Beyond GTD: Pioneering the Future of Personal Productivity

Unraveling Assumptions, Seeking Alternatives, and Shaping the Future Landscape of Personal Productivity Solutions

This post is part of The Productivity Chronicles, a slow series exploring the history and future of personal accomplishment.

GTD is dying….

Surely you’ve noticed.

And overall this is a good thing!

Throughout history, people have continually pushed their boundaries, achieving remarkable feats that redefined the possibilities of what any individual can accomplish. Countless incremental advances paved this way, yet a select few waves of innovation left an indelible mark on the trajectory.

Among these waves, we surely can count the moment when we first expanded our cognition beyond ourselves, harnessing the power of the written word. Another of these great leaps forward came when we learned to capitalize on 'clock time,' recognizing that “time,” after all, is the most precious resource of the individual. Then, the advent of information technology for personal use ushered in a completely new era, enabling us to accelerate many lower-value activities. And now, with the AI revolution on the horizon, we anticipate yet another transformative shift that has the potential to surpass all previous accomplishments.

Each approach to personal achievement acts as a time capsule, capturing the prevailing spirit of its era. These capsules, formed by the tools, ideas, and mindsets unique to their time, define a cohesive whole. Until, at some point, after countless incremental improvements, there always seems to arise a moment when a new paradigm emerges. The result: a significant overhaul of our methods & mindsets.

The third millennium is young, but among various 21st-century solutions to personal accomplishment, Getting Things Done by David Allen still stands out as the most popular by far. GTD disrupted conventional views on productivity by rethinking and integrating the ideas of past eras, namely that of externalizing thought and increased efficiency approach. By proposing a bottom-up approach to regaining control, it also touched on a side-effect of IT: information overwhelm. However, while popularized in this millennium, GTD was developed over many years and in the previous one. Even though Allen updated his system at some point, it still did not fully account for the latest technology advancements. And AI, the new rising star, is and probably never will be adequately addressed. So, with over 20 years under its belt, even GTD, the current star of holsisitc productivity solutions, is showing clear signs of aging and urgently needs yet another update to stay relevant.¹

While GTD is dying, what often survives innovational waves are principles that, through this, prove to be 'timeless truths.' Yet, even these principles may need periodic reassessment to get proper weighting in the holisitic setup of principles of an era.

I propose that we are on the verge of a new innovation wave, partly driven by AI. But more profoundly still by the escalating information overload we face. We are drowning in entropy, and GTD is not fit to master this challenge. We are in dire need of a complete new paradigm shift.

In this essay, I will offer an overview of the current landscape of personal productivity solutions, attempt to categorize them along various axes, uncover hidden assumptions that run through them, and contemplate the future trajectory of productivity in the digital age.

Are there any real alternatives to GTD?

GTD is not the only personal productivity solution out there, even if it sometimes appears to be that way. A quick web search, for instance, often only yields odd comparisons with narrow methods like "The Pomodoro Technique" or antique approaches like the “Ivy Lee Method” (which both predate GTD). While these techniques can be beneficial for specific aspects of productivity, they don’t offer as holistic an approach as GTD does, rendering these comparisons somewhat strange.

Finding alternatives to GTD, especially true holistic methods, can indeed be challenging. Many of the purported ones are often attempted evolutions or alterations of GTD, attempting to improve, extend, or simplify it. For instance, Zen to Done and GTD Lite aim to slim it down to the essentials, while the PARA method tries to extend it for knowledge resource-heavy use cases.

However, not all solutions out there merely iterate on existing ideas. Unfortunately, encountering them takes some deeper digging. True alternatives to GTD, systems like