It seems a few people have misunderstood what the author is saying here.
What David means is that if your life suddenly paused and you had no new tasks, it would still take 300-500 hours to complete the tasks that you’ve already committed to. Things like go to the store and buy cat food, repair the shed, and finish the project review. Things that are already on your lists (or in your head). The point is that we walk around with a big backlog of things we have committed to. If you do the math, 300-500 hours is 1-2 months of 8 hour workdays. I’m not sure how he got that estimate, but it seems reasonable to me. Cheers!

Hi Tom, I’m curious if you could share how your melding of GTD and Covey’s 7 Habits has come along? I’m currently working on the same thing, and there are a few pain points I’ve run into.

This was really helpful for me and framed it in a super clear way.

I use theBrain where you can make multiple connections, presentation formats, put it all in one Brain or use multiple Brains. Start with the free version, which gets you pretty far. I used it for about 8 years before moving into the professional version.

Hey Jenn

Thank you, these examples were great to explain the difference between projects and areas of focus.

Thanks, that’s a much better analogy, perhaps the best.

interesting !

I don’t think this is what he meant at all, dedicating only 2 hours each week to all of your projects is way too little. 300-500 hours refers to the time it would take to organize everything in the “Ground: calendar/actions” area (think all of your “to-do” items), assuming no new inputs in your life, so about 7-12, 40-hour workweeks. These ARE part of our “lives and important activities”, not some extra thing we do in our spare time. It would be like a once-a-generation house cleaning/organization marathon. In his GTD book Allen actually does recommend taking a days, if not week-long organization retreat to get a basic handle on all of your outstanding projects, commitments, plans and assorted “stuff”. But since virtually no one can just take 2-3 months off without anything new being added to their plate, the idea is to create a framework that allows you to process through this backlog and then deal with or “file away” new things as they come up, while systematically working on and completing our projects.