quantitative ROI for people adopting GTD?

[cornell]

I enjoyed the Duct Tape podcast (it's always good to "return to the well"), and wanted to follow up on a comment David made regarding statistics. He said Lockheed and the VA did studies that indicated an average of 45 minutes of time being saved per day. I wonder if anyone from davidco has a reference to the report - I'd be much obliged.

Interestingly, some competitors seem to focus on this a bit more, e.g., McGhee Productivity Solutions, who say:

Pre and post surveys confirm an 81% decrease in e‑mails being held in the inbox and 61% decrease in interruptions per day.

I suspect the answer is "we don't need to" ;-)

 

[severance1970]

Both McGhee and Allen espouse the concept of transferring actionable emails to an @Action folder, waiting-for emails to @Waiting-For, etc.; so an 81% reduction of email in the Inbox folder, per se, is not particularly impressive to someone who understands that those emails were merely transferred to other folders. And I'd be skeptical of surveys (as opposed to independent monitors) where repondents are said to report a "61% decrease in interruptions," a claim that's not much more objective than "we don't need to."

I don't doubt the correlation between transferring emails to appropriate buckets and those emails being handled more expeditiously, nor do I doubt that workers experienced a significant decrease in interruptions; but the empirical rigor of McGhee's metrics should be taken with a grain of salt. Davidco's claim of saving 45 minutes a day at least has the virtue of attribution (e.g. Lockheed and the VA, not unattributed "surveys") and of sounding less hyperbolic.