Quote:
Originally Posted by daiglebox
...GTD ignores Priorities. To state it simply, DA believes you should plan in Projects, but work from Contexts. Therefore, when you're at an airport with 20 minutes on your hands and a cellphone in your pocket, you look at your "Calls" context and that's what you do.
|
Context is only the tip of the iceberg. But without context, you have nothing. It's the old "being reminded of dead batteries in the flashlight when attempting to use it, rather than when out at the store" routine.
To say that GTD ignores priorities is false. If you were to shadow David Allen for an entire day, all the GTD you'd see him "doing" is the five-phase system of Collect-Process-Organize-Review-Do. This is the only "horizontal" component of GTD, but it's the most visible, so many people mistake it for being the whole GTD system.
What you
won't see him "doing" is what's going on in his head: doing the "vertical" aspect: examining one's work, life and priorities with everything from the daily stuff to the big picture view in mind.
Quote:
Originally Posted by daiglebox
DA can look at any given Context list and decide what's important at that moment for where he is and what tools are at hand. I can't. My boss decides what's important - and when he tells me, I better have a way of marking those actions accordingly.
|
Do you have a pulse? If so, then you can prioritize (making action decisions) in the moment, based on any of a number of criteria, only the first of which is Context. The problem is, these criteria may be shifting continually, based on time available, energy available, urgency with regards to deadlines, and yes, interruptions from your boss.
As David Allen says: (taken from track 2 of the audio version of the GTD book)
Quote:
The traditional approaches to time management were useful in their time. They provided helpful reference points for a workforce that was just emerging from an industrial, assembly-line modality, into a new kind of work that included choices about what to do and discretion about when to do it. Along with discretionary time also came the need to make good choices about what to do at any given time. ABC priority codes and daily to-do lists were key techniques that helped people sort through their choices in some meaningful way. If you had the freedom to decide what to do, you also had the responsibility to make good choices.
What you've probably discovered, at least at some level, is that daily to do lists, and simplified priority coding have proven inadequate to deal with the volume and variable nature of the average professional's workload. More and more people's jobs are made up of dozens or even hundreds of emails a day, with no latitude left to ignore a single request, complaint, or order. There are few people who can expect to code everything an A, a B, or a C priority, or who can maintain some predetermined list of to-dos, that the first telephone call, or interruption from their boss, won't totally undo.
|
Anyone who thinks GTD ignores priority needs to take a more careful read of the program, especially the "6-level model for reviewing your own work" and the "Natural Planning" model. There's a lot more subtlety and depth to GTD than the 5 stages of mastering workflow.