Finally!
Another blogger in the universe has come to his senses. Mike Vardy wrote tonight about how most people seem to not like productivity systems because “they don’t like systems.” I fully agree with that statement. We engaged on twitter shortly after that and I believe that we both have come to the same conclusion:
Getting Things Done (GTD) is a framework for personal productivity. You can use any (or all) bits of it in whatever form that make you more productive.
Jason and I have always felt that GTD as its core is a framework for people to construct their own system of productivity. I am sure that there are a good many who try to be as canonical as possible. They do this by following the GTD Flowchart to the letter of the law; they keep a separate projects-only list; the keep separate lists for every context they use; and do mind dumps by putting a single idea/task on a sheet of paper. I tried to be as canonical as possible when I was first implementing GTD in mid-2005, but quickly after that I realized that there were parts that I found I did not use.
Today my system is quite aways away from what is considered canonical. Today, a daily index card and a cloud based task list are all that is in my system. You can read more about it on a guest post that I wrote for my friend Beth’s blog. The only change is that I am looking at using asana for my task manager, based on Mr. Vardy glowing reviews of it.
Productivity is about getting things done (notice the lowercase letters). NOTHING ELSE.
If you are not getting things done, you are not being productive.
