The 90s filing cabinet cyborgism of "Getting Things Done"

I've been re-reading David Allen's book "Getting Things Done". I've used it to organise my to-do lists and personal projects for the last two years, which makes it the longest I've stuck to any system for organising tasks. I've noticed three things from going back to the original text:

• The book makes me strangely nostalgic for a kind of work-space set up I am too young to have actually experienced
• That set up has a very distinct aesthetic: grey filing cabinets, light blue carpets, office chairs with wheels but very few other ergonomic features, beige fax machines, black briefcases with spiral-bound notebooks and ballpoint pens
• I learnt what this set up looks like from (1) TV-shows and films set in the 90s, (2) memories of my parent's desks at home or from when I would visit them in their offices, (3) one or two of my own university professors whose offices look like they have not changed much for the last 30 years.

I think this nostalgia is a large part of the experience of growing up in the 2000s. Everything is moving and changing quite quickly, but you are aware of a familiar and relatively stable time just before. It was a time where we were already living in the information age but information was still still mostly analogue in medium. This nostalgia is so strong is that it can be felt by people whose entire careers have taken place on computers (for the most part not even desktop computers - but laptops that you'd pick up and plug into monitors!).

90s offices were not beautiful places, and yet - something about them calls to us. I have two explanations for why this might be.

My first explanation is that modern computer UIs are still mostly virtual representations of a 90s office. The save icon is a floppy disk, "files" are stored in "folders", and any files you want ready to hand can be placed on your "desktop". Every time you interact in this way you are saying a little prayer at a virtual shrine dedicated to the memory of the 90s office space.

My second explanation is that modern open plan office life has many deficiencies which make us long for times when things were different. Hot-desking in particular means people rarely have fixed desks any more, we encourage much tidier desks, with fewer notes and papers lying around, and we don't really encourage people to build a "private" space around themselves. For security and interoperability reasons, people's work computers are also often very heavily locked-down, which means that while in theory this "private" space is now all meant to exist digitally - the digital world presented to an office worker is much more rigid than the analogue world of paper, briefcases and filing cabinets would have been¹. All of these changes were made for good reasons, but they also brought with them various costs.

I think its easy to imagine that digital tools might have been a strict improvement on analogue ones. I think it is clearly the case that they are improvements overall, I would find it very frustrating to have to do my job without access to a computer (even leaving out the parts of my job that aren't programming!). However there are areas where I think analogue office workers still had it better. One of these ways in particular has also been on my mind while reading "Getting Things Done" (GTD), and it has to do with the quality of the symbiotic relationship that develops between an individual and the tools they are using to do their work.

In particular, one thing I've changed my mind about with GTD is that I no longer think the manual work spent by its users reviewing and transferring items between physical locations and paper lists (before it was easy to keep them on a computer) was entirely wasted.

Personally, I do keep most of my GTD lists on a computer, and a big mistake I made early on was to try to automate away as much of the reviewing process as possible. This was a mistake because a part of what keeps systems like this fresh is the intentional directing of attention to reviewing everything on them. A system which does too much of this work for you ends up leaving no slack for that kind of headspace². The other reason this was a mistake is that reviews are a chance to update and change the system itself if something is not working. If you automate too much much of it, those changes become costly and brittle.

Analogue offices (even the ones involving ugly booths created out of felt dividers) were just much better at creating the right conditions for this kind of activity. For example, books like GTD have advice for deciding what material to bring with you when going to a paper-based meeting. Ideally you'd organically direct the same care and attention to preparing for a meeting which you can bring your laptop to, however even if you do this, the laptop itself is a minefield of other distractions.

When you return from a meeting where you took your notes on paper and go back to your desk, you then have to transfer those notes into your various systems for tracking what you need to do. It's tempting to look at that activity as purely wasted time - nowadays you can just get an LLM to transcribe the recording of the meeting and let you know of any action items you need to take. Again, I think this is probably an improvement overall, but I am also personally trying to make a more active effort to think about other ways in which the activity of manually reviewing meeting notes might have been delivering load-bearing benefits. I guess the right thing to do in situations like this is to use the saved time to realise those benefits in other ways.

The original meaning of the word "cyborg" predates science fiction and was meant to describe a way of studying the homeostatic relationships between humans and machines that arise as situated in their broader environments. One advantage of this view is that it lets you study both how to change the machine or the environment to fit the human which interacts with them, but also how the human changes to fit the machine and environment around them. One way to view office life in the late 1900s, is that it was the peak of the analogue information age, where the mass production of office equipment enabled many more humans to make use of centuries of tacit knowledge about how to operate in a primarily paper-based environment.

A theme of this blog is that I often make anachronistic jumps between the late 1600s and the late 1900s. Maybe one reason I keep making these jumps is that both periods feel like the start and the end of a particular "modern" - feeling era of this kind of analogue-cyborgism. I get a similar nostalgia to the one I described above when I read about the desk setups of the early modern philosophers, or the scientists of the royal society ³. It's likely also the case that my own personal mechanisms for motivation are such that sitting at my desk and emptying my virtual "in-tray" feels a lot more enjoyable when I imagine I am a part of a long history of humans who have had to do the same for hundreds of years.