(2017-03-11) Getting Things Done Personal Knowledge Management

Tiago Forte on the combo of Getting Things Done + Personal Knowledge Management

One of the key insights of Getting Things Done, the book on personal productivity by David Allen that spawned the worldwide movement known as GTD, was that knowledge workers could instantly and massively reduce information overload just by clearly separating Actionable from non-actionable information, and then giving priority to the former

But as the nature of work rapidly evolves, I believe that “non-actionable information” is quickly moving to center stage

We can now expect to spend only a few months to a few years with one organization, which means our ability to capture, organize, and retrieve our ideas, and transfer them effectively from project to project and company to company, becomes more important than ever.

he (Allen) hammers on the critical importance of “a good general-reference file” as “one of the biggest bottlenecks in implementing an efficient personal management system.”

He goes on to explain that, although these materials are “seldom associated with urgency, nor are they strategic…”, if left unmanaged “your mental and physical workspaces become cluttered with non-actionable but potentially relevant and useful stuff.” This lack of effective downstream systems, he claims, eventually produces a “debilitating psychological noise” that makes any kind of Creative thinking impossible.

In an economy driven by creativity and innovation, not having a personal knowledge management (PKM) system means you’re not fully leveraging what you learn. You’re not collecting your ideas and making serendipitous (Associative) connections between them

Allen goes on to lay out many of the qualities such a reference system should have:

But this new frontier presents a challenge: the world of non-actionable information — long-term, open-ended research on creative projects — is very murky, with no “clean edges” or “next physical actions” to speak of.

Such a system needs to help us cultivate what Roger Martin called an opposable mind — the ability to hold two opposing ideas in our mind at the same time — while remaining eminently practical and sustainable for extremely busy professionals.