Mar 16th, 2009 |
A half hour discussion with David Allen of The David Allen Company. We intended to record a ten minute segment and wound up talking for a half hour. David has just completed the first GTD Summit, a gathering of practitioners and enthusiasts of the ‘Getting Things Done’ methodology in a conference format.
This is a free flowing unedited conversation: the core of the discussion is around the GTD methodology, outlined in David’s book “Getting Things Done: The art of stress free productivity‘. There are some fascinating insights in this conversation: David is clear that the individual grounding that is a major part of GTD mastery is a precursor to the application of organizational GTD to larger groups. This approach originating from individuals taking responsibility for their actions comes much greater organizational clarity.
As a people processes and communication focused consultant and mentor, David believes the big vendors are still years away from creating viable collaboration software: the GTD methodology is one way to deal with email information overload.
We also discuss David’s remarkable experience with Twitter: in the two weeks he has had a presence as @gtdguy he has picked up 95 thousand followers and rising. In the end it all comes down to leadership, love and life balance to get the grounded direction we all seek, and to work well with others.
Hey Oliver, So we meet again here. And yeah, GTD Summit was a remarkable event. Am just pondering how I oughta blog about it.
David’s twitter launch-to-orbit alone is reason enough to suspect that there is more than a popular productivity tool here. In fact, my biggest surprise from the summit was how _little_ we talked about productivity per se, and how much we focused instead on what you can do with the precious freed-up bandwidth you get when your productivity method actually works.
That’s the true test. A good productivity method is one that works so well, it fades into the background.
Venkat
Great interview.
I would recommend checking out http://www.Gtdagenda.com for an online GTD manager.
For me, I get tons of emails I forget to respond to. As far as GTD, plugins like Outlook Track-It for Outlook 2007 work amazingly. You can flag emails to remind you to follow up and reply.
Really It is an interesting and Intellectual post. I am fully satisfied with the information provided in the post.