Getting Serious About Getting Things Done

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Rather than create a daily to-do list—a depressing exercise that means recopying everything you didn't finish on Monday's list to Tuesday's—Allen urges us to keep running lists organized by category or place, such as calls, errands, @home, @office. I immediately take to the idea of a "waiting for" list—a reminder to keep up with answers I haven't gotten or tasks I've delegated. I also like that Allen's system is platform-agnostic—high-tech geeks may prefer one of the many software add-ons built for GTD users. But it apparently works just as well with plain old pen and paper, which you can, of course, store in the GTD file folders the David Allen Co. is selling in the back of the ballroom.

GRANULAR GRADATIONS?

But by lunchtime, I'm feeling overwhelmed. The concept of breaking down projects into actionable steps makes sense, but my brain can't wrap itself around just how granular I'm supposed to go. (Isn't "research hotels" an intuitively obvious action in planning a vacation?) And by afternoon, my head is swimming. After a couple of hours thinking at 20,000- and 30,000-foot levels—GTD parlance for pondering higher goals—categorizing "take car for oil change" into a topic area such as "personal administration" starts to feel like needless overthinking.

The real test, as Allen indicated, is how well I can make the ideas stick when I get home. I'm already a fan of some GTD dogmas, such as keeping running "agenda" lists for people I speak with often: my boss, my spouse, my colleague on a project. It's a simple trick for remembering what to discuss in meetings or calls. And I've been warned that it will take at least two months to make GTD practices habitual. But since I'm in the middle of moving, steps like creating a system of reference files seem impossible when I'm still surrounded by boxes. And as someone with more than 7,000 e-mails in her in-box, the concept of an empty one feels so preposterous I decide not to even bother.

In the end, the real questions I find myself facing are whether GTD will make me less stressed and more productive (I believe it will) or actually save me time (I'm a little skeptical). GTD doesn't, after all, make procrastination go away. In fact, Allen's instruction to go ahead and do anything that takes less than two minutes, rather than putting it on a list, has me feeling happily efficient. Meanwhile, what I should have been doing is, um, writing this story.

I call up Allen to see if there are any GTD secrets for stopping that pesky habit of postponing. Like any good self-improvement guru, he does make me feel better: "As long as you're going to procrastinate, you might as well clean up the living room." But even he recognizes that there are limits to a system: "All it can do is let you know that you're procrastinating."

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McGregor is BusinessWeek's management editor.