I went on a personal productivity kick a while back, and along the way I read and tried to implement the system that Allen describes in Getting Things Done. I came away with the impression that his system was optimized very closely around the needs of managers. So much of his system is built around figuring out what to delegate, figuring out who to delegate it to, and then scheduling the follow-up meetings to ensure that the delegated task got done correctly.
That’s great, if you’re a manager. But if you’re a “leaf-node” worker, then it’s not really all that helpful. The one piece of advice from the book that I have stuck with is keeping my to-do list and calendar separate. Furthermore, even though I don’t do formal daily/weekly/monthly reviews, I can see how they would be helpful for people who are concerned with longer-term goals. But other than that, I found Getting Things Done to be mostly a waste of time.
I went on a personal productivity kick a while back, and along the way I read and tried to implement the system that Allen describes in Getting Things Done. I came away with the impression that his system was optimized very closely around the needs of managers. So much of his system is built around figuring out what to delegate, figuring out who to delegate it to, and then scheduling the follow-up meetings to ensure that the delegated task got done correctly.
That’s great, if you’re a manager. But if you’re a “leaf-node” worker, then it’s not really all that helpful. The one piece of advice from the book that I have stuck with is keeping my to-do list and calendar separate. Furthermore, even though I don’t do formal daily/weekly/monthly reviews, I can see how they would be helpful for people who are concerned with longer-term goals. But other than that, I found Getting Things Done to be mostly a waste of time.