This is a comment on a Reddit post. I don’t have much motivation to dump my content into someone else’s walled garden, so I’m putting it here instead.
The general point being made is the same one that comes up all the time in discussions of GTD. I believe it represents an incorrect view of GTD as well as an incorrect implementation of GTD.
GTD is an acronym for “Getting Things Done”. I suppose it’s natural that someone would interpret that to mean “do the same things you’re doing now, but faster”. That might be an outcome of GTD, but another outcome might be that you do different things, and indeed, you might end up working more. You’ll have less stress, because you’re doing the valuable things, you know you’re doing the valuable things, and you don’t try to hold so much stuff in your head. There’s no reason to think that will translate into less hours working. Given how many people scroll social media as a form of procrastination, I’m inclined to say the average person that adopts GTD will be working more hours.
But let’s set that aside. Is the overhead of GTD really that great? You should have a master projects list. That can be a single piece of paper, a single note in Evernote, or whatever. There’s not much to it. The master projects list should have all of your active, inactive, someday/maybe, and completed/archived projects.
You need inboxes for capture. For me, that’s primarily my email. I use a paper notebook to capture some things during the workday. I have a digital task manager. That’s the extent of my capturing.
You need a list of next actions to move your active projects forward. When I do my weekly planning, I drop tasks onto the list of things I’m going to try to do in the upcoming week. Items that I can’t get to in the next week are stored within the project. Project management varies, but smaller projects might be a single note in Obsidian, and larger projects might be stored in a repository.
You need a calendar for things that have a specific date attached. I use my Fastmail calendar, but there are obviously many alternatives that work well, even on paper. This is where my tickler items go. I’ve made a decision to revisit something on a certain day, and since that means there’s a specific date attached to the revisit, it belongs on my calendar.
That’s all you need to do GTD. Note the absence of a todo list. David Allen explicitly warns against having a todo list, and I agree.
So now let’s address the time requirements. Is the weekly review a lengthy process? It takes me 15 minutes or less to do a full review in a typical week. Let’s look at the individual components, keeping in mind that the purpose is to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.
If the weekly review is taking an extraordinary amount of time, you’re either not using the system during the week (probably because you’re postponing the processing of items in your inbox), or you’re overorganizing. The weekly review is there to catch the few items slipping through the cracks. If it takes you two hours to review everything, you’re not very good at your job. If you have 50 email messages that need a response, don’t blame GTD for pointing it out. Take it as a signal that you need to do better.
The only benefit of GTD is that it helps you to get stuff done. It’s not an organization system. If you’re putting everything in “the right place”, well, you’re wasting a lot of time. You need to store the right stuff, you need to know how to find it, and you need to be sure everything is getting done. Organizing is largely a distraction, and for some people, a form of procrastination to avoid doing the work. Long todo lists are filled with items that need more processing and a plan for completion - they’re nothing but an unprocessed inbox. Adding proper tags to your notes and putting them all in the right subfolder may or may not be worth your time, but it has nothing to do with GTD.