Like probably everybody else in our industry I have a lot of tasks I should be working on at any given point in time. The question always is, how do I best get a handle on all the things I should/want to be doing?

For a long time I tried to use the system Steven Covey suggested in “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People“. The book is great and everything Covey says is very true. But as a time management system it fails. It reminds me a lot of the old waterfall.

1. Fist you have to have a mission,
2. then you have to define your roles,
3. then every week you have to plan what to do to achieve your mission within your roles.
4. Every Task should be scheduled at the beginning of the week to be worked on on a given day of the week – just like an appointment.

The problem was – it never worked, at least not for me. At the end of the week I had typically 12% of the tasks I had allocated to that week done. The reasons were many. I am to optimistic, too much stuff always came up. But I also planned to work on tasks just because I had nothing else in that role.

A year ago I switched to Getting Things Done (GTD) and it immediately clicked for me. I don’t think I get much more done but at least now I feel on top of it all. Plus I also think I have a clearer understanding of what my top goal/project at any given point in time is, that I should be working on.

GTD has a lot of elements that we think of today as agile:

1. Write everything down that needs to be done.
2. Organize your tasks in Projects
3. For every Project make sure you have a clear vision of how “finished” looks like
4. For every Project, you should only work on tasks in sequence
5. Don’t schedule tasks
6. At any given point in time when you need a new task to work on, just go to your list of tasks, ordered by importance of projects and sequence of tasks and take the top one.

If I had to put the difference between the two into one sentence, I would say The Seven Habits is a Top Down approach while GTD follows a Bottom Up philosophy.

And I am beginning to realize in many more things that “Top Down” feels analytical and logical but seldom produces good results, while “Bottom Up” feels messy and uncontrolled but yields better result. (Think software architecture for another example for this principle)