Lately, I’ve been struggling to follow through on my own goals, getting easily scattered between ideas, projects, work, and personal issues from personal life.
It’s possible that I’m not a particularly focused person in general. I tend to be interested in multiple subjects, and these change periodically. I’m more of a generalist than a specialist. The world has so many distractions: infinite access to books, tv shows, music, and social media. How do we keep our attention on what we actually want to do?
I was reading Ben Kuhn’s post the other day about tools for staying focused and one tool caught my attention. The tool is called Intend and it has an interesting twist on the typical productivity tools we see around. By focusing first on our goals, not just tasks, we end up accumulating fewer pending tasks and smaller issues.
For me, this has always been one of the issues with the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach. The organizational processes and habits are efficient and robust, but the higher “horizons of focus” aren’t emphasized much, and I often lose the forest for the trees. For people who are constantly having ideas and exploring multiple topics, not having a structure to guide priorities makes GTD hard to use over the long term.
On the Intend’s philosophy page, they explain the advantage of focusing on goals:
“I think that having goals come first means that users are more likely to forget to do random small tasks and less likely to forget to make progress towards their high-level goals, which I see as being probably a good tradeoff—especially if the person has other systems in place to ensure small tasks don’t get forgotten if they’re indeed really important.”
It’s not that GTD has some concept missing to implement this. Intend’s approach is more like selecting some of the GTDs projects we find particularly important and focusing on those on the day to day basis, while handling other tasks (like going for groceries with a shoppinglist) with support from other tools.
David Allen argues that we need to handle the nitty-gritty details first before we can focus on the higher-level stuff but that the ultimate goal of GTD is:
“Championing appropriate engagement with your world—guiding you to make the best choice of what to do in each moment, and to eliminate distraction and stress about what you’re not doing.”
I don’t think the approach was successful in accomplishing this for me. Treating all projects as equal in my productivity system just doesn’t work. Some have hard deadlines and urgency; others are important but aren’t screaming at me. It’s easy to focus on the former and neglect the latter on a day-to-day basis by looking at a task list.
Of course, these aren’t new ideas. One of my biggest influences, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, emphasizes focusing on the roles we play (not too different from GTD’s “areas of focus”) and planning weekly activities related to those roles. The third habit, First Things First, guides us to prioritize what’s important but not urgent. The challenge is that these ideas came from a slower-paced world. GTD updated the model to handle more stuff but I feel we missed something in the process. Blocking time on the calendar for important-but-not-urgent activities goes against GTD approach.
I think intend is a good step toward bringing these ideas into the digital but I still feel there’s a missing conceptual structure linking the day to day management prowess of GTD with the “begin with the end in mind” and “first things first” habits of 7 Habits. For me, starting from roles, even more than starting from goals, feels like a much better entry point for planning my week and handling the information overload most of us face today.
For GTD, the weekly review is meant to solve many of these problems but, once you have hundreds of projects, it’s hard to focus on what matters most. Maybe the weekly review should be used to carefully select “active projects” and keep the rest in a someday/maybe/later list.
I’m sure there are no perfect solutions and each of us needs to find what works best. I feel I have all the right tools to make it all work but I didn’t make them work well with each other.s—what I haven’t yet done is make them work well together.