Thursday, January 08, 2009

Getting Things Done Hilarity

I really enjoyed reading Diary of a Self-Help Dropout in the latest issue of Wired magazine. In this article, Chris Hardwick takes readers through attempts to implement various self help philosophies, including: Getting Things Done, Never Check Your E-mail In The Morning and The Four Hour Work Week.

The results are not only educational (yes, I should read and maybe even adopt some of the mentioned material) but also quite hilarious.

One of these days I'm going to devise my own Getting Things Done Strategy, and I'll write a book about it. While I haven't gotten it figured out completely, it will definitely emphasize Flow and include plenty of Slack. It will include a mandatory waiting period before dealing with some tasks (or until acceptance is reached on them). It will also have a required sabbath (read: day when you don't do any work), though it won't have to be Saturday. In terms of tools, it will leverage both paper and online. It'll have a clever name, and a very, very, very small following.

I know, one more thing to add to my todo list...

2 comments:

  1. Ben,

    I read your post with interest. Slack, waiting period, and mandatory sabbath are good ideas and can definitely be incorporated into a GTD-like approach. You should check out my own free/inexpensive online training system (new) that delivers customized GTD-principle-based training based on your choice of organization tools. The TRO system merges GTD principles with best practices form Covey and others. The paper approach is being added soon:

    http://www.priacta.com/Training/troonline.php

    I'd be interested in your reaction.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the tip - I'll check it out!

    -Ben

    ReplyDelete