GTD+Agile

A quicky little something I need to get off my chest. David Allen‘s “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” has a tiered notion of things you worry about – “open loops” he calls them. From smallest to biggest, it goes something like:

• current actions
• current projects
• area of responsibility
• one- to two-year goals
• three- to five-year vision
• Life.

He has some great stuff in the book about how anything at any of those levels that you haven’t put into a trusted system will bug you at some level, so you have to get it down, review it regularly, convince your Controller or your Pusher or whichever little man it is in your head that one day you’re gonna get to it.

So, the other thing I want to bring in is from the Agile methods school of thought who really strongly emphasize the role of the customer – the person who asked for the software to get built – in the software development process. Most Agile methods maintain regular meetings with the customer as a core part of the development process.

This strong core reminds me a lot of when Fernando Flores talks about the “atom of work” – that all work is a customer asking a provider for something to be done, the provider delivering (or not), the customer accepting the quality of the work (or not), the steps taken to correct that situation and around you go again.

This customer in Flores’s terms, in the Agile methods sense, it occurs to me is one way to address David’s “area of responsibility” in a way that might be interesting. I’ve always found projects too amorphous as a unit of planning – the boundaries change too much they appear and disappear in my work, they’re too unstable. “Area of responsibility” has always seemed a little too abstract, but when you approach that concept from a Flores direction, a facet that makes it more concrete is to ask the question: “responsible to whom?”

Somehow for me, making a list of people to whom I’ve given commitments (one of whom is me) makes the spine of GTD more clear – I’m reviewing what I’ve committed to other human beings, not just what I need to do in my vaguely defined areas of responsibility.

Works for me. Thought I’d share.

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