GTD sucks for creative work. Here’s an alternative system

It's funny how some people lambaste GTD and then proceed to offer a productivity solution that's basically GTD plus some extra steps or tools. The basic tenets of GTD are sound and not new. David Allen just simplified the process and provided some psychological justifications to why they work. So as long as you collect everything out of your head and into a system where you can review and prioritize, that's GTD for everyone regardless of your station in life.

I don't think that was a failure of GTD. I think that was a failure to understand your own limitations and what you're realistically going to be able to accomplish in any given timeframe. It really sounds like a fundamental failure to properly understand GTD.

If you actually read the book--rather than the BusinessInsider, et. al. listicles summarizing it--Allen makes the point that the most important feature of any task tracking system be that it is not cumbersome. All else be damned. If whatever system you're using to keep track of what you need to do is getting in the way of keeping track of what you need to do, then it is no good.

He also makes the point that nobody is meant to do everything in the book. The book is meant to be a cookbook, you are meant to try different things in the book up to the point of gaining control of your work and then put the book down. You're supposed to stop reading GTD when you start to get things done. Don't mess with a good recipe.

I keep a single sheet of paper as my TODO list. If it doesn't fit on the paper, it doesn't go on the list. It's one list for both work and personal issues, because I only have one life, I can't clone myself and work on two lists in parallel. I scratch things off and reuse the paper until it's full. I then rewrite the list on a new sheet of paper, with items that have gone undone for a long time naturally bubbling up to the top of the list.

And if something has been ignored at the top of the list for a long time, I just throw it away. If it didn't get done in the last month, clearly it's not that important. If it were more important, I would have made the time to do it.

Get better about throwing away your emotional baggage.

I too find GTD unsuitable for creative work, mostly because it doesn't handle open-ended, non-tickboxy tasks well, though I can't say that I was using GTD properly -- for example, I couldn't bring myself to do weekly reviews. Overall, GTD felt like it requires too much willpower to run.

Have you tried Mark Forster's Autofocus or Final Version Perfected systems? If not, you owe yourself a try. The systems, at their core, are very simple:

1. You have a long list of tasks (the same 'ubiquitous capture' principle as in GTD and other systems) 2. You scan the list for tasks that 'stand out' for you as 'ripe' to be done / worked on. This means that you're mentally ready to do these tasks. 3. Work these tasks for as long as you feel like. It's not necessary to finish these tasks. 4. After you've dont with a task, you either cross it off the list, or re-append it to the end of the list.

I found his systems much more tolerant of creative work, and much less willpower hungry. A downside of these systems is that they're not capable of handling tasks with start / due dates.

Also, regarding de-cluttering todo lists, I firmly believe that:

1. ALL your tasks and actionable thoughts must be captured in your system. 2. Your current todo list must only show items that you are ready to do right now, at the moment. For example, your todo list shouldn't show the task 'Vacuum the floor' if you're not at home. Therefore, there must be ways of de-cluttering your todo list that allow you to defer the tasks until your external (or internal!) conditions are more conducive to working on these tasks.

(I got fed up with the inability of most todo apps to do the above, so I'm working on my own todo app).

From what I am reading, the author is saying they are effectively time slicing their week. Each day is like a "task", in the software sense, that gets to run and make progress to its goal. You have to consider all the things that you could do, but then decide which should be prioritized because it will deliver results towards the goal. This may be better for creative work, because it is easy to otherwise keep busy doing things that seem important, but if you think about it they do not really do enough to get you to your goal. (Like how easy it is to drift towards unnecessary feature work over maintenance.) At the same time, "next actions" may not quite work because the work is often non-linear (though I would not say they suck). It will be interesting to see how personal management plays out in the long, long run and how it develops against AI.

GTD is not for creative work. GTD is great to deal with type 2 procrastination [1] because not everybody can afford to have somebody doing their important errands. So it is just an efficient method of preventing my (your) life to become a mess. Listing every micro action in a fancy way (in my case I use Evernote [2]) would be wasted time (that is better spent deciding what is the next action or doing real work), a sheet of paper is more efficient for that.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

[2] https://github.com/we-build-dreams/hamster-gtd (a simple implementation that you can use as a starting point)

> Too many projects and too many next actions. It was information overload. I think my brain couldn’t handle my 50-100 ongoing projects and next actions.

IMHO, this isn't a problem with GTD as a system; it's more of a problem with the user's prioritization. Nobody should have to have 50-100 ongoing projects and next actions. Urgent/Important them, and junk the rest.

It would have been nice to give any reference to "GTD" in an introductory sentence so that readers don't have to google it and interfer from the context what's meant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTD

GTD works fine for creative work when you get GTD. Most people don't. it actually takes quite some time (months/years) to do the needed click and understand what GTD is all about.

The part of the “xxx is not for creative work” argument that bothers me is the assumption that “creative work” cannot be organized and planned. Let’s call writing, programming, … simply “work,” not “creative work,” and we have to do them like other kinds of work.

Of course, some parts of everybody’s work need more focus/mental energy/physical energy/..., but that doesn’t mean they are special and can get away with being disorganized.

Van Morrison once said in an interview that when he has a song to write he simply sits down and works on it, whether he feels like it or not. Are our iOS apps more “creative” than his songs?

