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Getting Things Done

Generation Y has always been on the cutting edge of finding interesting ways to use technology. They were teenagers during the dot-com boom of the late '90s. They were the first generation to take cell phones and Internet access for granted. They were the generation that drove the popularity of blogs, social-networking services, instant messaging, podcasting, digital music, and all the other cool stuff that's now becoming big business and driving social transformation around the world. Now, they're hitting their mid-20s, and they're starting to take on concerns that'll be with them the rest of their lives: advancing their careers; balancing work, family and personal interests; and in general finding the time to get things done. As Generation Y faces new problems, they're turning to familiar tools to solve those problems: blogs, Web sites, cell phones, and PDAs. There's an entire culture of productivity on the Internet. The centerpiece is a book: Getting Things Done. As far as I've been able to determine, Getting Things Done (or, as the faithful call it, "GTD"), turns the central premise of most productivity regimes on its head.

For example, I took a class in "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" about 10 years ago. Their premise was that you should find the most important things you should be doing in life, and schedule those things first. Otherwise, we spend so much time on the little stuff that we often don't have a moment to spare on the big stuff.

This insight was inspirational when I took the course--and perfectly useless in real life. Because, in real life, there aren't enough hours in the day to do everything you should do. And the most important things in your life aren't always the most important things you have to do that day. Some days, y'know, you just gotta do laundry.

As far as I've been able to determine, GTD takes more of a bottom-up approach. Take a moment to think of all the things you need to do that day. Include the little things (do laundry) and the huge ones (develop a business plan). Break up the big task into smaller tasks.

And when I say smaller, I mean really small. Let's say, for example, that you found an article the other day that might provide information for your business plan. Read it. That's a task.

Sometimes even the small tasks can be overwhelming, so you might want to break those down into components: If the prospect of doing laundry that day seems overwhelming to you (and some days it sure does, doesn't it?), how about just sorting the laundry?

Throughout the day, when you think of new things to do, add them to the list. For example, I just found a bug in our publishing software. I thought at first that it would be easy to fix, but it turns out to be getting more and more complicated the more I look into it. I don't have a lot of time to devote to it right now, so I added it to my to-do list.

So you make your to-do list, and then you start on the first task. And here's a very important part--put the to-do list aside. When you work on one thing, just do that one thing. The other things are safely on your list.

For example, right now, I've got a million things to do today, and I'm pretty late with some of them. Doesn't matter. I'm not thinking about them. Right now, I'm writing this blog entry. I'll do the next thing I need to do when I'm done with this one. And I'm totally not thinking about that bug in the publishing system, because I'm swamped with work for the rest of the week, and then I'm on vacation. But that's OK. The bug'll still be on my to-do list when I'm back from vacation.

(By the way, I may be misrepresenting GTD, because I haven't read it. I've only skimmed it. It's on my coffee table. This is partially because I feel like I've picked up what I need from reading online discussions of the book. And partially because I just haven't had time to read it. Let us now take a moment to appreciate the irony, then move on.)

GTD has spawned a thriving subculture online. 43folders is a blog about--among other things--GTD and productivity, with an associated del.icio.us tag and Wiki. (What's del.icio.us? I did an article on that; follow the link in the previous sentence.)

Lifehacker is a very good blog devoted to productivity and computers. (Motto: "Don't live to geek; Geek to live.")

We're doing our part to enhance your productivity, with a story by Ted Kemp about how IT managers can help their staffs become more productive. People who go into IT are often smart, highly motivated, hard-working--and disorganized. And so the manager's problem is to keep the group focused, on track, and goal-oriented. We've got some advice to help.

Interestingly, the popularity of GTD and related productivity philosophies has spawned a sort of backlash against Palm Pilots and other PDAs. Or, if not a backlash, then a growing appreciation of those old-fashioned tools, pen and paper, and how they can enhance productivity. The author of 43Folders is a devotee of a particular kind of paper notebook, called a Moleskine, which is a fad sweeping the Internet right now.

Moleskine is a great notebook--I use it myself--and it's got a great marketing pitch, about how it's the same notebook used by Picasso, Hemingway, and those other intellectuals and artists of the Lost Generation. As far as I can tell, the marketing pitch is complete and utter malarkey; the company that makes Moleskine was founded only a few years ago. Still, it's a great yarn. And, for added marketing malarkey, the name isn't pronounced "moleskin" or even "mole-skeen." It's pronounced "Mole-a skeen-a," which is oh, so Italian and dolce vita. (The BBC debunks the Moleskine marketing myth.)

The author of 43Folders has invented a device he calls the "Hipster PDA" to enhance productivity. He describes the steps for building the Hipster PDA this way:

1. get a bunch of 3"x5" file cards....
2. clip them together with a binder clip
3. there is no step 3

Did the resurgent popularity of pen and paper kill the PDA? Peter Clarke at EETimes seems to think so; he writes that he's not surprised the PDA market is moribund, he's surprised it took so long. "The clue to the handheld's demise can be gleaned by asking: What does an electronic device do for a consumer that he couldn't do for himself before? So the mobile phone user answers by saying it allows you to make and receive calls on the move," and so forth. Interesting reading, not the usual Luddite anti-PDA rant. I've been a PDA user for years, but increasingly I find that my Palm Tungsten C just sits in its cradle.

Of course, Clarke's essay is somewhat contradicted by a Gartner study showing PDA sales are up 32%. However, Gartner's study included devices such as the Research In Motion BlackBerry; other studies showing a decline in PDA sales excluded connected devices. I'm with Gartner on this one: To say the PDA is dying simply because more devices are connected is, well, silly; it's like saying the PC market died when PCs got network connections.

Nicholas Negroponte, in his seminal book Being Digital, answered the question why analog media are often better. It's because we're not just brains in jars, we have bodies, too, and when we use our bodies to help us think and remember, the process goes better. Write something down and you often don't even have to look at the note again later--the muscular action of writing causes the information to be inscribed more permanently in memory, as well as on paper.

Similarly, he tells the anecdote of a senior Navy admiral who refused to look at computer displays of battle information. He had a junior officer transcribe the reports and translate them to a wall-sized map, with pushpins and grease-pencils and all that World War II-era stuff. The admiral explained that having the battle progress rendered on a big wall like that helped him feel the information. If two ships were relatively far apart from each other, he had to walk across the room to see them, and that helped him understand the battle in ways that looking at numbers never did.

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