[arafalov]

The article was oddly unsatisfying.

For me, GTD's biggest contribution was the focus on "Next Action". Which was mentioned exactly once in the article. I struggle with the perfect lists and I just can't get the Weekly Review figured out. But looking at some project and figuring out the exact Next Action (and sometimes associated Critical Path) is ridiculously valuable.

I've read a bunch of other productivity books. They have different ideas and approaches, but all of the practical ones seem to have this moment "and figure out the smallest, actionable thing you can actually do on that". But often, that bit is not front and center of the methodology. I suspect in the "3-day master course" for those techniques, they would actually practice such focus. David Allen just really put that front and center, explicitly.

Similarly, the Cognitive Behavior Therapy also uses this "Next Action" idea to get the person to move forward.

In that sense, I felt the article failed to truly look behind the curtain and just focused on a rise and fall of individual movement influencer. I did not see any mention of Lotus Notes (David Allen's own preferred solution), active GTD LinkedIn group, etc.

[CobrastanJorji]

You know, I wonder if there's a way to make bug/task tracking systems like Jira show a "Next Action" view. Like, don't show me the list of bugs/tasks/burndown items I have assigned, don't tell me how many there are, don't show me any alerts, just show me the appropriate Next Action, based on whatever prioritization scheme my team is using, and don't even let me see the rest until I take some active step (including sleeping) on this one.

[dkasper]

Some of the internal tools at meta have a feature kind of like this. Personally I don’t use it, but I bet some people like it.

[Scarblac]

For me it's the other way around.

"Next Action" never worked for me because some things are only a few actions total, but others are hundreds and need to be done sequentially all before the end of next month. By looking only at next actions the difference wasn't clear enough.

Whereas weekly / monthly reviews work very well for me to see patterns in what works and what doesn't, see where I need to spend some time planning, etc.

But I do this in a "bullet journal" type of setup, not the "getting things done" method.

[arafalov]

GTD has support for that with its "Project Support" documents, higher-level reviews, multiple Next Actions for same project, etc. I feel it does cover the situation, and you can still do it just when you run out of obvious things to do or stop for the day.

The "Next Action" is really just to ensure you know what actually can be done and when and not just have the project (e.g. "Buy car") as the action.