Ever Get Burnt Out From Doing GTD?

[Marcelo]

I'm going to take a risk and speak for David Allen....he never advocated using every single minute for work. In fact, I think he'd say he wants to manage his life better so his attention ISN'T on work when he's not working. And I bet he does that very, very well. From what I've read of all the DavidCo people, they lead rich, full lives apart from their work: they travel, they pursue higher education, one is a poet, they hike, they run...and I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg. But I don't see any of them (the visible ones anyway) as workaholics.

I cautiously used the word "...seem to validate..." because the subject needs further clarification.

The sentence from the OP that triggered this observation of mine was this one:

"The only times I wasn't getting things done was when I took a break to eat, but even then I was doing some research online for a term paper."

This attitude of working while eating -trying thereby to use up every single minute for work-, may seem to be validated by, for example, the following quote from Getting Things Done:

"While you're on hold on the phone, you can be reviewing your action lists and getting a sense of what you're going to do when the call is done. While you wait for a meeting to start, you can work down the "Read/Review" stack you/ve brought with you. And when the conversation you weren't expecting with your boss shrinks the time you have before your next meeting to twelve minutes, you can easily find a way to use that window to good advantage." (p. 199).

While it may be argued that there is a substantial difference between a break to eat and being on hold on the phone or waiting for a meeting to start or having an unexpected shrinked window of time (these are not breaks), this difference is not self-evident, more so as David Allen proposes that work (now in the common sense, not in the GTD sense) and life should not be differentiated.

The consequence is that anyone, as the OP author seems to have done, can project the example quoted to his eating break and similar situations.

Furthermore, I have to say that I am a Zen practitioner, and from the point of view of Zen, dwelling in the present moment is a central practice. While waiting on hold on the phone, I wouldn't rush to see what I am going to do afterwards (who knows? may be that call will change my next actions), but rather would gently breath and relax. No stres will accumulate from breathing and relaxing, rather, if there is any, it will be dissipated. Trying to foresee my next actions while I am not yet done with the present one, seems to me to unnecessarily allow stress to build up.