GTD and Me

I recently read David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD). Allen has received a lot of buzz for his system of productivity, and many blogs (two of my favorites are Lifehack.org and zenhabits.com) are devoted to ways that people can implement the system in their lives for maximum productivity. For example, Allen recommends taking all the open projects in your life and breaking them down into “next actions” or “the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion” (34). So for example if you need to get your oil changed, your next action might be to call the garage to see when it’s open and how much it costs. Allen also recommends categorizing these actions by their locations, so you’d have a next action list for “@Home” “@Work” “@Errands” etc.

I found Allen’s book incredibly useful and I would recommend it and the above blogs to anyone, but I’m concerned that his ideas are more applicable to Corporate America types as opposed to graduate students. He talks a lot about faxes, meetings, agendas, organizing one’s “office” – these are not the essence of what a grad student deals with everyday. What I’ve found difficult with implementing this system is the physicality of it all – Allen stresses that you need to think of things in terms of the next physical action, but I feel like a lot of what I do in grad school is internal and mental (perhaps this causes procrastination?) For example, say I’m writing a paper. I could put on my next actions list: Write one page of paper. But that’s not really how I write. My style is very recursive, so although I may have written a page, it’s likely that very little of that will contribute to what Allen calls completion. In fact, I could babble for a page. Sometimes I think my next action is “Stare into blinking cursor” or “Think of title” neither of which are especially physical actions.

I do think that I could teach some GTD principles in a freshman composition course. Allen writes that we procrastinate because we start to imagine all the things that could possibly go wrong (this is why sensitive and imaginative people are especially prone to procrastination). He says that we just need to start plodding along and making things happen instead of worrying about the end point. Many students in a freshman composition course have not had good experiences with writing in the past, so when I assign the first paper, they are instantly filled with anxiety (“It’ll never be good enough” “Mrs. Horrible Sophomore English Teacher hated everything I wrote”) and thus procrastinate. But what if we could break down the paper into a series of next actions? Would this relieve the anxiety? For example, it might go something like this
1. Get together notes from class, assignment sheet
2. Brainstorm three topics
3. Choose a topic based on guidelines in class
4. Find three quotes I want to use
5. Write thesis statement
6. Make outline based on thesis statement

WOW! I already have less anxiety! Now this is not to say that the students wouldn’t encounter the same problem that I mentioned above, but I think that a set of physical actions would at least get them started. Plus, looking back at that list now, I realize that “staring off into space” and “thinking” are mental actions that are kind of embedded in the physical actions of creating a thesis statement or outline.