Thoughts from David Allen, Getting Things Done Author

In this interview in The Atlantic, James Fallows follows up on his 2004 article on time-management expert David Allen [see Memo 41] by asking him whether life is more stressful nowadays with e-mail, texting, and full-time connectivity. Allen maintains that through the ages, musicians and writers [and teachers and principals] “could always be doing more work. So I don’t know that it’s ever been different for someone with an open-ended profession or interest.” 

But there is a difference today, he concedes: we’re less often in life-threatening, crisis mode, which allows the world to flood into our brains. “Now you’re worried about taxes and tires and ‘I’m getting cold’ and ‘My printer just crapped out.’ Now that flood is coming across in electronic form, and it is 24/7. To cope, you need the executive skill and the ability to make rapid decisions about how you allocate limited resources.” In the 21^st century, many more people are making these kinds of decisions than in the past.

Allen believes we are in the most information-rich environment walking through a forest. But although there are countless stimuli, only a few of them require immediate action – a bear, a snake, poison oak. The constant stream of e-mails is different in that almost every one requires a small decision or a response of some kind. 

The other thing about e-mail is that it’s addictive. “Now, some part of you, subliminally, is constantly going, That could be meaningful, that could be meaningful, that could be meaningful, that could change what I’m doing, that might be something I don’t want to decide about,” says Allen. “You multiply that by the hundreds, if not thousands, of items sitting there. All those things you’re not deciding about wear you down, and decision-making functions just like a muscle.” 

This produces what Allen calls the GSA of life – Gnawing Sense of Anxiety. “You don’t remember what it is, but it might be more important than whatever you’re doing, so you’re not present anywhere. You’re at work worrying about home, and you’re at home worrying about work, and you’re neither place psychologically when you’re there physically. That’s hugely undermining of your productivity, and certainly adds hugely to the stress factor.” 

What’s changed, says Allen, is the signal frequency. “You and I have gotten more change-producing and priority-shifting inputs in the past 72 hours than your parents got in a month, some of them in a year,” he says. People had the same worries when the first telephones appeared in houses 100 years ago – “all the interruptions and distractions!” 

What is to be done? We need to externalize all the stuff in our heads and capture it in a time-management system we trust, says Allen. We need maps to keep track of everything, and the ability to shift from one map to another – “Okay, which map do I want to work on right now? That’s enough of that map. What’s the next map I want to see? Or: I’d just like to read some poetry right now.”

“Busy and Busier” – An Interview with David Allen by James Fallows in The Atlantic, November 2012 (Vol.. 310, #4, p. 42, 44), http://bit.ly/RYzpgI 

From the Marshall Memo #458