Jira / Kanban works for some projects while Waterfall works for others. Some projects need high levels of governance while others move faster with low levels of governance. Some projects can get away without time-commitments, but others have dependencies and must hit deadlines, and this must be tracked.
And just because GTD is great for managing my personal workload, doesn't mean that it's great at coordinating the work of 100 people.
(I say this as a person that generally believes in Agile, is a huge proponent of GTD, and have also been on a dev team where Agile and Kanban was applied where traditional Prince2 would have been a better fit).
> Just as G.T.D. was achieving widespread popularity, however, Mann’s zeal for his own practice began to fade. [...] Productivity pr0n, he suggested, was becoming a bewildering, complexifying end in itself—list-making as a “cargo cult,” system-tweaking as an addiction. “On more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish,” he wrote. [...] It seemed to him that it was possible to implement many G.T.D.-inflected life hacks without feeling “more competent, stable, and alive.”
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise... (or https://beta.trimread.com/articles/59839)
This is a trap I have fallen into before - where you are effectively procrastinating by trying to optimise and system-tweaking your personal GTD system rather than just actually-getting-stuff-done.
Having said all that, GTD helps me personally massively. It's not for everyone, but for lots of people in senior jobs that gets so much 'stuff' in that they struggle to keep up, it's really important to have a systematic way to process it all and not drop anything. I find people who don't have a system like GTD or similar will tend to work from their inbox and end up dropping stuff.
I spent a little time trying to find an actual study, however non-rigorous, about GTD, and this was the only real contender: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222552899_Getting_T...
I don't use GTD in any explicit fashion, but to throw my n=1 in the ring, the overall concept of personal productivity changed my life. Anything can be taken to a harmful extreme, and I was (at least) annoying for the first few years. But I grew out of it and kept the good parts, and I have no doubt that, for me, this sort of thing was hugely beneficial.
Stuff you might or might not complete is basically, everything. That's not a meaningful category list.
> These core mechanics work.
They work like a water-filled car coasting downhill. It looks like it's water-powered (or JIRA-powered) but it's just the gravity well of "looking busy" for the most part.
Maybe the in-car water fountain could be considered water-powered in practice, but that's a derail. Management gets approximations from JIRA because that's what they want, but JIRA doesn't provide it. A tool with a dependency graph could do much better.
You have stuff to do today, stuff to do tomorrow, and stuff you might or might not do. Each day you roll the active lists forward.
Squint, and it’s just personal Kanban, with TODO and DOING, along with PARKING.
These core mechanics work.
Where everything goes sideways is when anyone tries to turn those core mechanics into a work breakdown structure fit into a project management iron triangle, per your middle management point.
Of course, middle management is just trying to lie to senior management that writing software isn’t invention because invention isn’t predictable — but senior management wants perfect predictability so they know they’re hitting their bonus, by pleasing C-level execs, whose packages depend on pleasing shareholders. Everyone’s building a Jenga tower of predictably hitting the numbers.
So if you don’t like JIRA, blame shareholders. :-)