David Allen’s Getting Things Done is a sacred text in certain circles. Engineers, entrepreneurs, product managers — the kinds of people who wear their calendar apps like exoskeletons — tend to speak of it in reverent tones. Which is probably why I resisted it for so long. I didn’t want to be that guy.
Eventually, of course, I gave in — one of those books one ‘should have read.’
And I did like it — perhaps more than I wanted to. But it also left me with a feeling I couldn’t quite name at the time. Years later, revisiting my notes, I think I’ve worked out what it was.
To begin with: there’s a lot that Allen gets right. He isn’t, contrary to my assumptions, some sort of productivity evangelist in the narrow sense. His project is subtler. He sees the modern affliction not as laziness or distraction, but as a kind of chronic mental clutter — a system so overloaded that it loses the ability to reflect on its own direction. In that sense, his method is less about doing more, and more about making space to ask why you’re doing any of it at all.
That resonated with me. Still does.
And a lot of the advice is, frankly, excellent. I still swear by his email-processing method. His principle that “your mind is for having ideas, not holding them” is a neat way of justifying my obsession with writing things down. Even his vocabulary — next actions, trusted systems — has a kind of neutral elegance. It doesn’t try too hard to be clever.
But buried in the middle of the book, almost as a footnote, is a line I kept coming back to. Allen mentions that his method might not apply to people whose work is “mission critically reactive.”
He gives the example of someone like the White House Chief of Staff. If your job is to constantly respond to what’s emerging — to fire-fight, to reprioritise in real time — then perhaps GTD isn’t for you.
He moves on quickly. I couldn’t.
The more I’ve sat with it, the more it seems backwards. Not because his system doesn’t work — it does, and well — but because I think he underestimates how many of us live and work in exactly that “critically reactive” mode. Not as an exception, but as a norm.
I also think he misunderstands what that mode really is.
The term “critically reactive” feels vaguely disapproving — as if the people it describes are merely victims of circumstance, tossed about by other people’s priorities. But I don’t think that’s fair. And I don’t think it captures the deeper texture of what’s going on when someone is, say, deeply attuned to the unfolding dynamics of a meeting, or holding space for another person to figure out what they think. That’s not just reactivity. That’s presence.
Some roles — many, I’d argue — depend on exactly that kind of attention: unstructured, relational, porous. Sometimes that means dropping everything to respond to an urgent crisis. But more often it means staying open enough to notice when something needs tending that isn’t yet on anyone’s list. That kind of listening doesn’t always map neatly to next actions.
I don’t want this to read as anti-GTD. I still use the system. I recommend it. In the right contexts, it can be life-changing. But I think of it now the way I think of clearing my desk, or updating my OS: a form of mental housekeeping. Useful, necessary, even beautiful in its way — yet still different in kind from the quiet clarity that comes from simply being present.
Allen speaks of “making space to play a bigger game.” I think he’s right. But the bigger game isn’t always about having a better system. That old joke comes to mind: Don’t just do something — stand there.
That’s not just reactivity. That’s presence — the kind that borders, at times, on something like a spiritual practice: emptying yourself to make space for what matters.