How GTD Helps You Navigate Complexity

This article brings together selected writings by Francis Sopper, CEO of GTD Focus, exploring the Five Horizons framework and what it takes to navigate complexity, uncertainty, and change at every level of focus.

 

In the years since I first engaged with Getting Things Done in 1998, I’ve lived through four economic recessions, one divorce, three businesses, five significant shifts in job roles and responsibilities, a second marriage, raising two children, moving more than 1,200 miles twice, and serious illnesses and deaths among people I love.

 

Oh yeah, and all the personal and professional disruption that came with a global pandemic.

 

And I’m still here, trying to imagine what’s next. Most of the time now, I can reach a place of quiet competence, a sense that no matter what life sends my way, I have a way of engaging with it. That didn’t happen by accident. It took all five horizons.

 

The Five Horizons of Focus

 

The five horizons are a framework for understanding your work and your life at different altitudes, from the immediate and concrete to the deeply personal.

Level 1 is the Runway: your next actions, the things you have to do in the real world to reach a desired outcome.

 

Level 2 is Projects: a series of next actions that produce something tangible. You keep moving forward because you’ve defined your desired outcome and identified what needs to happen next.

 

Level 3 is Areas of Focus and Responsibility: the commitments we make to ourselves and others. These aren’t static. We recommit and renegotiate them regularly as life shifts around us.

 

Level 4 is Vision: where ideas live. Ideas aren’t filmable actions, but they lead to real-world outcomes. It’s the difference between “let’s build a bridge here” and “do you think there should be a bridge here?”

 

Level 5 is Purpose and Core Values: your life’s final exam questions. What kind of person do I want to be? What mark do I want to make? And crucially, it takes you straight back to Level 1: are the specific next actions I’m taking every five to ten days actually moving me toward that?

 

When the Levels Collide: Vision and Refocus

 

Understanding the horizons is one thing. The harder challenge is knowing which level you’re currently operating on, especially when you’re already overwhelmed.

 

Consider a client whose organization needed to fill an important position. On the surface, it looked like a Level 2 problem: define the role, write the job description, identify candidates, hire. But what showed up underneath was a Level 4 question: is this role actually what we need right now? What does our organization need to become? Suddenly, filling a job had become restructuring a team, and doing that while already in overwhelm, with a chain of command committed to the existing org chart, is a different challenge entirely.

 

This is what Vision and Refocus is designed for. It embraces multiple areas of focus at once — without ignoring the others — because new visions have to manifest as commitments, and new commitments inevitably require renegotiating or closing off existing ones. Those commitments then need to be supported by projects and next actions all the way back down to the runway.

 

Big, life-enhancing change needs space to be seeded, incubated, and developed. Vision and Refocus helps you make that space.

 

Time, Chance, and Higher Horizons

 

There’s another layer to all of this. We humans are remarkably well-suited for probability and anticipation — for sensing that this might happen, or that this won’t, but could. We recognize the passage of time and can activate in the present while reflecting on the past. Andy Clark, in his book Surfing Uncertainty, calls us “prediction machines.”

 

Statisticians will tell you we’re also remarkably poorly suited for these things, and they’re right too. We’re good at short time horizons and simple probabilities. The speed and complexity of the modern world is another matter.

 

And so, in order to navigate that complexity, I have to trust people. I can’t learn enough, know enough, or experience enough to verify everything myself. This is when I lean on Level 5 — Purpose and Core Values. In an impossibly complex world, I work very hard to be a trustworthy person, and trust that others are doing the same. It’s not a perfect system. But it’s the one available to us.

 

When It’s on You

 

There’s a particular challenge that comes with reaching a high level of competence and responsibility, one that doesn’t get talked about much, because it’s uncomfortable to raise.

 

When you’ve risen far enough, you can lose the wisdom of the crowd. Groupthink gets a bad reputation, but the preponderance of evidence is usually true — operative word, usually. “Peerless” sounds like a compliment, but it can mean there’s no one left to check your work or send you back into the fray. And as we move into higher horizons, complicated goals, motivational purposes, deeply personal principles, we can find ourselves stalling without understanding why.

 

Sometimes we let go of best practices and know exactly why. Other times we ask ourselves: why am I not doing the things I know I should do? What’s wrong with me? Or worse, we start believing the wrong things about ourselves, that we’re not smart enough, not working hard enough, that everyone else has something we don’t. There are also quieter losses: unconscious leaks of energy from fear, shame, resentment, misperception, and misunderstanding.

 

At the same moment we achieve singular competence, we can lose touch with what others see in us that we can’t see in ourselves. And occasionally, a position can be rare enough that there simply aren’t people who know what we don’t know, no authorities, no guides. Hence the expression: it’s lonely at the top.

 

We understand that. And if any of this sounds familiar, we’d like to talk. Call us and learn how we can support you where the air is thin.