***David Allen|http://www.davidco.com/***’s Getting Things Done book/practice/philosophy/whatever is one of the latest phenomenons among geeks. In a nutshell, GTD is a system for enabling stress-free productivity at the job, school, home, just about anywhere. It is designed to help you Get Things Done and to take stress and worry off of your mind. Since many geeks are inherently disorganized, and have tons and tons of things that they want/need to do, this system has been a godsend for them. Geeks have jumped on the bandwagon and created all sorts of tools and techniques to help them utilize the GTD philosophy.
When I’ve heard other geeks talk about GTD, I’ve found that I generally don’t identify with their problems: I’m not drowning in a sea of email, I don’t have lists of tasks that I need to complete, and I generally have plenty of free time to do the things I want to do. Perhaps it’s just because I’m not a terribly important person… I have a fairly limited set of responsibilities at work, and I collaborate with a limited set of individuals. I also don’t participate in any large-scale projects outside of work, and certainly nothing that requires volumes of email or generates stacks of to-do lists.
But I also know that there is always room for improvement, and I’m sure that there are ways that I could better manage my time. If I ever do end up being one of those ‘busy’ people, it would be great if I had a robust management system in place, just in case. So I’ve checked Getting Things Done out from my friendly ***public library|http://www.noblenet.org/beverly/***. I’m going to attempt to read it from start to finish, and I’ll do my best to go along with the practices that the book suggests. I’ll update here periodically.
If anyone else has tried out this system, let me know how it worked for you!