Is GTD any way to run a country?

Last July, Barack Obama had a private conversation with the leader of England's Tory Party, David Cameron, that accidentally took place in front of an open microphone. Their talk provided a major league window into the difficulties politicians face in finding time to think critically about the things that presumably attracted them to politics in the first place: the issues.

"Should we be successful," Obama tells Cameron, paraphrasing something he heard from a former White House staffer, "the most important thing ... is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking." Both men then agree such chunks of time are rare. Cameron tells Obama he refers to the stream of meetings he faces daily as "the dentist waiting room" and that his staff stuffs his agenda full of appointments.

"And that's when," replies Obama, "you start making mistakes or you lose the big picture. Or you lose a sense of; I think you lose a feel ..." "Your feeling," Cameron interrupts. "And that is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to make decisions."

It's still refreshingly novel to have a president who thinks critically about the issues. But someone in the White House still might want to clear Obama's calendar because to many of his supporters inside and outside of Washington, it's starting to feel exactly as if Obama is losing his feel. Some of the most important early judgments his administration has made seem less about the kinds of laws he wants to pass and more about the compromises he's willing to make in order to get things done.

There's a sense among progressives—based on Obama's record so far and coagulating around the compromises being made in health care reform negotiations—that the judgments Obama is making aren't squaring with the kind of president he said he'd be. Progressive discontent is now just simmering, partially because Obama is still Obama, but he seems to be giving them every opportunity to boil over.

That's because it looks like Obama is having a checklist presidency. Yes, his agenda is being passed, but much of it feels compromised. The president appears to be delegating far too many details to Congress in order to keep Getting Things Done.

Getting Things Done is a productivity system invented by David Allen. Currently all the rage among the lifehacking set, Allen uses seminars, books, and private sessions to teach people how to handle all the "stuff" in their lives. Allen, echoing the theory of alienation that Marx applied to industrialized labor 165 years ago, thinks that the relentless stream of "stuff" white-collar workers process every day makes it hard for them to retain control over their accomplishments and larger purposes. His theory is basically this: By creating an external system to track our big goals and breaking those goals down into discrete actions, we free up our minds to actually complete those actions, which, after all, get us closer to our big goals. Then we use chunks of time to think, to plan our next steps, and to adjust our courses of action.

Applying GTD on an individual basis or within a corporate department, where everyone shares roughly the same goals and incentives, can be effective. But in a political context, it's easy to see how players with different agendas could subtly pervert the GTD workflow to serve their own ends. Obama, like any president, has far too much to do without the help of a staff that acts as his extension. Thousands of the little actions of governance must to be delegated to them so that he can focus on the big picture. And he needs Congress to pass bills that enable his programs. But what if those people don't "get" Obama or simply don't share his outlook to the extent he thought? What if, like a trading algorithm on the fritz, these discrete actions keep coming back from his staff and Congress just a little bit altered, so that when the big goals are reached, they aren't in fact what Obama said they would be or his supporters expected them to be?

Click the image below to see our take on Obama's GTD workflow:

To see the original GTD wallpaper, click here.

Many of the president's legislative victories—like the stimulus package, FDA regulation of tobacco, credit card reform, and climate change—have featured such pernicious compromises. Take the Cash for Clunkers rebate program, which was so popular it ran out of its $1 billion allotment in less than one week. The problem is, car-state senators gutted the program's efficiency standards. Originally touted as a way to increase the fuel economy of the American "fleet," it morphed into just another auto industry stimulus bill, leading environmental groups like the Sierra Club to qualify their earlier support. The only "clunkers" benefitting from the rebates are Chrysler, Ford (F), and GM (MTLQQ).

Obama's executive branch policies, which he has full control over, have only added to his problems. By deciding not to investigate the Bush administration's scandalous torture directives nor its possibly illegal counterterrorism programs and continuing that administration's policies of document secrecy and using signing statements on legislation, the president is making it too easy for his critics to ask, whatever happened to "Change We Can Believe In"?

All of this makes it reasonable to ask: Is President Obama merely moving "stuff" through his GTD workflow? Are the administration's actions actually leading America to the big goals he promised to deliver?

