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[22]The New Yorker
[23]Office Space

The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done

How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to.
[undefined]

By [24]Cal Newport

November 17, 2020
A bunch of hands each handling a single task
As the obligations of knowledge work have grown increasingly frenetic, workers
have flocked to productivity tools and techniques.Illustration by Timo Lenzen
Save this story
Save this story

In the early two-thousands, Merlin Mann, a Web designer and avowed Macintosh
enthusiast, was working as a freelance project manager for software companies.
He had held similar roles for years, so he knew the ins and outs of the job; he
was surprised, therefore, to find that he was overwhelmed—not by the
intellectual aspects of his work but by the many small administrative tasks,
such as scheduling conference calls, that bubbled up from a turbulent stream of
e-mail messages. “I was in this batting cage, deluged with information,” he
told me recently. “I went to college. I was smart. Why was I having such a hard
time?”

Mann wasn’t alone in his frustration. In the nineteen-nineties, the spread of
e-mail had transformed knowledge work. With nearly all friction removed from
professional communication, anyone could bother anyone else at any time. Many
e-mails brought obligations: to answer a question, look into a lead, arrange a
meeting, or provide feedback. Work lives that had once been sequential—two or
three blocks of work, broken up by meetings and phone calls—became frantic,
improvisational, and impossibly overloaded. “E-mail is a ball of uncertainty
that represents anxiety,” Mann said, reflecting on this period.

In 2003, he came across a book that seemed to address his frustrations. It was
titled “[27]Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity,” and, for
Mann, it changed everything. The time-management system it described, called
G.T.D., had been developed by David Allen, a consultant turned entrepreneur who
lived in the crunchy mountain town of Ojai, California. Allen combined ideas
from Zen Buddhism with the strict organizational techniques he’d honed while
advising corporate clients. He proposed a theory about how our minds work: when
we try to keep track of obligations in our heads, we create “open loops” that
make us anxious. That anxiety, in turn, reduces our ability to think
effectively. If we could avoid worrying about what we were supposed to be
doing, we could focus more fully on what we were actually doing, achieving what
Allen called a “mind like water.”

To maintain such a mind, one must deal with new obligations before they can
become entrenched as open loops. G.T.D.’s solution is a multi-step system. It
begins with what Allen describes as full capture: the idea is to maintain a set
of in-boxes into which you can drop obligations as soon as they arise. One such
in-box might be a physical tray on your desk; when you suddenly remember that
you need to finish a task before an upcoming meeting, you can jot a reminder on
a piece of paper, toss it in the tray, and, without breaking concentration,
return to whatever it was you were doing. Throughout the day, you might add
similar thoughts to other in-boxes, such as a list on your computer or a pocket
notebook. But jotting down notes isn’t, in itself, enough to close the loops;
your mind must trust that you will return to your in-boxes and process what’s
inside them. Allen calls this final, crucial step regular review. During
reviews, you transform your haphazard reminders into concrete “next actions,”
then enter them onto a master list.

This list can now provide a motive force for your efforts. In his book, Allen
recommends organizing the master list into contexts, such as @phone or
@computer. Moving through the day, you can simply look at the tasks listed
under your current context and execute them one after another. Allen uses the
analogy of cranking widgets to describe this calmly mechanical approach to
work. It’s a rigorous system for the generation of serenity.

To someone with Mann’s engineering sensibility, the precision of G.T.D. was
appealing, and the method itself seemed ripe for optimization. In September,
2004, Mann started a blog called 43 Folders—a reference to an organizational
hack, the “tickler file,” described in Allen’s book. In an introductory post,
Mann wrote, “Believe me, if you keep finding that the water of your life has
somehow run onto the floor, GTD may be just the drinking glass you need to get
things back together.” He published nine posts about G.T.D. during the blog’s
first month. The discussion was often highly technical: in one post, he
proposed the creation of a unified XML format for G.T.D. data, which would
allow different apps to display the same tasks in multiple formats, including
“graphical map, outline, RDF, structured text.” He told me that the writer Cory
Doctorow linked to an early 43 Folders post on Doctorow’s popular nerd-culture
site, Boing Boing. Traffic surged. Mann soon announced that, in just thirty
days, 43 Folders had received over a hundred and fifty thousand unique
visitors. (“That’s just nuts,” he wrote.) The site became so popular that Mann
quit his job to work on it full time. As his influence grew, he popularized a
new term for the genre that he was helping to create: “productivity pr0n,” an
adaptation of the “leet speak,” or geek lingo, word for pornography. The hunger
for this pr0n, he noticed, was insatiable. People were desperate to tinker with
their productivity systems.

