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GTD vs. The 4-Hour Workweek
By Brick | March 19, 2008
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Clay Collins has a new post titled Productivity Guru SMACKDOWN: Tim Ferriss v. Dave Allen at his excellent blog The Growing Life. It immediately appealed to me having read both Getting Things Done (GTD) and The 4-Hour Workweek. Before I get into this, I have to mention that Clay is a great writer! This is one of the most entertaining posts I have read lately. It is hard to believe that his blog is only a couple of months old given the quality of the writing!
Here is my take: I am biased towards Tim Ferriss myself, but mostly because his material seems a little more fundamental. He questions assumptions about work before he talks about doing work. Dave Allen is mostly about the doing part. Personally, I agree with Ferriss when he says:
[T]he person who…develops an elaborate system of folder rules … is efficient on some perverse level. … Doing something well does not make it important … What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.
Source: Timothy Ferriss.
However, surely once you discover what you really want to be doing, what is truly most important, you can still be more effective at that if you are better organized! If you put the thinking of Ferriss ahead of Allen, I think The 4-Hour Workweek and Getting Things Done actually complement each other.
Productivity
Fair enough you might say, but both Ferriss and Allen both speak about how to do work. Perhaps there is some competing, incompatible strategies here that require a SMACKDOWN! Let’s review productivity from the vantage point of a really smart guy:
Productivity is driven by two variables: the amount of work performed and the time it takes to perform that work. Productivity can be increased by either increasing the amount of work performed in a set amount of time, or by performing the same amount of work in a shorter period of time.
I think that Allen is really addressing the work variable in the productivity equation. Allen is starting from a tacit assumption that work has to be done or managed by you and so he provides a system for performing more work in a set amount of time. Ferriss is really working on the time variable (the title of his book is a dead give away). By automating and outsourcing massive amounts of work, you can get the same amount of work done in a fraction of the time.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Why can’t we employ both strategies? Why are the methods and philosophies of Ferriss and Allen exclusive of one another? Why not attack the productivity equation on both sides of the division sign? Yes, we need to ensure that we don’t use our productivity gains to do work for work’s sake, but I don’t think Allen is advocating this at all. Besides, I find it hard to believe that massive amounts of automation and outsourcing do not require a decent amount of organization. What would Stephen Covey say? What do you say?
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Topics: Personal Productivity |
March 20th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Brick,
I completely agree–GTD provides an organizational system for life. 4HWW provides the motivation and helps you to remove or improve the stuff in your life (that’s being organized via GTD). But you did nail it–Tim questions the fundamental assumption that you have to do the work and that it has to be performed in a similar fashion.
One need not follow much of David Allen’s approach to get value from it. And one need not desire similar things as Tim to take advantage of his very tangible steps.
Thanks for sharing the link to Clay’s article and for bringing to the fore something that’s been on my mind for a while. The reason why I never posted about is that I find the two systems to work well together (seeing how I never follow things by the book anyways).
Cheers.
March 21st, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Fully agree. 100%. GTD *AND* Four Hour Work Week. That’s why we’re members of both Feedburner Networks!
March 21st, 2008 at 4:45 pm
@Jared: I’m glad you enjoyed Clay’s post.
@Rex: Good point!
March 29th, 2008 at 2:18 am
I’ve never seen the bad about GTD or how it conflicts with 4HWW. One’s a philosophy, one’s a system and several insights that can improve whatever anyone is doing.
I never really bothered to fully implement GTD although until I got the Things (OSX) program to do it for me. The fact that it’s really really geared for execs pulls the steam out a little bit.