I finished reading(well listening) to GTD last week and started implementing the system this past week. Though I've basically taken a bunch of ideas from it and changed it to fit my work and lifestyle(I also switched to time based contexts over location mostly). I kept the processes the same. I also almost never have paperwork so I ignored all the stuff about labellers and filing cabinets.
The community around the book is seriously full of weirdly obsessive people though. I've read discussions where people talk about how they've been studying it for 3-6 years and just now feel like they are starting to really get it and if you haven't put that much effort into it you won't get it. I constantly feel like I'm missing out on something because I just didn't find it that hard to understand?
The new book apparently drops all the talk about palm pilots which I'm sure is nice but from what I've read if you read the original you probably won't have much to gain from reading this one.
3-6 years? Sounds like someone who is in love with preparing for the actual work. I know this situation - whether it is setting up your development environment, getting the proper running gear if you want to get in shape or researching the best controller for your DAW (I used to work in audio production)...or reading books on how to get things done. These are tasks that easily provide a feeling of accomplishment, without ever tackling the actual work, the hard problems.
Don't get me wrong - it's good to prepare and I appreciate being organized, but it's very easy to fall into the trap of an endless preparing cycle. At some point there aren't any remaining benefits and all that is left to do, is the actual doing.
> it's good to prepare and I appreciate being organized, but it's very easy to fall into the trap of an endless preparing cycle.
I fall into that trap very often. If I'm learning a new programming language, I'll read every book and article I can find about it, try to learn best practices an architecture approaches, before even thinking about starting to write an experimental program in it. Sometimes I think I should just dig in, and research things on the fly. The worst is that I tend to repeat that mistake :-) It seams hard to change person's nature/mindset.
People take years to understand something like I say it took me 20 years to learn how to build software systems. I didn't spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 20 years educating myself. It was bits and spurts, interspersed with other goals and learning how building software systems relates to those other goals and my self and my life.
In other words, hard things are hard and if it's not hard, it's not worth learning. Twenty years from now I'm sure I'll be saying that it took me forty years to learn how to code.
My experience with it was really different. I didn't read GTD first. I read this: http://www.brool.com/index.php/using-org-mode-with-gtd. Then I read this: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/orgmode.html. I thought, hey, this idea of having a trusted system and getting things I needed to do out of my brain and into the system might really help. I also loved the idea of putting my todos in contexts like "home" "office" "lunch" "driving". Those two simple things really made a huge difference for me...
The community around the book is seriously full of weirdly obsessive people though. I've read discussions where people talk about how they've been studying it for 3-6 years and just now feel like they are starting to really get it and if you haven't put that much effort into it you won't get it. I constantly feel like I'm missing out on something because I just didn't find it that hard to understand?
The new book apparently drops all the talk about palm pilots which I'm sure is nice but from what I've read if you read the original you probably won't have much to gain from reading this one.