What Mann and his fellow-enthusiasts were doing felt perfectly natural: they
were trying to be more productive in a knowledge-work environment that seemed
increasingly frenetic and harder to control. What they didn’t realize was that
they were reacting to a profound shift in the workplace that had gone largely
unnoticed.

Before there was “personal productivity,” there was just productivity: a
measure of how much a worker could produce in a fixed interval of time. At the
turn of the twentieth century, Frederick Taylor and his acolytes had studied
the physical movements of factory workers, looking for places to save time and
reduce costs. It wasn’t immediately obvious how this industrial concept of
productivity might be adapted from the assembly line to the office. A major
figure in this translation was Peter Drucker, the influential business scholar
who is widely regarded as the creator of modern management theory.

Drucker was born in Austria in 1909. His parents, Adolph and Caroline, held
evening salons that were attended by Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter,
among other economic luminaries. The intellectual energy of these salons seemed
to inspire Drucker’s own productivity: he wrote thirty-nine books, the last
shortly before his death, at the age of ninety-five. His career took off after
the publication of his second book, “[28]The Future of Industrial Man,” in
1942, when he was a thirty-three-year-old professor at Bennington College. The
book asked how an “industrial society”—one unfolding within “the entirely new
physical reality which Western man has created as his habitat since James Watt
invented the steam engine”—might best be structured to respect human freedom
and dignity. Arriving in the midst of an industrial world war, the book found a
wide audience. After reading it, the management team at [29]General Motors
invited Drucker to spend two years studying the operations of what was then the
world’s largest corporation. The 1946 book that resulted from that engagement,
“[30]Concept of the Corporation,” was one of the first to look seriously at how
big organizations actually got work done. It laid the foundation for treating
management as a subject that could be studied analytically.

In the nineteen-fifties, the American economy began to move from manual labor
toward cognitive work. Drucker helped business leaders understand this
transformation. In his 1959 book, “[31]Landmarks of Tomorrow,” he coined the
term “knowledge work,” and argued that autonomy would be the central feature of
the new corporate world. Drucker predicted that corporate profits would depend
on mental effort, and that each individual knowledge worker, possessing skills
too specialized to be broken down into “repetitive, simple, mechanical motions”
choreographed from above, would need to decide how to “apply his knowledge as a
professional” and monitor his own productivity. “The knowledge worker cannot be
supervised closely or in detail,” Drucker wrote, in “[32]The Effective
Executive,” from 1967. “He must direct himself.”

Drucker’s emphasis on the autonomy of knowledge workers made sense, as there
was no obvious way to deconstruct the efforts required by newly important
mid-century jobs—like corporate research and development or advertisement
copywriting—into assembly-line-style sequences of optimized steps. But Drucker
was also influenced by the politics of the [33]Cold War. He viewed creativity
and innovation as key to staying ahead of the Soviets. Citing the invention of
the [34]atomic bomb, he argued that scientific work of such complexity and
ambiguity could not have been managed using the heavy-handed techniques of the
industrial age, which he likened to the centralized planning of the Soviet
economy. Future industries, he suggested, would need to operate in “local” and
“decentralized” ways.

To support his emphasis on knowledge-worker autonomy, Drucker introduced the
idea of management by objectives, a process in which managers focus on setting
out clear targets, but the details of how they’re accomplished are left to
individuals. This idea is both extremely consequential and rarely debated. It’s
why the modern office worker is inundated with quantified quarterly goals and
motivating mission statements, but receives almost no guidance on how to
actually organize and manage these efforts. It was thus largely owing to
Drucker that, in 2004, when Merlin Mann found himself overwhelmed by his work,
he took it for granted that the solution to his woes would be found in the
optimization of his personal habits.

