The New Yorker

The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done

How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to.

497

productivity

work

Takeaways

Productivity, we must recognize, can never be entirely personal. It must be connected to a system that we can study, analyze, and improve.

To move forward, we must step away from Drucker’s commitment to total autonomy—allowing for freedom in how we execute tasks without also allowing for chaos in how these tasks are assigned. We must, in other words, acknowledge the futility of trying to tame our frenzied work lives all on our own, and instead ask, collectively, whether there’s a better way to get things done.

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