The stuff invasion may be worse for the millions whom Allen calls
knowledge workers, a term coined by management guru Peter Drucker.
That's because, instead of performing the kind of cut-and-dried
tasks common to our forebears - chopping down trees, handling the
switchboard, bolting on door frames at the
Ford plant - today's
knowledge worker must define the work before doing it.
Improve communications with personnel - how? Refine that legal
brief - how? Get in on booming Chinese markets - how? And while
you're defining the work and trying to do it, the hyperlinked,
overconnected world keeps banging on your cubicle walls.
"With all the interruptions, e-mails, and calls coming in, you
never actually get a solid hour to work on something," says GTD
fan David Baillie, environmental director, Naval Weapon Station
Seal Branch,
California. His thought is echoed by Michael Hyatt,
president and CEO of Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson.
"To be successful today requires being good at multitasking," says
Hyatt. "Things appear with little or no context and you have to
impose order on a fairly chaotic environment. The GTD system does
that without getting in the way."
To make matters even more difficult, our own minds conspire against
us. "The mind is great for having ideas, but not for holding on to
them," Allen likes to say. The moment the mind senses the approach
of stuff- the forgotten phone call, the broken patio gate, the
looming meeting with its hazy agenda - it immediately stores the
info on a chunk of your psychic RAM, then sets about making sure
you never forget. Never.
But you're thinking, Huh? I do forget. A lot.