Recently I’ve seen a lot of posts about “Getting Things Done”, by David Allen. Designed as a program for increasing productivity (mostly for business professionals), that many geeks seem to be turning on to. I’ve been feeling stretched increasingly thin with commitments at home, grad school, and with friends and colleagues, so anything that makes it easier to get things acoomplished would be wonderful. After seeing four or five different technical people mention the book (at Slashdot and O’Reilley among other places), and since I’ve felt like my commitments were getting out of control, I decided it would be worth a read.
So far I’ve only read a couple of chapters, but I decided to start implementing some of the techniques mentioned so far. The net result is that I’m feeling more relaxed, and that my commitments are being better tracked. Only time will tell if I get more from the book and I become more productive as a result. The tactics in the book seem to be well thought out, and pretty simple to put into use, but I’ve only really started using the project/next-action lists so far.
I’ve decided to use OmniOutliner3 for tracking my “projects”, multi-step tasks that I need to finish, since I’ve always found outliners to be a good way for me to work, and I only had to upgrade an existing license that came with my computer. If people are interested, drop me a comment, and I’ll elaborate on how I’m using OmniOutliner within the structure of “Getting Things Done”, since it differs somewhat from what other people seem to be doing.
You too, huh?
I bought GTD a couple months ago as well, but somehow it dropped off my reading list before I got further than the first two chapters and before I could really try to implement it.
Anyway, I’d be interested to know the details.
You need no book.
You must simply be more slack like me.
Be like me…be more slack. You want anything from iceland?
I hate these books. Have you noticed that their covers look exaclty the same? They all have some moron smiling on them saying “WOW I’m such a success!”
http://sevasblog.com
Seva, I normally agree with you, but I blame the publishers. There are just too many self-improvement books out there, and all of the marketing just sucks.
Unfortunately, there are some really good books out there that suffer for having just that sort of cover. As they say, “you can’t judge a book by its…”
I’ll post more detail and some of the Applescripts I use with OmniOutliner in a future post (soon).
It probably is the publisher’s fault, I agree about that…I’ll leave it to you to ‘Judge’ these kinds of books. I guess I’m the only one with a negative view on things.
Hey,
Can we see what your outline looks like? I am very interested in using OmniOutliner 3 as well for GTD.
Thanks!