I just found this videocast of an interview with David Allen on the the BNet Intercom site.
Now, I’ve heard David Allen describe GTD a number of times, but I’ve never heard such a succinct answer to the question of what GTD is, as the one he gave in this interview. He described GTD as:
What’s the work that you need to do, to figure out what you need to do, when the work that you need to do doesn’t let you know what you need to do?
He said it as if he’d said it a million times before, without the slightest pause or hesitation, as if it was just common sense. The guy is obviously a genius.
If you describe GTD in this way, it’s quite easy to see why you would use it. GTD is not really about what is important to you, your fundamental life principles, or roles you play in life. It’s not even really about setting priorities. It’s simply about having a system to get things done to help you remember what you are supposed to do, when you can do it. It’s about making things so simple, that breaking those things down into manageable lists is more than enough to actually get them done.
Now a confession: the biggest problem for me is that I’m too lazy and disorganized even to figure out regularly what I need to do. So, although I believe that GTD is an excellent way of organizing my life, my next question would be, “how can I get the work that I need to do let me know what I need to do, when I need to do it?”
And that is exactly what I am trying to do with tudutu.