As the popularity of 43 Folders grew, so did Mann’s influence in the online
productivity world. One breakthrough from this period was a novel
organizational device that he called “the hipster PDA.” Pre-smartphone handheld
devices, such as the Palm Pilot, were often described as “personal digital
assistants”; the hipster P.D.A. was proudly analog. The instructions for making
one were aggressively simple: “1. Get a bunch of 3x5 inch index cards. 2. Clip
them together with a binder clip. 3. There is no step 3.” The “device,” Mann
suggested, was ideal for implementing G.T.D.: the top index card could serve as
an in-box, where tasks could be jotted down for subsequent processing, while
colored cards in the stack could act as dividers to organize tasks by project
or context. A 2005 article in the Globe and Mail noted that Ian Capstick, a
press secretary for Canada’s New Democratic Party, wielded a hipster P.D.A. in
place of a BlackBerry.

Just as G.T.D. was achieving widespread popularity, however, Mann’s zeal for
his own practice began to fade. An inflection point in his writing came in
2007, soon after he gave a G.T.D.-inspired speech about e-mail management to an
overflow audience at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Building on the
classic productivity idea that an office worker shouldn’t touch the same piece
of paper more than once, Mann outlined a new method for rapidly processing
e-mails. In this system, you would read each e-mail only once, then select from
a limited set of options—delete it, respond to it, defer it (by moving it into
a folder of messages requiring long responses), delegate it, or “do” it (by
extracting and executing the activity at its core, or capturing it for later
attention in a system like G.T.D.). The goal was to apply these rules
mechanically until your digital message pile was empty. Mann called his
strategy Inbox Zero. After [35]Google uploaded a video of his talk to [36]
YouTube, the term entered the vernacular. Editors began inquiring about book
deals.

Not long afterward, Mann posted a self-reflective essay on 43 Folders, in which
he revealed a growing dissatisfaction with the world of personal productivity.
Productivity pr0n, he suggested, was becoming a bewildering, complexifying end
in itself—list-making as a “cargo cult,” system-tweaking as an addiction. “On
more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish,”
he wrote. Part of the problem was the recursive quality of his work. Refining
his productivity system so that he could blog more efficiently about
productivity made him feel as if he were being “tossed around by a menacing 
[37]Rube Goldberg device” of his own design; at times, he said, “I thought I
might be losing my mind.” He also wondered whether, on a substantive level, the
approach that he’d been following was really capable of addressing his
frustrations. It seemed to him that it was possible to implement many
G.T.D.-inflected life hacks without feeling “more competent, stable, and
alive.” He cleaned house, deleting posts. A new “About” page explained that 43
Folders was no longer a productivity blog but a “website about finding the time
and attention to do your best creative work.”

Mann’s posting slowed. In 2011, after a couple years of desultory writing, he
published a valedictory essay titled “[38]Cranking”—a rumination on an illness
of his father’s, and a description of his own struggle to write a book about
Inbox Zero after becoming disenchanted with personal productivity as a concept.
“I’d type and type. I’d crank and I’d crank,” he recounted. “I’m done cranking.
And, I’m ready to make a change.” After noting that his editor would likely
cancel his book contract, he concluded with a bittersweet sign-off: “Thanks for
listening, nerds.” There have been no posts on the site for the past nine
years.

Even after the loss of one of its leaders, the productivity pr0n movement
continued to thrive because the overload culture that had inspired it continued
to worsen. G.T.D. was joined by numerous other attempts to tame excessive work
obligations, from the [39]bullet-journal method, to the explosion in
smartphone-based productivity apps, to my own contribution to the movement, a
call to emphasize “deep” work over “shallow.” But none of these responses
solved the underlying problem.

The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems
to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which
individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group
outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she
can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or
disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the
cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication is cognitively
harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work
unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem.
A worker might send fewer e-mail requests to others, and become more structured
about her work, but she’ll still receive requests from everyone else;
meanwhile, if she decides to decrease the amount of time that she spends
engaging with this harried digital din, she slows down other people’s work,
creating frustration.

In this context, the shortcomings of personal-productivity systems like G.T.D.
become clear. They don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the
insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. They
only help individuals cope with its effects. A highly optimized implementation
of G.T.D. might have helped Mann organize the hundreds of tasks that arrived
haphazardly in his in-box daily, but it could do nothing to reduce the quantity
of these requests.

There are ways to fix the destructive effects of overload culture, but such
solutions would have to begin with a reëvaluation of Peter Drucker’s insistence
on knowledge-worker autonomy. Productivity, we must recognize, can never be
entirely personal. It must be connected to a system that we can study, analyze,
and improve.

