The Hard Landscape vs The Unschedule

I’ve been a GTD disciple for a long time and can testify that it has improved a lot of aspects of my life. What first caught my attention about David Allen’s system was that it wasn’t just another guy telling you to make a to-do list. It’s a thinking process and a to-do list is just the start of it. It’s a way to outsource your brain so you no longer think about all the things you have and want to do, but to know, keyword here, what you have and want to do. The two thoughts sound alike, but there’s a big difference between thinking and knowing what you have to do. The Getting Things Done strategy can seem complex, but once you implement the system, it truly does simplify things.

GTD does eliminate a lot of buzzing thoughts, but I’ve been struggling with how it deals with time management. It teaches that a calendar should be only used as a “Hard Landscape”, meaning that you should only schedule things that can only be done at a certain day or a certain time. This is a sound strategy because the reality of the interrupt-driven life will quickly make irrelevant a filled calendar. GTD bases the decision of what and when to do on four criteria: Priority, Context, Energy, and Time. That is, how important is the task, what resources you have to complete the task, how tired or hyper you are, and how much time you have.

Procrastination Dilemma 

The GTD four criteria model for doing is a double edge sword for us procrastinators. It doesn’t make us pressure ourselves with scheduling, but it gives us an excuse, because it lets us determine what’s important, what resources we have, what energy we have, and how much time we have available. What I mean by this is that it gives us too much room to define these four things.

One way I’ve been trying to attack this is by using the “Unschedule” technique, taken out of The Now Habit audiobook I’ve been listening to. The idea behind this strategy is to schedule first your “playtime” and then “punch in” when you start “working”. For the last couple of days I’ve been test driving it. The results have been somewhat good, but not as good as I thought.

I’m going to keep trying and see if there’s a way you can combine these two strategies, The Four Criteria Model and The Unschedule.

Are you a GTD disciple? Do you schedule your tasks? I would love to read your ideas about this.