Productivity means a whole new thing when a student makes the transition to college life. You have a car on campus, and a bike, so you must remember to tune each up, make sure licenses are up to date, bring appropriate equipment when going on a ride in each. You must remember that lecture is cancelled today because your professor is in Boston, and that you need to call your mom. You have to remember that equation for enthalpy and what Nietzsche really was talking about in that passage and to print that problem set from coursework as soon as you get home and to buy that thing before the bookstore closes. You have to send 5 different emails, meet that guy for lunch, remember that joke for tonight.

This is an exaggeration, certainly, but I am sure all of you have had hours, days, or even whole weeks when you felt like this. There is a kind of intrinsic chaos to college life that can only be exaggerated by an individual’s own laziness and inability to do meaningful work. I needed a way to know what to get done when, without the guilt and the procrastination that usually is associated with such an affair.

The answer for me lied in David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Abbreviated GTD, the system has its flaws and isn’t for everybody. Yet despite all its criticism, it can be very useful for college students feeling the same way that I do.

You can get a great review of the system itself from many places, so I don’t want to spend too much of this post explaining the structure of the system. Basically, Allen demands that you have a bucket to gather every pressing thought in your head, and then dump these contents regularly into a trusted system of deferral, delegation and action. (For more information, a great place to start is here. Allen’s GTD diagram is also a good visual summary of the entire structure he proposes.)

There is a lot to say about the depth and the utility of the GTD structure, but more important for me is the way it lets me feel about my everyday life. Allen’s book helped me shatter the paradigm of chaos needs to be ubiquitous in the life of a college student, and returned a deeper kind control to my everyday life.

This new paradigm gave me permission to question the task in front of me, and gave me confidence not to do something if I understand why I am not doing it. I realized that a task without a vision is drudgery, and a vision without a task is the stuff of fantasy. I know that part of my job as a human being is to continually bridge drudgery and fantasy into the stuff of reality. This is a powerful—and uplifting—description of work.

I am not all praise, however. GTD evokes some fear in me as well. I know, in my heart of hearts, that I cannot let go of all this chaos. I have to hold on to some of the overwhelming spontaneity of a college life, or I am certainly missing out of something—right? There is a lingering sense in me that if I totally embrace this paradigm, I will be filling my life with only my own meaningful work. Doing so will certainly lead to a great leap of self-confidence and ambition, but can also lead to a weird kind of sterility and closed-mindedness about other people and their lives. It can change the patience I have with people and with their concerns; it can deaden my empathy with the outside world if I let it.

I hope my fears are totally false, and just a stereotype I have about the ultra-ambitious. Hopefully confidence is not inversely related to empathy. But within these concerns is the very promise of GTD: the very fact that I have these fears is great testimony to the power of the system in changing the way humanity can do extraordinary work.