One of David Allen's favorite GTD tropes, says James Fallows, is the airplane view of "stuff." By taking the time to imagine workflows from every altitude, from immediate tasks "on the runway" to the 50,000-foot Meaning of Life, GTDers keep their goals in proper perspective. The 20,000-foot view, which encompasses immediate areas of responsibility, seems to be where Obama's Air Force One is circling. Obama wanted to focus on health care from day one, but he found a slew of old business waiting for him in Washington, which, polls suggest, he appeared to impatiently ram through his GTD workflow before getting on to "stuff," like health care, that he actually wanted to deal with. In the first months of his administration, he opened many speeches by reminding listeners he inherited the crisis and had no choice but to deal with it. (Indeed, it's the "amorphous blob" that causes GTDers the most consternation, which may explain why the administration was quick to roll out incomplete frameworks like TALF to try to organize the crisis into discrete actions to process.)

Democrats in Congress decided to seize the moment, hence their ram-through of the $410 billion Bush-era "old business" bill that Obama signed in March. Full of the earmarks candidate Obama claimed to detest, press secretary Robert Gibbs admitted the president signed off on nearly $500 billion in spending pretty much just to get it out of the way.

What followed was the Goldilocks stimulus bill, which was not too little nor too big but just wrong. Liberals and conservatives agree, for ideologically opposite reasons, that the bill has been ineffective. Liberals, of course, want a supplemental second stimulus. The political battle Obama hoped to avoid by compromising on the first bill, while still winning no Republican votes, will likely have to be fought anyway, only this time against better-organized conservatives armed with new talking points and data.

Similarly, the president heralded the tobacco regulation bill as a victory against Big Tobacco. But the bill was the product of a decade-long lobbying effort by Philip Morris (PM), which co-opted anti-tobacco forces into supporting weak regulations, leaving the FDA unable to ban cigarettes or mandate their nicotine content down to zero. Meanwhile, the law's one punishing aspect, new marketing restrictions, is already being called unconstitutional and facing court challenges.

The credit card reform bill, another big win, ended up giving card issuers a nine-month loophole during which to squeeze customers by all the old rules. The fixes, even when they come, won't be as strong as consumer advocates think they should be. Senators have taken to writing letters to the Federal Reserve to ask that it enforce tighter regulations immediately. Um, if that was going to be an important thing to do, why not include it in the bill that just passed?

The climate change bill, passed by the House, is facing pushback in the Senate, presumably so senators can weaken the bill's provisions to appease a Republican minority that won't vote for it anyway. Then there is the slew of minor legislative promises, like needle-exchange funding, that seem to have fallen out of Obama's workflow completely, leaving interest groups without lobbyists or big bank accounts hurt and skeptical about his commitment to their causes.

If there were ever a movement candidate, someone who essentially reinvented a political party to win his election, it was Obama. Yet after winning, he surrounded himself with old apparatchiks and began humoring the committee chieftains, er, chairmen, he once considered to be emblems of a broken political system. Perhaps it's impossible for any reformer in power to not become a creature of the system, but in this case the jacket is fitting a little too well right off the rack.

By not pressing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid to whip their caucuses into line, the president has put his prize initiative, health care reform, at the mercy of Congress, which is as scary as it sounds. Currently the six senators in charge of health care negotiations represent just 2.74 percent of the population and almost no urban areas, says Matthew Ygelsias. In the House, Nancy Pelosi's acquiescence to Blue Dogs and freshman Democrats from conservative districts is viewed by progressive members as giving far too large a voice to coalitions that continue chipping away at the plan's once lofty goals while taking record amounts of funding from health care lobbyists.

President Clinton's health care bill was defeated because he expected Congress to pass it by fiat. But by letting congressional leaders handle the incremental actions that lead up to his big goal, Obama is showing them a deference they haven't seen in generations. The result of that deference could be something even worse that a defeat: America could end up with a gutted health care "reform" law that accomplishes little, other than reinforce the argument that universal coverage is an unachievable goal in America.

It's just not enough to check off tasks and Get Things Done, hovering at 20,000 feet. Part of the problem may be that Obama and his team are dog-tired. But the lasting echoes of the compromises the administration is striking today demand our, and its, renewed attentions.

Much has been made of Obama modeling his first 100 days on Franklin D. Roosevelt's—implementing a huge agenda of radical change—but perhaps it's time Obama take a page from Roosevelt's cousin Teddy, who said, "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena ... who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."