Many contemporary efforts to design and improve thinking target invention, creativity, and innovation.
Others target productivity. The paper treats a well known personal productivity system ‘Getting Things
Done’ as a technique of ideation or acquiring ideas. This personal improvement system has become
popular across corporate, institutional and private domains. Personal productivity techniques marry quite
prosaic techniques of managing email inboxes or filing systems with anxious concerns about the
difficulty of finding ways of generating ideas or ‘intuitions’. They promise a heightened capacity to think.
While sceptical of claims of heightened thinking, the paper argues that ‘Getting Things Done’ can be seen
as a form of ‘modern equipment’ (Rabinow, 2006) that practically re-thinks the relation between ideas
and events as a problematic encounter with the multiple