Gets Things Done.

Because buying new running shoes is more fun than actually running is an interesting and very complete kind of background conversation one could walk into and learn all about this popular online trend (more later) about getting things done. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen seems to have really sparked some technology. I’m not sure if I buy it all.

Palm Pilots have been wide spread for well over 7 years now. I don’t understand how web based versions of the common PDA applications are going to help people get more organized. If anything I would think they would be far more difficult to use. The power that the web does bring to the table is that of colaboration. Imagine a network of your coworkers or colaborators (think soccer moms) all communicating, not just with email, but with flexible and beautiful web tools such as SproutLiner, Ta-da Lists, Trumba, , Basecamp, and/or a good old Wiki.

I don’t understand the cost associated with these web services. It seems that for any team or moderately sized organization the cost of configuring similar tools, could easily configure tools themselves. Maybe that is just the nerd in my finding it easy to roll out nearly any web application. Such tools have been available for years. Wiki’s, bulletin boards, email lists, and other online tools, help teams work more efficiently.

All of these tools seem to be supported and advocated by a seemingly large GTD community. These are the Getting Things Done people. With a subtitle of all your tasks are belong to you, how can you resist the nerd in these organizers? (Also, I wonder if the nerd twenty-somethings of yester-year who loved all your base are now the late twenty-somethings of getting things done) Joel Spolsky wrote that the most important thing about getting hired at his company is “gets things done”. So maybe nerd everywhere are realizing that just being able to code, or knowing how things work is not enough. The 43Folders wiki has a nice summary of GTD. The strong focus on “Next Action” sounds appealing. I’ve been in a hell of a rut lately, and I’ve blamed it mostly on my tiresome comute and boring job. This type of thing may be good for me.

Does this mean I will purchase and read this book? Probably not anytime soon. But I’ll file it away in my brain, so that I’ll remember that it exists when I need to. But I’ll have absolutely no idea what it is called, or how to retrieve these details.