Francis Heylighen and Clément Vidal
Published
Dec, 2008
This article evaluates and reinterprets David Allen’s best-selling ‘getting things done’ (GTD) method for enhancing personal productivity and reducing stress from information overload – in light of how the brain actually processes information and plans actions in the real world.
Examining GTD from the perspective of situated, embodied and distributed cognition theories, the authors note that people’s actions are based on intuition, which is rooted in subjective experience, rather than on logic and rationality. They follow the notion of the mind as extending into the physical environment to include all of the diaries, calendars and to-do lists that support its day-to-day functioning, noting how the real-world environment contributes affordances (to assist), disturbances (to frustrate) and feedback (to help monitor) activity.
The authors recommend acting firstly in line with the situation: do you have time for this action? Is there a phone to make your calls? Is your head actually full of something else? And only after that do they suggest acting with (your own or others’) priorities. Knowledge workers should use the brain for what it is good at – recognising patterns and associating them with actions – and entrust factual information (which it is poor at recalling) to more reliable external memories (written notes or computer files). This will allow them to achieve a sense of “flow” and thus “constantly advance towards their goals at the most efficient speed, without needing artificially imposed deadlines to ensure they attain their objectives.”
Asserting the primacy of adapting over planning, the authors argue that true productivity should be measured not by the number of planned objectives achieved, but by the number of intrinsically worthwhile results, and by examining how the concept of ‘stigmergy’ might be employed to extend GTD to enhance collaborative work.
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