GTD: Mind Depositor

It never stops with blogging about Getting Things Done. Zen Habits had a blogpost full of humor about a GTD-addict; the most interesting statement was:

(…)you may be a productivity junkie if (nr 8 ) sex with your spouse is on your someday/maybe list.

Without bragging too much about my own performance as a lover I can safely state that this is not the case for me 🙂 However, some other of the signs listed definitely apply to me, e.g. nr 2:

You spend significant amounts of time comparing GTD systems with other life “hackers.”

I have good reason for that: I’m always open to new ideas, to do things better.
Patrick Ng from Hong Kong has an interesting blog about GTD. He designed a new “hipsterPDA” template, you can download it from his website. I’m impressed, not in the least by his generousness for sharing, but for now I’ll stick to my own system.
Patrick Ng’s website is worth a visit for other articles too: it has a powerfull slogan:

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thoughts

and an article about the content of his bag. I just thought about writing myself a blogpost on “Me and My Bag”, but then I realised that this had been done before by other lifehacking geeks.

More on GTD: action management application RememberThe Milk is very popular among GTD fans. I have an account, but I prefer my simple D3 TiddlyWiki. Now you can spice up RTM with user styles. Hm, maybe I should give RTM another try; I’ll put that on my someday/maybe list.

In case, just in case, the continuous stream of GTD blogs will dry up one day, David Allen has recently published a follow-up to GTD: “Making it all Work“. It’s about “the matrix of self-management”

A quote from the last chapter: “Pay Attention to What Has Your Attention”:

If (..) you really want to effectively identify and incorporate those higher-horizon commitments, you must start with what’s taking up the space in front of them. More often than not that’s 22 e-mails you’ve been avoiding, the sitter you need to arrange for your kids for tomorrow night, and buying cat food. If you don’t deal with those effectively, they will undermine your recognition of the bigger stuff or at least diminish your ability to focus on them clearly.

That brings it back to what GTD is all about: The purpose for being productive is to have more time for doing the things you actually want to do with your life.

Leave a Reply

  • The Aesthetics and Beauty of Knowledge

    Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.

    – David Zindell, The Broken God, 1993

  • Geek Attitude

    The attitude thing is about flexibility, portability, creativity, sociability and jamming (ran out of suitable “ity” words!). It’s about improvising – in the practical and musical senses of the word; not getting tangled in boundaries and the “right” way to do things.
    Definitely the only way to travel.
    Martin Delaney – “Laptop Music”.