various projects vs. focus on one

[Tom.9]

Somewhere I read a nice story.
In brief, it´s about the advice of focusing on one problem for all waking hours all days until it is solved. This should increase the overall productivity in a tremendous way.

GTD divides major projects into context-oriented next actions, which in my case, leads to procrastination on some of the big projects (while I find it very helpful on less-step projects).

How do you feel about the focusing advice?

 

[TesTeq]

You need some food, don't you?

Somewhere I read a nice story.
In brief, it´s about the advice of focusing on one problem for all waking hours all days until it is solved. This should increase the overall productivity in a tremendous way.

OK, but what about errands (you need some food, don't you?), about cleaning your room, about changing the tires in your car and about hundreds of other small projects?

 

[GTDClone]

GTD gives you options.

You can focus on any specific project as much as you want. As long as everything else is processed and you know what you are not doing then you can actually feel good about focusing on just a single specific project for a long time if this project is the only thing you really want to focus on. You won't get disrupted by your own thoughts about other stuff at random times and such.

Or you can move forward multiple unrelated projects in different contexts.

However there are switching costs for certain activities. For example writing a book. You can't just randomly switch between such activities all the time without a cost. You would want to have enough time to get into those to make some serious progress.

Somewhere I read a nice story.
In brief, it´s about the advice of focusing on one problem for all waking hours all days until it is solved.

I think this approach is actually the only option sometimes for people without any system like GTD. They have to hold on to a single thing and focus on it because otherwise they would just forget/lose it. They just can't move multiple complex projects efficiently and without stress at the same time because they would be missing things and re-thinking too much and eventually something just falls through the cracks

Btw focusing on a single problem for all waking hours is impossible anyway, even if it was possible, you probably would have just hit a mental wall and got lost in details and wouldn't have had have any insight.
It’s easy to get stuck on the same small set of solutions to a problem,
called the impasse phenomenon.

 

[GTDClone]

GTD divides major projects into context-oriented next actions, which in my case, leads to procrastination on some of the big projects (while I find it very helpful on less-step projects).

If you are procrastinating on a certain project then there is probably a good reason for that. It's really hard to give a specific advice though without knowing what the project is. But generally you want to make sure that the outcome of this project is something that you really want and its success depends only on you (so you can actually get it done no matter what the rest of the world is doing).
Another helpful thing to consider is to review everything from a higher perspective

BTW Yeah, it might seem like GTD gives you some good options to procrastinate and avoid certain projects because you can always decide to do something else and avoid some specific project.
However as long as you the do weekly review consistently you will still have this project (you are procrastinating on) in your face each time.
And then you can see that there is some problem. GTD would actually make this problem/procrastination very apparent