Wade Armstrong

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Back in the Saddle

Posted Wednesday August 1, 2007 in Productivity

I’m a big fan of Getting Things Done; but I haven’t been very GTD-y lately. With too much on my plate, I fell off the wagon. But the point of GTD is to make it easier to handle the volume of work coming in, right? So why did a more busy, more overwhelming time get me away from GTD?

The answer isn’t in the failure of the GTD approach — it’s in the failure of my implementation. And this answer pointed me to the value of maintaining a strong personal commitment to the work you do — and continually questioning that commitment when you don’t get that work done.

GTD and Too Much Work

Starting a business is tough. Not least, there’s nobody else to do anything. In my company, anything that doesn’t involve cooking is on my plate. That means that I have too much work. Of course, the concept behind GTD is that it helps you dig through all those piles of work, by prioritizing and keeping a to-do list that really helps you get done what you can get done.

But the act of keeping my to-do list up-to-date was getting in my way. The vaunted weekly review took too long, and, with my to-do list not current, there was no point looking at it. So I skipped the to-do list and just bulled ahead with whatever was in front of my face.

Falling Behind

The problem with just grabbing what’s in front of you is that you don’t see the big picture. As my father says, sometimes when you don’t know what to do, you do what you’re good at, and, since I didn’t have a big picture of what needed to get done, I went and built two new Web sites for my company. Now, having more channels to sell through is good, and will pay off relatively quickly, but I’m not sure that creating these channels helped me with the core personal sales tasks that I need to be executing.

So, the next sale — the kind of sale I’d been planning on for a year — began to slip out further into the future. When you count on earning money this month to pay for this month’s expenses, that’s the definition of falling behind.

Questioning Commitment

Un-done tasks on my to-do list, missed weekly reviews — clearly, I wasn’t being committed to GTD. And, you know what, that’s fine. If I’m not committed to something that’s not worth being committed to, then I’m making a good choice.


I asked myself: was I 100% committed to GTD? The results had been there for me in the past, so I said yes. Was I 100% committed to the weekly review? No, because it hadn’t been delivering for me. Since the tactical approach was the problem, I broke down my weekly review and explicitly asked myself if I got value from everything I did in that review. Many steps got a resounding “no,” and I realized that they weren’t helping me keep up with my to-dos. These parts of the review got dumped, and quick.

Then I went through my tasks and asked myself the same question. Was I committed to this task? Did it match the big picture? I pruned away, and I got on track.

I’ve used this trick, asking myself explicitly if I’m 100% committed to doing something and then being honest as to why not, many times before. It helped me give away orchids I’d been given as a gift, but which I wasn’t committed to taking care of, and it helped me leave a martial arts studio that I had trained at for months but whose instructors I didn’t think had a lot of teaching skill. Questioning your own commitment — and being honest when it’s not there — is a great way to get to the heart of what’s wrong. Just ask yourself why you aren’t committed and be honest, then do something about that — or, if it’s not worth it, drop your task.

Moving Forward With GTD

GTD has a weakness — if you don’t keep up with your weekly review, it breaks down quickly, no matter how well you execute on the process and organize phases of the game. But, for most people, the weekly review is the hardest part of GTD. For me, the key to getting back in the saddle has been to develop a specific, step-by-step approach to my weekly review, one that takes no more than 30 minutes and one which ruthlessly ignores everything that doesn’t add value and insight.

Now I’m doing two new things with my GTD set-up:

• I’m reviewing the review — as I do my weekly review, I make sure that there are no Projects in the review itself, no Someday/Maybe stages; instead, it’s all a series of specific, brief next actions, each feeding into the following stage.
• I’m questioning my commitment. As part of my review, I look at the to-dos that have been on my list for more than 30 days and either renew my commitment to them, put them in Someday/Maybe, or delete them. My gut level of commitment has thus far turned out to be a good and accurate proxy for the business value of a foregone to-do.

And it’s working. I see what’s ahead of me, I see what I need to do now, and I’m moving forward. Later, I’ll blog about a little bit of the higher-level planning that’s helping me get there.