I found GTD and I did not get along. For me, the result was the opposite of its name, or exactly the name if you define "things" to be all the pointless things in life that you shouldn't waste your time with.

I found the important/due date quadrant system espoused by Randy Pausch in his Time Managenent video to be the best way to get important things done. GTD didn't make that distinction and in my experience, it made it worse.

Disclaimer: I know how overzealous I was about GTD when I was using it, and I want to say that I'm not interested in talking about why you think I should try GTD again. I don't want to debate with anyone about GTD. This is only my experience with trying to use it in my life 5 years ago for about a year. It didn't mesh with my goals. I am excited for you if it's served you well, though!

I read David Allen's book back when the web was at version 2.0 and the one thing that has stuck with me is this: if something is going to take two minutes or less, just do it. That simple rule helped me immensely.

I'm a creative fella. I use GTD super heavily, because it lets me manage EVERYTHING in my head - all my creative efforts, in addition to the mundane.

> Most task/to-do software is based around the concept of projects and tasks. It’s really too bad. The tendency is to fill up your task software with dozens of projects and tasks under each project. But the more you look at your projects and tasks every day for the next few weeks, it gets discouraging. It feels like a never-ending river of stress.

These are things that are already open in your head in some way. you put them into a system you trust to get them out of your head, and you review them at varying intervals because they matter to you in some way, at some level.

> The most important thing for the creative innovator is not a ton of tasks to do but rather the ability to see what’s important to focus on and to focus on that deeply. The creative innovator needs to go deep on a feature or issue, and the deeper they go the more creativity they unleash.. thus creating lots of value to the end user.

GTD doesn't stop you from doing this. GTD helps you identify what's important and ensure it gets done.

> Personally, I can’t bear the thought of trying to organize my work with Things for Mac (or similar task management software). Typically, you create some projects and fill them with tasks, and before you know it you have so many projects and tasks that it’s overwhelming. The whole thing becomes a distraction and a drag. It makes work less enjoyable.

OK, I might agree with you there. I had abysmal luck in implementing GTD with Things and Omnifocus, so I built my own web app that does what I want: focus on capture, and make review possible from a variety of data points like creation, tags, metadata; even things like tag or word count.

Overall though, this author doesn't know what he's talking about, doesn't understand how to properly implement and manage their GTD, and that is simply NOT GTD's fault. that's theirs. If you're going to make such a bold title that "GTD sucks for creative work" you better back it up with some solid points and alternatives. This author did nothing of the sort.

I will still say: GTD is awesome for creative work. I am easily 5x more creative after learning about GTD. I don't 1:1 implement it, but I take whats useful and discard what I don't, like inbox zero. Although now that i've been booking a lot of appointments via email, I might want to revisit that.

It's a good insight that other systems may complement GTD for driving deep creative focus. Todd Henry covers this very well, both conceptually and tactically, in his book The Accidental Creative. He offers a flexible set of practices that work together as a system to help you put your money where your mouth is in terms of what you say is important in your creative work and how you spend your time and mental energy in light of that. He touches on a lot of the same principles as the OP but in book form. It's a good read and is backed by the author's personal experience and work experience helping others tackle their own creativity and productivity challenges.

One technique relevant to other commenters recognizing that a full task view is not always relevant for creative projects, or least for the creative aspect of projects, is to maintain a project list that focuses on the key challenges or questions that define the creative purpose or problem of the project. Review that regularly and set aside time to tackle the creative challenges. You can always use GTD or any other task list tool to track the concrete tasks generated from those times and work from those lists during pomodoros or heads down execution time. The point is nurturing creativity does require different techniques than task execution, but with some care you can manage it within the constraints of a given day, week, and month. The book says it much better and more comprehensively than I can and is highly recommended reading.

I find that often my interest in projects waxes and wanes periodically, and seemingly randomly. I like the organizational ideas of GTD, specifically the getting the ideas out of your head and collecting them into a known place, and breaking down TODOs into components until they're not so large and abstract as to cause paralysis -- but I agree that they can still be overwhelming.

This article made me think of an idea of mitigating the former issue; that is, instead of have a huge list of "next steps" that can cause their own form of analysis paralysis when I'm feeling indecisive, even if they're small and easy, but instead have a mechanism to choose and display a single, randomly chosen item from the list of items.

If I'm not interested in that, I could skip to another one. Otherwise, it catches my fancy and I now have something concrete to work on, without wasting any effort trying to figure out what to do myself.

Surely using the Pomodoro technique for creative work will break flow?

I use a simplified version of scrum for personal planning, with one day "sprints". Works pretty well.

GTD is a great managerial schedule. Creative work needs those 4 hour time boxes and singular mental focus.

TODO apps should have an upper-bound on the number of items to force the user to prioritize his tasks.

I noticed a pattern where the new shiny TODO app is adopted. Then it gets filled-up until it becomes depressing to open. Then the new-new TODO apps gets a round of applause. Repeat.

I guess GTD sucks for creative types. The type that thinks that their needs are so special compared to other workers, are very sensitive towards whatever environmental factor makes them feel bad or discouraged, that any kind of externally imposed structure cramps their style, and that they should have the freedom to make up whatever ritual that makes their god-given creative juices flowing. Which are, again, very sensitive to petty environmental distractions.