One of the few academics who has seriously explored knowledge-work productivity
in recent years is Tom Davenport, a professor of information technology and
management at Babson College. Many organizations claim to be interested in
productivity, he told me, but they almost always pursue it by introducing new
technology tools—spreadsheets, network applications, Web-based collaboration
software—in piecemeal fashion. The general belief is that knowledge workers
will never stand for intrusions into the autonomy they’ve come to expect. The
idea of large-scale interventions that might replace the mess of unstructured
messaging with a more structured set of procedures is rarely considered.

Although Davenport’s 2005 book, “[40]Thinking for a Living,” attempted to offer
concrete advice about how knowledge-worker productivity might be improved, in
many places his advice is constrained by the assumed inviolability of autonomy.
In one chapter, for example, he explores the possibility of routinizing or
constraining the tasks of “transaction” workers, who perform similar duties
over and over, by using a diagram to communicate an optimal sequence of
actions. He adds, however, that such routinization simply won’t appeal to
“expert” workers, who he says are unlikely to pay attention to elaborate
flowcharts suggesting when they should collaborate and when they should leave
each other alone. In the end, “Thinking for a Living” failed to find an
audience. “It was one of my worst-selling books,” Davenport said. He soon
shifted his attention to more popular topics, such as big data and artificial
intelligence.

And yet, even if we accept that people don’t want to be micromanaged, it
doesn’t follow that every single aspect of knowledge work must be left to the
individual. If I’m a computer programmer, I might not want my project manager
telling me how to solve a coding problem, but I would welcome clear-cut rules
that limit the ability of other divisions to rope me into endless meetings or
demand responses to never-ending urgent messages.

The benefits of top-down interventions designed to protect both attention and
autonomy could be significant. In an article published in 1999, Drucker noted
that, in the course of the twentieth century, the productivity of the average
manual laborer had increased by a factor of fifty—the result, in large part, of
an obsessive focus on how to conduct this work more effectively. By some
estimates, knowledge workers in North America outnumber manual workers by close
to four to one—and yet, as Drucker wrote, “Work on the productivity of the
knowledge worker has barely begun.”

Fittingly, we can derive a clear vision of a more productive future by
returning to Merlin Mann. In the final years of 43 Folders, Mann began dabbling
in podcasting. After shuttering his Web site, he turned his attention more
fully toward this emerging medium. Mann now hosts four regular podcasts. One
show, “Roderick on the Line,” consists of “unfiltered” conversations with
Mann’s friend John Roderick, the lead singer of the band the Long Winters.
Another show, “Back to Work,” tackles productivity, mixing some early 43
Folders-style exploration of digital tools with late 43 Folders-style
digressions on the purpose of productivity. A recent episode of “Back to Work”
combined a technical conversation about TaskPaper—a plain-text to-do-list
software for Macs—with a metaphysical discussion about disruptions.

Mann no longer uses the full G.T.D. system. He remains a fan of David Allen
(“there’s a person for whom G.T.D. is a perfect fit,” he told me), but the
nature of his current work doesn’t generate the overwhelming load of
obligations that first drove him to the system, back in 2004. “My needs are
very modest from a task-management perspective,” he said. “I have a production
schedule for the podcasts; it’s that and grocery lists.” He does still use some
big ideas from G.T.D., such as deploying calendar notifications to remind him
to water his plants and clean his cat’s litter box. (“Why would I let that take
up any part of my brain?”) However, his day is now structured in such a way
that he can spend most of his time focussed on the autonomous, creative,
skilled work that Drucker identified as so crucial to growing our economy.

Most of us are not our own bosses, and therefore lack the ability to
drastically overhaul the structure of our work obligations, but in Mann’s
current setup there’s a glimpse of what might help. Imagine if, through some
combination of new management thinking and technology, we could introduce
processes that minimize the time required to talk about work or fight off
random tasks flung our way by equally harried co-workers, and instead let us
organize our days around a small number of discrete objectives. A way, that is,
to preserve Drucker’s essential autonomy while sidestepping the uncontrollable
overload that this autonomy can accidentally trigger. This vision is appealing,
but it cannot be realized by individual actions alone. It will require
management intervention.

