GTD And The Work/Life Blur Dilemma
This guest post was written by Rich of Half-A-Dozen Monkeys.
The main focus of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology is… well, to get things done. It aims to give you a tool to enable you to identify everything you need to do and then go and get those things done. This is fine. No, this is superb. But it does create one particular problem – it consciously blurs the boundaries between all aspects of your life. It seeks to provide you with a solution to all strands of what you do in one fair swoop, on the assumption that for a lot of people the boundaries are already a little fuzzy.
This flies in the face of the traditional personal development mantra of work/life balance. The ethos that we should all seek to find the fulcrum whereby we are at least content with our split of cubicle nightmare and golf course heaven.
So how do we tie these together? Marry the power of Getting Things Done with the ability to switch off and drink cold, fizzy beer in front of a big TV? Well, I am not going to offer you ten words that solve it all, or even a good old top ten tips for doing so – I think there is no one-size-fits-all route to un-blurring this boundary while still clinging to Mr Allen’s teachings.
My personal solution is to pull my horizons of focus into my tasks and projects – knock 20,000ft onto the runway. I split my life into my areas of focus – simplistically this might be “work” and “home”. The idea is not to identify all my areas of focus, but to come up with the broader buckets in which they sit. Rather than have one set of @next actions, @phonecalls and @email folders, I have a set for each of these buckets. Whilst this is duplication, it doesn’t significantly hamper the process. And when I sit down on a Saturday morning, my @next actions list doesn’t remind me I need to write a report on new markets, phone my boss, and complete my time sheet.
I admit this is far from elegant. But it draws that line for me which is needed to prevent the perpetual creep of work into my weekends. Maybe you could only use GTD for work? Or maybe your personal tasks all fit into one @home context? How do you try and keep your work-life balance within a GTD framework?
7 Comments
Hi Rich.
You’ve brought up a relevant item to think through here. I would lean towards a similar side to what you are saying – keeping GTD for the vast majority of work-related items and then having certain items of interest, leisure or social value left GTD-less. On the other hand, David Allen might say that GTD is not so strict and orderly that it wouldn’t help in those aspects as well.
I’d say that GTD could be performed in the home context, but only should be done if the interest was there.
I use GTD for both home life and work. In fact, I have one @work context, and multiple personal ones (@home, @computer, @phone, @errands). The entire purpose of GTD is to get rid of those nagging “I gotta do this and that” thoughts that so often pop up. What difference does it make if it has to do with work or home life? It’s still taking up your precious brainpower to think about it regardless.
There is a misconception that adopting GTD turns you into a productivity machine, spending every waking moment… well, getting things done. This makes a lot of people hesitant to adopt GTD, because they picture themselves coming home from a busy day at work and continuing to work through context lists.
It doesn’t have to be that way. You can get home from work and take a nap on the couch. The important thing is, as you’re drifting off to sleep, you’re not worrying about the things you must do by tomorrow and all the bills you can’t forget to pay, because you have it all written down and know the world can wait while you nap. David Allen answered exactly this question in one of his podcasts.
I used to feel guilty about my ever-growing @home context lists when I came home exhausted on weeknights and played video games. But now I know the list can wait until the weekend when I have more energy, and I can relax as much or as little as I need to.
GTD has been an awesome tool for me both at home and at work.
Armen Shirvanian, thanks for your comment. I agree that we can be a bit more stricter with ourselves than David Allen may have intended!
Courtney, I am very jealous of your discipline! I still fight the “school night” guilt. I wonder if the number and complexity of next actions/projects in each area of focus drives how you use the system? You sound like you have more home actions than work actions, whereas I think I have the opposite (my wife may disagree).
Dividing your contexts by broad area of focus (work/home) works when there is a very clear line between the two but this is rarely the case.
I have found I still do home related tasks while in a @computer context at work and visa versa.
Given that the top priority is to get it out of your head I suggest embracing the different contexts when looking at an area of focus. A bit like the Six Thinking Hats system. For example, the energy and optimism of a playground has regularly give me inspiration for a better way to do a work task. Or the more formal environment of work has gotten me to “book a meeting” with an old friend for lunch.
I agree with Courtney’s school of thought, in that it is just important to get that “I should be doing something now” feeling out of your head.
I just completed my final year at university, and although I really wanted to get a first class degree, I felt it was very important that I maintained my work/life balance. By keeping lists, one for work and one for home, I was able to keep on top of all my work and still fit in time with my friends in the evening. Not everyone did this and they were the ones who were still working late into the night as they hadn’t organized their days!
What works for me is to take those 20,000ft areas of focus and make sure that I am spending time on all of them every week. I do that by making a weekly calendar and blocking time for those life areas that are important. But keep in mind that your calendar is flexible and if something urgent comes up it’s perfectly fine to move that block to another time just as long as you aren’t totally ignoring it.
By the way, I don’t use contexts at all and keep one project list and one next action list. I think the context list thing is only important for busy executives.
I wish I could lay my hands on the quote, but I remember it being said that you should have your work and personal stuff in one system because it’s all your life.
I disagree with that. My work time is time purchased by my employer. They do not pay me to do anything for them outside of working hours, and I make sure that I don’t. It’s hard to do though, especially when technology makes it possible to work 24/7.
The big problem with GTD for me is that it was always “on”. Even when I was working on my own stuff, there was never down time because it wasn’t a project with a next action.
So I use GTD at work, because my work lends itself to that structure. And I don’t at home, so that I can live my life without the constraint of lists and structure.
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