Getting Things Done and Deep Work are both highly influential books in the productivity space. David Allen first published his Getting Things Done (GTD) system in 2001 and it became incredibly popular. Cal Newport published Deep Work 15 years later, partly in response to the shortcomings he saw in GTD.
In my opinion, Allen and Newport’s systems share more similarities than differences.
GTD involves 5 steps:
- Capture
- Clarify
- Organise
- Reflect
- Engage.
When Newport first launched his blog in 2007, he posted an adapted version of GTD that he called Getting Things Done for College Students. Newport has since shifted his focus away from students to knowledge workers more generally, and made his system more alliterative:
- Capture (as above)
- Configure (which matches Allen’s ‘Clarify’ and ‘Organise’)
- Control (which matches ‘Reflect’ and ‘Engage’)
I haven’t been able to find a reference to this system in Newport’s books or blog posts, but he’s endorsed it multiple times on his podcast.
Key difference: use of the calendar
The key difference between Allen and Newport is in their approach to the calendar.
Allen recommends treating your calendar as ‘sacred territory’. He argues that you should only put information or tasks you must achieve on a given day onto your calendar, so you don’t dilute the importance of those tasks. Optional tasks that you want to achieve on a given day should go onto “next action” lists instead of your calendar, because things frequently change during the day. If you don’t end up doing the optional tasks, you’ll have to re-enter them on another day, which Allen argues is demoralising and a waste of time.
Newport, by contrast, is a strong proponent of time-blocking, which falls under the “Control” part of Newport’s Capture, Configure, Control. Time-blocking involves planning out what activities you’ll do each day at what times. For smaller errands, Newport recommends blocking out time to batch-process them instead of putting each individual task on your calendar. You may end up revising your schedule as new things crop up or if your estimates turn out to wrong, but Newport assures us that’s perfectly fine. The aim isn’t to stick to a rigid plan but to be more deliberate about how you spend your time.
Different target audiences
I think the differences between Allen and Newport boil down to their different target audiences.
Allen explains that he originally wrote Getting Things Done for “managers, executives, and higher-level, fast-track professionals”. And it shows. Some of Allen’s descriptions eerily matched how I saw partners in big law firms managed (or failed to manage) their workloads. Allen’s advice appears to be aimed at the typical manager whose usual workday:
- consists of a handful of time-specific meetings;
- involves various small tasks (e.g. phone calls, reviewing work) done in between those meetings; and
- is rather unpredictable with plenty of interruptions.
But, as Paul Graham has pointed out, the typical manager’s day is very different from the typical maker’s day. Makers are people like programmers, writers or academics who tend to need large chunks of uninterrupted time to do ‘deep work’. Managers, by contrast, don’t usually need such time.
Newport’s background as an author and professor places him firmly in the ‘maker’ camp. This helps explain why Newport describes GTD as a system for “Getting (Unremarkable) Things Done”. He accepts that GTD is ‘devastatingly effective’ for organising shallow work, but points out that shallow work is fundamentally different from deep work.
So who’s right: David Allen or Cal Newport?
As a ‘maker’, I tend to prefer Newport’s time-blocking system. I have very few time-specific tasks that I must do on any particular day, so I’m not worried about optional tasks diluting the importance of mandatory ones. Besides, digital calendars let me mark mandatory appointments in red so they’re easy to see. And since my days don’t get interrupted that often, re-entering incomplete tasks onto other days is not a big deal — and again, it’s much easier with a digital calendar.
None of this is a criticism of GTD. As I said in my summary, I think much of its advice is gold. You just need to remember that Allen was writing for a particular audience and adapt GTD to your own needs.
Share your views on Getting Things Done vs Deep Work in the comments below!
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One thought on “Getting Things Done vs Deep Work”
Yeah, I think you’re right. Some of the stuff in GTD about how many projects you should have, and snatching 6 minutes to make a phone call while you’re waiting for something else doesn’t fit at all with the very idea of Deep Work. So as you say, they’re really targeted at fundamentally different types of work.
I think long term, the GTD style of work suits a particular type of person. The rest of us would burn out pretty quickly I think. Of course, deep work suits a different type of person, but I think if it doesn’t suit you you’d just be a bit bored and not do very good work, as opposed to burning out.