Merlin - the two ideas aren’t really mutually exclusive. At my company we have a “Top Three” meeting each week among the managers where we each pick three things we will absolutely get done that week. They’re not the only three but they are the ones we are making a commitment will get done, no matter what, that week.

I’ve also taken to using a GTD category I call @Today. I apply it to items I am promoting to my task list for each day. Once something is tagged @Today and marked with today’s due date, I do it that day - no exceptions. The discipline of making a commitment to myself to getting anything with this tag done that day makes me very cautious about applying it during my daily review every morning.

I’m with you, Marc. I have a category called “@focus” that I use for that purpose. And I love your “three things” idea.

But sometimes my available reserve of energy and attention needs to be trained completely on the tasks of the day, without all of the scanning, futzing, and things-getting-doneness even appearing on my radar screen.

For me there’s no substitute for occasionally putting “the system” completely away and just having a pen and a sheet of paper with a few items scratched on it. That’s why I called it a “vacation.” Maybe a better term would be “primitive camping.” :)

My big complaint with the GTD method is seems weak on setting priorities and stripping the nonessential tasks out. From my reading of Allen’s work, the emphasis seems to be very heavy on list-making. But I think prioritization matters far more. The old Charles Schwab technique is very useful. (It consists of picking the top six things that must be attacked, ranking them, and doing those first that matter most.) As a businessman, I also like to distinguish between stuff that is money-making from all the rest: money-making activities first!

The flaw in Allen’s GTD system, in my view, is that he uses the computer as his metaphor for the human mind. The computer needs to manage a variety of tasks efficiently, and must context-switch between them. But Man is different: he chooses his tasks and priorities. And even more importantly, he decides what NOT to do. I do not see that Allen takes sufficient account of this. In my reading, his system seems reactive by design. And I think a reactive system is a dangerous system.

People who know GTD better than I may disagree heartily. I would love to hear their analysis. Maybe I have Allen all wrong.

True, Allen doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on prioritization in GTD, but, rather than ignoring that facet of productivity, I think he’s just giving you credit for being able to figure out the priorities for yourself.

You make the lists to get all the open loops to quit bouncing around in your head, then you look at your lists and do your reviews to prioritize your next actions.

I think he acknowledges that we’re good at the prioritization part, not so good at the remembering all the next actions part.

Whippet - I agree with PaulD. It’s not so much that DA doesn’t address prioritization as the emphasis he puts on recognizing context, available time, and energy. Priority comes after those filters have been applied to the list.

Much as I rant about hating having to switch contexts any more than necessary, it’s a fact of life in these fast-paced times. Having a system in place that allows me to quickly scan everythign I need to do while out and about (@Errands) just before I head to my car has been uncredibly helpful in making the most of my lunch break or other errand-running jaunts.

Similarly, the other context tags I use allow me to make smart decisions about what the most important thing I can be doing might be. When I have ten or fifteen minutes before my next meeting or appointment, I usually scan my @Calls list and knock off a phone call or two that, while not urgent, needs to be made.

In the nearly five years I’ve been honing my GTD skills, I have seen countless adaptations of GTD by people who see the core value in the methods Allen teaches to their individual work and life style. Merlin is a perfect example of that.

PaulD and Marc make good points, enough to make me re-think my critique. Thanks to both.

As I think Merlin said in a past post here, it’s great that GTD has a wide (and motivated) enough audience to get this level of participation.

I’ve received tons of good adivce here, and more than once been prompted to rethink my original position on things!