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I accidentally told someone that āZTD sucksā (I love Baubuta's other blog though, mnmlist).
Let me be more specific if I am gonna say something sucks.
All of this goes for ZTD, BuJo, AF/FV, Three Big Rocks etc.
Whatās either missing, or assumed, and Iām not sure which of those is worse, from these is the way GTD turns ideas from vague dreams into something very concrete.
Any of those systems can be great as a way to find further focus on top of a GTD mindset, sure.
Nowadays, with years of GTD practice (and the consequence of that practice in simplifying my life and home), what I have is a stripped down list of like three things. But I couldnātāve started with something like āhereās a list of three important thingsā; I tried that in the before-GTD-years and I just procrastinated and felt lazy and stupid and helpless and hopeless.
I even had just one thing instead of three, and it still just kept getting postponed from day to day to day. āWhy canāt I even vacuum my floors? How the heck can I be this lazy?ā
First and foremost, I hadnāt sorted out all the prereqs. I canāt vacuum the floors if there is laundry or letters on there. And if the vacuum cleaner is under a huge pile of junk in the closet. Itās a bigger project than just a one and done.
Second, I was distracted from the vacuuming thing by all my other ideas and projects that I wanted to do and my brain was afraid of losing track of them so I just started doing them. I learned Emacs because I was supposed to vacuum the floors. Instead, with GTD, I can know that there is a proper ābookmarkā in all of those dreams, which helps me focus on what Iām doing. (And help me select what I want most to get done in a given moment.)
Whatās great about the granularity is that depends on who you are and what you need. I can āwrite a Scheme CLI appā as one thing and throw something together and ship it (might take a few weekends, but I don't need to break it down to "Start Emacs. Open such-and-such file") but for a while to do the dishes, thatās exactly the level of granularity I needed. āPlace everything to the left of the sinkā. I had fourteen steps! Obviously thatās not needed anymore because I did it enough to know how to just freestyle it in the dishwashing department and can now just put āWash dishesā (or even just trust in me doing it as part of my daily habits of cooking and eating food).
Iām embarrassed to write just how messed up I was before I found GTD in my mid twenties. But itās also proof that I know that itās possible to get better.ā„