Obama & Getting Things Done

At The Big Money, Paul Smalera has an interesting post tying Barack Obama’s apparent governing style to David Allen-style Getting Things Done (via GTDTimes). He asks a question that should be near the heart of anyone who’s interested in thinking about productivity: Get things done, yes, but what things?:

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?