David Allen
An interesting book on how to best get yourself producing at a higher level, Getting things done make me want to change how I go about planning and accomplishing things 180 percent.
I’ve never used a planner in my life, and any other sort of listing or goal analysis almost as rarely. But I’ve always loved sorting and filing and organizing things. Allen’s method for improving your ability to think and do appeals to my verbose and impractical side almost as much as it encourages me to get off my ass and start doing some worthwhile things.
Basically Allen argues that everything you have an obligation to do should be kept somewhere outside of your mind, in some physical and easily reviewable form. I’ve always been able to keep my to-do lists mentally, but they also have never been much more then a hash of the assignments to be turned in within a week on a per class basis.
I’ve always used a GTD like approach to do my work, but never in the spelled out, physical way that Allen demands. I’ve habitually filed things in my own mental inbox, used a detailed cranial filing system, often reviewed the things that are going on, and kept myself action/project list schema, but thinking about it now, getting everything out and onto paper logically couldn’t do anything but take a load off me, and quite a large one at that.
What I hope that implementing a GTD like system can do for me is keep me from suddenly remembering while reading a book that I need to make a phone call, because the little things like that are peripherally filed in my head. Actions without a due date slip my mind often, because I don’t have any sort of trigger for them. But I’m going to take a look at the Rails GTD App by bsag, and hopefully really get this thing going. I think it will be fun!
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