GTD and showing up

Woody Allen once said that “80 percent of success is showing up.” I was reading a thread in the Getting Things Done Yahoo group today and thinking that applies to success in using GTD, too.

Getting Things Done (GTD) is the personal productivity system management spelled out in the 2001 book by management guru David Allen.

Allen’s process has users plow through everything in their lives, distilling their commitments and projects (both big and small) down to two questions:

1. What is the outcome I desire from doing this?
2. What is the next physical action required to move forward?

Doing this takes the uncertainty and ambiguity out of the working -- since you’ve already defined how you’re going to do things, you can sail through the work of “getting things done.” It’s also incredibly energizing, since it gives you a sense of having everything squared away at all times.

Allen also offers some guidance to help keep the flow going and leverage efficiency, such as organizing your next actions according to the resource you need to do them (such as having a “calls list” for the phone calls you need to make).

Seems simple enough, and, for most people, it is. But a noisy few complain that GTD’s approach doesn’t work, because of their “unique situation.” They make very elaborate cases for being “different” and sometimes create complex “alternative” or “hybrid” GTD systems to accommodate their “needs.”

A casual observer might be inclined to say that’s understandable, since everyone’s different. But, as someone who has been more than a casual observer for a few years now, here’s the fact: About 99% of these complaints are a total cop-out by people just can’t or won’t own up enough to their own commitments and actions to succeed.

GTD asks users to cut through all the systems, structures, piles, and debris they’ve built around them to confront basic truths about their lives:

• These are the projects and commitments I have
• These are the desired outcomes I want
• These are the resources I have available now
• These are the actions I must take to reach my desired outcomes

Reaching those truths requires a fundamental willingness to face life with “no bull” and an openness to finding out that, when it gets down to bare metal, your desired outcomes may not be what you’ve been telling yourself they are.

Then, once you do sort out your desires and commitments, it’s time to do the work. Since you’ve already identified the resources you need and the actions you’re going to take, you have no excuses for not acting.

I believe that’s why some people are so dedicated to maintaining the myth that GTD’s two fundamental questions – what do I want and what’s the next action – don’t apply to them. Their systems complicate what they do just enough to give them a way to avoid thinking or acting in a new way. Their approaches subtly sidestep facing reality. And, if all else fails, they fall back on blaming David Allen for not (somehow) accommodating them in his book.

So, for those who passionately defend their flawed (and failing) approaches to GTD, here’s some advice: Cut out the all the approaches, tweaked systems, and other nonsense. Just ask yourself what you want and what’s the next action to get there. Then, try showing up.

(Hmmm…now that I think of it, I wonder if David Allen and Woody Allen are related…)