Getting things done

On practical productivity matters

The classic productivity topic is how to get things done. David Allen’s landmark book Getting Things Done (2001, rev. 2015), known as GTD, presents a productivity system in which you write down all the tasks in your head as concrete action steps. Allen then has advice for organizing these to-dos so that you know how they relate to each other and which ones to do next. Then, once you’re clear on exactly what to do, you get to work. This system has been coopted by numerous apps, journals, and the like over the years as the premier productivity system and the foundation against which all subsequent productivity systems have to distinguish themselves.

Many years ago I spent a lot of time experimenting with productivity systems. Getting things done, pomodoros, time boxing, time blocking, not to mention just about every to-do list and project manager app out there—I’ve tried it all. Nonetheless, I still, at the time, struggled with productivity. Upon reflection, I see that my mindset was wrong: none of these methods really worked for me so long as I had a self-defeating mindset about my work. That is, I think mindset is incredibly important to productivity, and no perfect system can on its own cultivate the right mindset. We have to bring the right mindset to our work in the first place.

Hence my approach to getting things done is less a concrete strategy and more the shaping of a mindset that can shift how we work.

First, I think we have to believe in our ability to do our work. I struggled with imposter syndrome for years, and this interfered with my ability to get things done, no mater which productivity system I was doing. (You can systematize all you like, but if you can’t fundamentally sit down and work because of psychological blockage, you’re not going to get very far.) This is a tough one to write about because I can’t magically erase any imposter syndrome you may be experiencing. But I can say that there’s no reason not to believe you can do your work. You were hired for a reason. I largely got over my own imposter syndrome by keeping at it and working despite the doubts until finally I had gotten so much done that my confidence in my ability to get work done had to go up. Fundamentally, I think, we have to believe in ourselves in order to be productive. Knowledge work is largely mental, after all.

I remember reading somewhere the wise observation that we procrastinate when we don’t think we have enough time to get our work done. This is ironic and self-defeating because if we procrastinate, then we really don’t have enough time to get our work done. Part of believing in our ability to do our work is believing we have enough time to get it done. This is well facilitated by time tracking and producing data over time that tells you how long it takes you to do a particular kind of project so that you can plan that much time to work. If you know you need three hours to plan for a meeting, give yourself three hours. (And if you can’t give yourself that much time, you have to strategically scale back your expectations.) The larger lesson here is that in order to believe in our ability to do our work, we have to have a realistic sense in our head of what doing that work entails and we have to have the practical ability to carry that out. Getting things done systems fail when we are idealistic and perfectionistic, out of touch with reality.

Second, I think we have to see our work not as an autonomous sphere of big achievements—as a domain very separate from the rest of our lives and in which we complete monolithic projects. Instead, we should see our knowledge work as continuous with the care work we do in the rest of our lives. Just as I do a load of laundry for my family every couple of days—sorting the clothes, spraying stains, and hanging them up to dry when they’re done—so do I work on a scholarly article—reading a source, drawing out key relevant information, adding it to my Word document, and incorporating it into my text.

Seeing knowledge work as continuous with care work offers a few advantages. First, we are all mostly competent at the care work obligations we have in our lives. We may not get the bedsheets washed every week, and we may forget our child’s spirit day at school, but we generally do bathe regularly, feed ourselves (and maybe others, too), and care for our homes and environments (at least to a basic degree). We do this care work day in and day out with no major disruptions—e.g., we might put off doing the dishes for a day, but we’re not going to skip eating. Now, apply this attitude of competence to our knowledge work, and suddenly our perfectionism and imposter syndrome abate.

A second advantage of seeing knowledge work as continuous with care work is that I suspect most of us are pretty decent at tackling big care work “projects.” I don’t mean things like doing a DIY home bathroom renovation, which you may find yourself putting off for months, but just the regular care work of our daily lives. Every night at 7pm, the bedtime routine for my two older children begins. Each kid needs a bath, skincare (they have eczema), pajamas, and brush and floss teeth. We’re also careful to make sure each one uses the potty to avoid nighttime accidents. My husband and I do this together, each taking charge of one kid. Often, when 7pm rolls around, I feel daunted. The bedtime routine feels like it is going to be a lot of work. The kids often goof around a lot or refuse to cooperate, making the process rockier and slower. But I do it anyway, every night, by taking things one step at a time and gradually proceeding down the list of tasks. And every night the kids are in bed by 8pm, even if we have to fend off some resistance. Cleaning up the kitchen after cooking a big holiday meal is similar: daunting at first, but I get it done, step by step—maybe not all at once, but one full dishwasher load at a time.

Bringing the same mentality to knowledge work is what I advocate here. I tend to my children when I do their bedtime routine or I tend to my kitchen after cooking Thanksgiving dinner, doing one small step at a time. Similarly, we can tend to our knowledge work, taking it one small step at a time. Seeing our knowledge work as routine and as comprised of many small efforts makes it more manageable, more doable, and more integrated into our larger lives.

A small note on systems: you may find it helpful to actually break knowledge work projects into small tasks, or you may not. If you do this, I would suggest coming up with tasks that take no more than 30 minutes, ideally fewer. You want to minimize resistance to doing them and to show yourself that you can make productive use of small bits of time during your workday, so that you’re not waiting for big 4-hour chunks of time that rarely happen. At the same time, you may find the act of concretely breaking a project down into tiny listable tasks to be tedious and unhelpful. For the record, I have experimented with writing lists of tiny tasks, but generally I don’t do them anymore.

Here’s how I make progress on a big project—let’s say, a scholarly article I’m writing. As I work I always have a sense of what comes next—a source I want to add, a paragraph that needs filling out (I tend to write in a very compressed way), a problem in the argument that I need to solve. If I have a few minutes, or even a couple of hours on a good day, to work on my article, I go straight to the spot that needs work next. And I dive right into working on it. I work on it with the attitude that I’m making a small effort to improve my article just a tiny bit. I don’t focus on the bigger picture, like worries about getting tenure or worries about whether the article will be accepted by the journal I want to send it to. I just tinker with, or tend to my document, focusing on making concrete progress, however small. I do a bit, and then when it’s time to stop, I stop, only to work on it again the next day or so. (I in fact prefer to work for no more than two hours a day on a single project because I think my attention span wears down beyond that and I’m less effective, something I’ll write about in a later post.)

Shifting to a tending mindset in our approach to knowledge work is a way around the big bullies like perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and overwhelm that so often hold us back from doing anything at all. With this mindset we can get things done, bit by bit, in a routine and regular way. I encourage using any systems and apps you like alongside this mindset; I don’t think any single system or app offers a distinct advantage. Having tried numerous ones (Trello, Todoist, Asana, Marvin, Evernote, Habitica, Wunderlist, Things, Sunsama, the list goes on…), I now just use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of deadlines and plan my work. I like it because it’s no frills and I can easily tailor it to my needs without being limited by an app’s intended use. But you should use whatever works for you and whatever you like.

While systems like Getting Things Done may offer guidelines for creating actionable to-do lists, the sticky point is that when it’s time to work, we have to work. Cultivating a tending mindset can help us work practically, effectively, and with care.