a million monkeys typing

Mmmm… Hate Mail….

Posted January 28th, 2005 at 07:41am

In my past post, I mentioned a few ways in which –for me– GTD tends to fall short. What I didn’t expect was the dozen or so flame mails I received in response. I obviously struck a nerve somewhere.

Some choice quotes:

• If GTD does n’t meet your needs, then you are doing it wrong.
• GTD does everything an dmore. my life changed wehn i started using it, and you dont have any rite to convince people otherwise
• Your [sic] a [expletive] [expletive] if you think that your [sic] [expletive] getting things done right.
• you give people the wrong impression. gtd works.
• y dont you try christanity, you [expletive]

There were one or two well-written, thought-provoking messages among those disagreeing with me (thank you, Dawn and RJ), but most of them are along the lines of the above.

People, remember this: GTD is not a religion. It is simply a way of introducing efficiencies into one’s life: it is a process, a 1-2-3 method of (duh) getting things done. I know that GTD is the height of geek fashion right now, and it is quite effective for many people, especially more procedurally-minded folks like myself, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t infallable, or that it addresses everything for everybody.

My point was simply that GTD is more finely-tuned for pragmatic, day-to-day tasks and events. This is great, and this is what I use it for. However, I have begun to yearn for something a little higher-up in terms of long-term goals and character-building. I am not looking for a religion: I am looking for a way to integrate such bigger-picture objectives into shorter-term tasks, and I find that GTD –or at least the way in which I implement GTD– doesn’t do an adequate job of doing this, even with the “Runway to 50K feet” sections that (to me) seemed tacked onto the end of an otherwise effective system. I am, fundamentally, trying to integrate philosophy with methodology, and am seeking ways to do this. The first step was simply to acknowledge that Getting Things Done falls short in this regard for me.

My apologies to the “cult of GTD”, if I have sullied their altar in any way. Normal organisational junkies, we now return to our regular scheduled programming.