Up until now, there has been little will to instigate this shift in
responsibility for productivity from the person to the organization. As
Davenport discovered, most knowledge-work companies have been more focussed on
keeping up with technological breakthroughs that might open up new markets. To
get more done, it’s been sufficient to simply exhort employees to work harder.
Laptops and smartphones helped these efforts by enabling office workers to find
extra hours in the day to get things done, providing a productivity
counterbalance to the inefficiencies of overload culture. And then [41]COVID-19
arrived.

In a remarkably short span, the spread of the coronavirus shut down offices
around the world. This unexpected change amplified the inefficiencies latent in
our haphazard approach to work. Many individuals responded by immersing
themselves in a 43 Folders-style world of productivity hacks. As we attempt to
juggle percolating crises, endless [42]Zoom calls, and, for many, the
requirement to somehow integrate both child care and homeschooling into the
same hours, there’s a sudden, urgent need to carefully organize tasks and
intricately synchronize schedules.

But it’s becoming clear that, as Mann learned, individual efforts are not
enough. Although offices are now partially reopening, a significant amount of
work will, for the foreseeable future, continue to be performed remotely. To
survive the current crisis, knowledge-work companies may finally be forced to
move past Drucker’s insistent autonomy and begin asking hard questions about
how their work is actually accomplished.

It seems likely that any successful effort to reform professional life must
start by making it easier to figure out who is working on what, and how it’s
going. Because so much of our effort in the office now unfolds in rapid
exchanges of digital messages, it’s convenient to allow our in-boxes to become
an informal repository for everything we need to get done. This strategy,
however, obscures many of the worst aspects of overload culture. When I don’t
know how much is currently on your plate, it’s easy for me to add one more
thing. When I cannot see what my team is up to, I can allow accidental
inequities to arise, in which the willing end up overloaded and the unwilling
remain happily unbothered. (For instance, in field tests led by Linda Babcock,
of Carnegie Mellon University, women were found to take on a disproportionate
load of “non-promotable” service tasks, such as organizing office parties, and
to be more likely than men to say yes when asked to do so, leading to their
being asked more often.)

Consider instead a system that externalizes work. Following the lead of
software developers, we might use virtual task boards, where every task is
represented by a card that specifies who is doing the work, and is pinned under
a column indicating its status. With a quick glance, you can now ascertain
everything going on within your team and ask meaningful questions about how
much work any one person should tackle at a time. With this setup, optimization
becomes possible.

In software development, for example, it’s widely accepted that programmers are
most effective when they work on one feature at a time, focussing in a
distraction-free sprint until done. It’s conceivable that other knowledge
fields might enjoy similar productivity boosts from more intentional
assignments of effort. What if you began each morning with a status meeting in
which your team confronts its task board? A plan could then be made about which
handful of things each person would tackle that day. Instead of individuals
feeling besieged and resentful—about the additional tasks that similarly
overwhelmed colleagues are flinging their way—they could execute a
collaborative plan designed to benefit everyone.

The ability to better visualize work would also enable smarter processes. If
you notice that the influx of administrative demands from other parts of your
company is overwhelming you and your co-workers, you’re now motivated to seek
fixes. Such optimizations are unlikely to occur when the scope of the problem
is hidden among in-box detritus, and when productivity is still understood as a
matter of personal will.

Whether or not coronavirus-driven disruption provides the final push we need to
move away from our flawed commitment to personal productivity, we can be
certain that this transition will eventually happen. Even if we convince
ourselves that the psychological toll of overload culture is acceptable
collateral damage for a fast-paced modern world, there’s too much latent
economic value at stake to keep ignoring the haphazard nature of how we
currently work. It’s ironic that Drucker, the very person who extolled the
potential of knowledge-worker productivity, helped plant the ideas that have
since held it back. To move forward, we must step away from Drucker’s
commitment to total autonomy—allowing for freedom in how we execute tasks
without also allowing for chaos in how these tasks are assigned. We must, in
other words, acknowledge the futility of trying to tame our frenzied work lives
all on our own, and instead ask, collectively, whether there’s a better way to
get things done.

[43][undefined]
[44]Cal Newport is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and an associate
professor of computer science at Georgetown University.
More:[45]Productivity[46]Coronavirus[47]Office[48]Workers[49]Technology[50]
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