It’s that time of year when I need to buy my planner refill for next year, for the last couple of years I’ve been using Franklin Covey to help organize my work-flow. Generally I like the system, but the lists can become a little difficult to manage. In short it’s a top-down/pull planning system that does its initial sort by importance and is weak when it comes to urgency.
When stuff percolates to the top of the list there is no time context in the FC system. There seems to be a bunch of low priority stuff that never makes it to the top of the list and stays there for months. It requires a both time and a little discipline to look down the list and deal with small stuff before it comes bigger, and FC does not seem to be conducive to that.
I picked up David Allen’s widely known book “Getting things done” (GTD). I’ve worked with a few devotes to Allen’s system in the past, but have never read it or thought too deeply about it, after all FC worked just fine, even if it became a little unwieldy after a while.
The start of GTD is collecting everything that needs to be done in a bucket. It does not matter what that bucket is, email inbox or notebook both seem to work. You then work down the list and if an item requires your attention you either do what’s required to close it, defer to later on or delegate to someone else to work. If an item does not need attention, but is only for information then you either file it somewhere for later use or to “incubate”, or throw it away.
GTD in practice seems to have the opposite problem to FC. It becomes a bottom up/push planning system that stresses urgency of a task over everything else, including importance and context.
FC says that efficiency as doing things right, but effectiveness is going the right things. GTD does not seem to help with the effectiveness part of the equation, while FC spends a lot of effort on it.
I spent little time talking to one of the GTD proponents about this, and he agreed that the system as written does not prioritize tasks in detail and it requires discipline to pick what really needs to be done, opposed to what is just as urgent but you’d prefer to do.
While FC has worked rather well for me for a number of years I’m looking for something that combines the list management/urgency of GTD. I clearly need to do some more reserch and thinking about this. Idealy I’d like a system I can sync my I-Phone into too.