Ok, ok, I hear ya. I’m about 5 years late to the party on this one. But after some advice from a few people who seem to be pretty balanced and productive in their lives I decided to pick up a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD). You can read about it at Wikipedia or Amazon or at one of the many techie bloggers that cover the topic.
In a nutshell, GTD is a fluid personal management process that operates closer to the way most of us work. Most of us deal with a constant influx of new tasks, dozens of disparate projects at home and at work, and changing deadlines. GTD provides a framework for us to deal with this onslaught.
I doubt that I will ever implement all of Allen’s ideas. For one thing, much of the book focuses on dealing with paper. I don’t handle much paper at home or at work. I typically carry a notebook to meetings and use it to scribble down some hieroglyphics ostensibly posing as English that even I cannot read. So I don’t imagine that I’ll be creating tickler files.
But ultimately I come out of these meetings with “to-dos” for myself that need to be tracked and managed. GTD provides the framework for managing and tracking everything.
I also don’t quite see the point of keeping my email inbox empty. I need to review (in one form or another) email as it arrives. But with desktop search I don’t need to categorize everything into folders. I don’t write down everything everyone says in meetings and I don’t see why I need to categorize every email.
But I can understand why GTD has a cult-like following among techies. It provides a practical structure for organizing our hectic lives into the ways we actually work.
So I’m going to give it a shot.
