Canter Bridge

For almost two years I have been weaving the principles and practices of David Allen’s Getting Things Done into, as Allen himself would call it, ‘the business of life and the art of work’.

I’ve read and re-read DA’s signature book as well as a second collection of the man’s thoughts, attended his one-day RoadMap conference in Manhattan, and subscribed to GTD Connect.

It’s good stuff and I’ll blog on the specifics at some other time.

For the moment, let me make an observation that only dawned on me with clarity a year into the implementation, when the efficiency results were already clear to see: You need to have a reason for doing more and doing better.

The powerful GTD system is an empty vessel. Carefully codified common sense, it delivers to busy, high-demand people like me a package that we would not have had the time, interest, or expertise to develop on our own. It produces quick results, clears the mind (a key GTD desideratum), and soon makes it possible to manage the conflicting demands of life and work more competently than before.

It doesn’t ask ‘what’s this for?’

Having learned from David Allen at some length and with great appreciation, I believe he’d agree with this observation and say that this is how things should be. Allen is not claiming to solve life’s philosophical and existential dilemmas for his clients, though in conversation he occasionally veers in that direction.

A word of caution: GTD is capable of enabling you to become a highly effective, widely admired, and perfectly miserable human being.

The meaning of work is not addressed here.

But we’d better address it.

My spiritual legacy and commitments remind me that I am a created subject of a divine monarch so beneficent as to beggar description. Work is my service rendered to him and to his world. Getting things done is not an end in itself. When pursued as such, it does what all idols eventually do: enslaves its servants.

There is no joy in that, no enduring passion, no compelling purpose.

These things exist, though. To get things done in service of their Author frames the whole enterprise in the way it is intended.

Or should be.