[Tb] David Allen Getting Things Done

One of the interesting things in the TB wiki was the outline of using TB as
a tool to implement a David Allen "Getting Things Done" way of organizing
your life.

David's system is simple, elegant, and powerful. I recommend his book to
anyone who hasn't read it. TB seems to have the power to make this kind of
organization happen, but the user who tried to put them together was more
technically sophisticated and less articulate in English than was ideal for
me. His implementation is found on a link in the wiki or you can go to the
web and see it directly:
http://www.fridgedoor.net/prototyping/protophot/19html and the links from
there.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the David Allen system, let me sum
it up for you in a few words -- this isn't a substitute for David's book or
his workshop -- you can get details on these at www.davidco.com .

David's aims are to reduce mental and physical clutter and therefore
emotional stress in our lives.

His main tools in this project are conceptual/physical. He believes
(correctly in my view) that a major energy sink in our lives is worrying
about things we have undertaken to do but have no way of tracking. The
result is that we spend a great deal of time not doing things we have
committed to doing, not being sure of what our commitments are, and worrying
that we are doing the wrong things.

His solution is simple, elegant, and powerful. You must create a list that
is accurate, reliable, and easy to access at all times of everything you
have committed or been committed to do. This list is divided into two major
categories: Projects (which consist of everything that takes more than one
step to accomplish). These live on a list of their own which must be
reviewed at least once a week. Tasks or To-Dos (actions), which consist of
single-step things to do and are derived from the project list. The process
is that you look at your projects and ask what the next step or action is to
move the project to completion. The tasks are organized, not by priority
(since this can change depending on a lot of variables) but by context. All
tasks requiring a telephone are grouped, as are those requiring a computer,
etc. the result is that if you have a few minutes and a telephone, you can
work through a mini list of things to do, ditto a computer, some quiet time
in the office, a chance to go to a local hardware store, etc.

He also has great ideas on how to file and how to classify things that you
file into sensible categories that will leave you with a clean workspace and
automatic reminders of things that need to be responded to on or by specific
dates. We don't need to go into those here and now.

The TB wiki contributor passed along his iteration of the DA system with
projects and actions and some use of agents and color coding and who knows
what else to make it all work. It seems to me that his system is complex,
unlike the DA system which is the opposite of complex, or that he doesn't
have the verbal skills to explain what he did in simple language.

And yet, it also seems to me that TB ought to be able to support a system
like David's and might be able to do it well and simply.

So here's my question: can anyone take a look at the link I've included and
see if it makes sense in terms of the system I've explained and, if so, pass
an explanation along?

TB seems to me to be an incredibly powerful tool that's hard to learn to use
but capable of doing amazing things if only you can get it under control.
This forum is a potentially great resource in bringing this application to
the point at which it can be controlled and used to accomplish things that
no other software can.

Stephen
Received on Tue Dec 30 19:30:52 2003