Getting Things Done and Scrum

A rather long review posting, but on a worthy topic.

Some kind of time-management strategy has become essential to let us mere mortals deal with this noisy, accelerating world.  Knowledge work doesn’t have clear boundaries.  There’s always more to do, or something which can be done better.  The Singularity is approaching, and people are being pushed to limits.  Traditional date-and-commitment systems to often drive us to mis-prioritize, waste time, and stress out.

GTD is a better way.  There’s a lot of great material on GTD on the web, including Getting started with Getting Things Done (43 Folders). I got interested enough to consuming the original source: David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (any page numbers below are from the 1st paperback ed, 2001).  These are some thoughts and notes after finishing it over the New Years holiday.

GTD is a great personal time management system, with a good book to back it up.  I’d previously read Sally McGhee’s Take Back Your Life. Sally and David are said to have worked together.  David’s is the better book, but Sally’s focus on the practicalities of making a system work in a particular tool (Outlook) are worth reading, especially if yours is an Outlook shop.

Why are these systems so important?

In so many roles, I’ve teetered on the edge of overwhelmed oblivion.  Only through prioritization and knowing that much “below the line” will not get done – have I wrestled back to control and fallen back into a calm cadence of productivity.  GTD is a very well thought out system for sustaining this at the individual level.  It has a lot of affinity with Scrum, a system for tackling the same kinds of problems at the team level.

The book has three parts. The first 80 pages describe the system.  The next 140 pages are about putting it into practice.  The final 50 are a restatement of principles. The book is a bit longer than it could have been, partially because most topics repeat coverage in these parts.  The repetition also creates a bit of disorder in the book.

The highest level summary of GTD is (1) Get all that worrisome stuff out of your head and onto actionable lists. (2) Tackle things from those lists one by one.  Simple, but the devil is in the details.

And there is lots of good detail in the book:

• The five stages of mastering workflow: collect things that command our attention, process what they mean and what to do about them, organize the results, review as options for what we choose to do, and finally – do them.  As with Scrum, there’s an affinity to Deming’s plan, do, check, act cycle. (pg 24)


• Collection success factors: every source of todos (open loops) must have a place in your collection system to keep them out of your head, yet you must try to have a few collection buckets as possible, and (most importantly) you must spend the time to process & empty the buckets regularly. (pg 29)


• For every item: quickly decide just to do it, delegate it, defer it, or drop it. (pg 35 -- Sally’s book also has good insights on the same way of thinking)


• The Four Criteria Model for choosing which actions to do first: context -- do related things at the same time e.g. all your phone calls, time available -- e.g. if it’s less than 2 mins to do it, do it now, energy available -- don’t block yourself completely on things that require psyching yourself up, and priority. (pg 49) [I take exception here -- would put priority as a backdrop for the other categories, rather than a 4th-ran].


• The Threefold Model for scheduling daily work: doing predefined work, doing work as it shows up, and defining your work. (pg 50)


• The Six-Level Model for setting priorities: Life goals, 3-5 year vision, 1-2 year goals, current areas of responsibility, current projects, current actions. GTD’s philosophy is to focus the most energy on current actions, but periodically review against higher goals. (pg 51 and 200)


• The Natural Planning Model: define purpose and principles, envision the desired outcome, brainstorm ideas, organize them, and identify specific next actions. (pg 56)

Chapter 4 starts talking about the practicalities – we get pelted via mail, email, phone, rss, etc. – what tools do we need to get all these disparate systems into one set of inboxes to free our minds of destructive fretting and fear of forgetting?

Chapter 7 talks about categories/buckets. (pg 140). And Chapter 8 talks about order to tackle things for maximum productivity (pg 183).

The principles in Part 3 include: The power of the collection habit, the power of the next-action decision, and the power of outcome focusing.

It was interesting to see many similar elements between GTD for the individual and Scrum for the team: Regular, periodical planning -- Scrum monthly planning, GTD weekly review (pg 185); Focus on prioritization -- Scrum priorized backlogs, GTD priorities (pg 195); Focus first on actionable workitems while tying back to larger priorities -- Scrum’s separate product & sprint backlogs, GTD’s six levels (pg 200).

So, I’ve been loosely doing a GTD-like thing for a while now.  Then I discovered how much Scrum resonated for me in a team environment. After reading GTD the book, I’m inspired to get even more done and stress even less.  It’ll take some discipline (folders, lists, weekly reviews), but hopefully I'll be up to it.