Um. "I don't keep a calendar" means "I consider my time more important than yours, so we'll meet at my sole convenience." I would love to do that, but everyone else in the world would rightly understand it that way and would treat it as a refusal to do core elements of my job. A: "Let's schedule a committee meeting." B: "I don't keep a calendar." A: "So what you're saying is everyone else on the committee has to find…
Fully agree. Also the rest of the article has questionable advice. I doubt the helpfulness of later lists and anti todo lists. Not answering the phone or pretending to be incompetent sounds like an idiotic idea too.
Before I break down some of the advice, keep in mind that he is talking about productivity. There are some jobs where his advice will not work. But I contend those jobs are designed in a way that necessarily limit your productivity. As an example, SW developers complain about context switching. I assure you, there are jobs where context switching is more or less necessary. I wouldn't criticize Marc's advice because it won't work for that kind of a job. I'd point out that the job is fundamentally one where productivity is limited.
Getting to the details:
Later lists are essentially Someday/Maybe in GTD, so it's not a radical concept. Personally, I've treated it as a dumping ground of things just to get them out of my head. If I'm not going to do it any time soon, I want it somewhere that is not my head. Now I've never found the contents of the list useful. It's usually so huge that it's not worth my time to go back to it.
As for Anti-Todo list, it's a psychological hack, so I'm not sure how you can say it is useful or not. It's strictly not a productivity technique. If it eases your mind, it works. Otherwise not.
I'm not anti-phone as he is, but if I substitute phone calls with texting and IM's, I fully agree. They are usually productivity sinks. I've found phones to be good for things where one cannot reasonably wait. Obviously, this is not going to work for projects that require continual, quick decisions. I think he is merely self selecting: He does only projects where phone calls are not as important.
As for strategic incompetence, he makes the criterion clear:
>Of course, this assumes that there are other things that are more important at which you are competent.
Look around your workplace. In mine, this is what more senior people do all the time. They have more important work to do, and they'll first try to convince managers the annoying work they're being asked to do is not a good use of their time (takes time away from more important work). 70+% of the time, this is enough. When it isn't, it's not unusual to see them do a poor job, at which time managers assign the work to a more junior person.
It does work, as long as their is a junior person who can do the work.
Limiting email time is effective. Whenever I've interviewed, I've asked whether I can do the job if I check email only three times a day. In reality, I check it a lot more often. But I've been burned by having a job where too much work was done over email with an expectation to respond quickly (e.g. within an hour). Having to drop all your work several times a day to answer lots of questions is not good for productivity.