take place on the computer. Geeks are assailed by distraction at every click, the reward centres of their brain falsely stimulated by silly emails and worthless rss feeds. There’s no point having an analogue implementation for a digital age and so, being geeks, they started writing their own programs.

What follows is a survey of the current crop of GTD programs, from the long established to the not yet written (e.g. iGTD, which is an entrant in My Dream App).

Past

Frictionless

This initially looked fantastic, with a screen to input next actions and another screen for doing. Unfortunately, everyone wanted these screens to be integrated and not on four separate windows. The developer pleaded ignorance, stopped updating his site and, as of March 18, the app died. Bizarrely, for a productivity book, GTD apps have a tendency to start off very well then suddenly stop development when things get difficult.

Completion

Take Completion. I read in a comment on Fraser Speirs’ livejournal that a chap called Pixelfreak has written a GTD app and was looking for Beta testers. The app was a very nice coca package which has the distinction of having a timer as part of its functionality. You could work out how long projects are going to take by typing in the number of minutes, which is an excellent idea. Unfortunately, it was very buggy as hell, frequently crashing or losing data. Whether it will ever be finished is a moot point (Pixelfreak stopped replying to my emails) but it has great potential.

GTD-PHP

GTD-php is pretty good, you can install it on your own computer if you have MAMP or LAMP or WAMP. You can edit the css to make it look as you want it to look and ir even has a screen for doing a weekly review. Unfotunately, the app involves too much clicking around to really be useful. It also lacks integration with, say, iCal. A better alternative is …

Tracks

Despite requiring Locomotive (a Ruby on Rails server), this browser based GTD app is very nice indeed. The ajax isn’t distracting (which is the thing that makes MonkeyGTD and GTD TiddlyWiki unusable), the interface is simple and adaptable, and you can even subscribe to the todos with iCal or even set up an rss feed of all your tasks. It is not perfect (it is difficult to print off errands, which is surely a prequisited), but at present, it is my GTD app of choice and, although I’ve only been using it for four weeks, I don’t think I’m going to change any time soon. Especially not back to something like …

Entourage

GTD allows you to focus on the elemenatry particles of your current projects, it suggests that you break big projects up into meaningful sub-projects. With Microsoft’s Entourage the task of creating projects is so laborious that one end’s up leaving them as big projects. Recurring tasks, a neat idea, becomes horrible when they begin to stack up (as they eventually will). Psychic entropy is the thing that one aims to get reduce by using GTD, with Entourage entropy (that special Microsoftian entropy) stifles everything you do.

Voodoopad Lite

It was after using Entourage that I started to get deparate and used my Voodoopad as a GTD solution. I love Voodoopad, it is such a pleausre to have all my documetns and useful information linked in the way that I want to access, but as a gtd app it was uselss. Because you can’t split things into contexts, it isn’t dynamic and your todos just end up starting at you.

Present

The lack of a killer GTD app is, it seems, as pressing as ever. What else could explain the excitement with which Inbox was greeted?

Inbox was touted as being as beatiful as Delicious Monster – it isn’t. First thing it did was to try and scan my mail trash can. Brilliant. Then it started giving me a load tof Lorem Ipsum, without explainign what it was doing. Sure, it was beta, but it felt like a guest stomping muddy boots over a clean carpet. It purports to be a faithful Allenian implementation, but its focus seems to be on the actual process of GTDing rather than getting things done. It also, like Kinkless-OOP(which I haven’t used) costs money which, given the speed with which I have become dissatisfied with apps in the past, I am unwilling to pay.

It is notable that a lot of GTDers are mac users. I suspect that macs are more distracting, what with their seductive aesthetics and beautiful usability. Nevertheless, there are some PC and Linux GTDers for whom Thinking Rock, a java application, is built. I mean, it works on a mac, but a mac user would never tolerate the image you get when you open it up. It really is one the foulest pictures you ever did see, a blurry, horrible jpeg. The implementation of the method is interesting, but over-complex. It isn’t enough to have a mind like water, we want software that is like water too. (nb. They have have fixed that image know, thank god).

Future

Actiontastic

The new kid in town is Actiontastic, like Completion it is a cocoa app with a simple interface. At the moment it doesn’t have a someday/maybe or waiting for functionality, but it is promising. Whether it will be bloated with features by users who have commented remains to be seen. For the problem with the GTD method is that we all have our own flavour, our own specific way of dumping all the psychic ram, processing it and then actioning it. A perfect app would be one designed especially for you (or be extremely customisble, in way that is easy to change).

Nothing is known about this apart from that it involves Omni group, the guy who did Kinkless and Merlin Mann (a guru who, like most gurus, is a terrible advertisment for what he recommends). Expectations are high, which is kind of bad because in order to do GTD you have to trust your system and how can you trust your system if you’ve got half a mind on a new one that doesn’t even exist?

Despite taking an early lead in the My Dream App competiton, people seem to have quickly realised the impossibility of a GTD app that works for everyone. My advice to those making iGTD and Omnifocus is to let us have a go, to let us customize it, but keep to also keep it simple (if that isn’t a paradox). It is all very well have fifty thousand things you don’t use on photoshop, but everything on a GTD app has to be useful, otherwise it is a distraction.

CONCLUSION

The problem with GTD is that when you procrastinate or think sloppily, you instantly think that there must be something wrong with the organizational tool that you’ve implemented. When you first used the app you thought “Wow this is great, this allows me to think about stuff in a completely different way. I must implement it fully.” You take hours trying to get the system right rather than actually focussing on what you need to do. But once it becomes part of the furntiure you realise that it still suffers from the greatest obstacle to organization: yourself.

Nothing is ever quite right for the simple reason that pople use their GTD systems in different ways. The system has to be your system. So find one that is right for you, analyse yourself and your habits and don’t allow them to get in the way of achiveing your goals.

13 Oct 2006