Build the Business of Your Dreams

Welcome to the Cranking Widgets Blog. We exist to help you get more done by showing you ways to be more effective and let go of the stuff that doesn't make you awesome. Be sure to subscribe to our feed and follow us on Twitter here.

Starting Out: Choosing a GTD Implementation (and I Give Stuff Away)

By , on Friday, January 19th, 2007

Fork in the Road

We’ve all been there at least once – we’ve just finished reading GTD and are now sitting in the presence of a myriad of choices as to how to implement the GTD system. What tools shall I use? Digital or Analog (or a hybrid of the two)? It can be quite daunting, to be sure.

One of the purposes of this blog is to keep an account of my experiences as a budding GTDer so that others may avoid some mistakes I’ve made. And, while a choice of implementation isn’t the biggest part of starting GTD, it can sometimes be the one thing that sours newcomers to the entire methodology (i.e., they choose system X, get it all set up, then realize that it’s not going to work for them and decide to scrap the whole GTD idea as a result).

I found such a person during my travels of the old Internet earlier this evening. Darren at the djp blog is looking at all of the hundreds of possible implementation methods and wondering where to turn. Being the analog GTDer that I am, I’ve decided to help Darren out a little bit and possibly influence his decision in the process…

I’m going to send Darren his very own Hipster PDA (and I’ll even include a fancy Pilot G-2 mini, my pen of choice if my Fisher Bullet goes missing). He need only email me his street address (which he can do from here) and it’ll be promptly shipped out.

I truly believe that all GTDers should start with a pure analog system for the same reason I think everybody should learn to drive in a car with a manual transmission – there may come a time when all you have is paper and you’ll have to make it happen. That’ll be a much easier feat if you were all-paper in the past; just like riding a bike, I think.

Darren, welcome to the club. The GTD community is a vibrant one and you’re truly in the company of some masters of the art. Cheers!

Technorati Tags: , ,

If you enjoyed this post…

You'll love getting free and freeing updates when we post new articles.
Enter your email below:

Enjoy these related articles

Reactions

  • http://www.djp72.net/blog darren “djp72″

    THANK YOU!

    and for interest sake – my main work machine at the moment is my trusty old emac.
    i am hoping to upgrade to a new imac later this year.

    all the way from australia- i thank you!

  • http://zenhabits.blogspot.com Leo

    Way to evangelize! I wish someone had gone out of their way for me like that when I first started GTD. Read about my GTD implementation on my blog.

  • http://none gill

    Hi there,
    I bought the book, read it and decided to go the plain old notebook route cause i prefer that to digital…
    i put tabs in, wrote in all my “stuff” etc and now i’m all confused! I don’t know where to start… which makes me think i’m not doin it right! I have lots of next action tabs and all the usual ones.. someday maybe etc. but i used to use my diary/calendar for a to do list and since reading the book i’m tryin just to write day specific tasks etc in there, and when there’s nothin in my diary i don’t do the stuff in the gtd notebook cause it’s so big and i don’t know where to start in it! now i’ve a bigger to do list than ever… its a notebook and it used to be one page… the whole thing is stressin me out but that’s why i think i’m doin it wrong… i want to get into the gtd cult and i can’t! i’m thinkin of goin back to my old ways of a to do list in my diary… although that did the exact thing david allen said… it made me do the un-important things in front of the important ones…have you any advice please? I’d love to do this properly.

  • Shnifti

    I at the same situation as the people you describe. I don't know wich gtd implementation I shall use. Tried Chandler and Thinking Rock. But they were too overbloated especially for my rootcrypted p3 thinkpad. I looked over some webbases implentations of gtd as well but I am still no satisfied. I think It would be better to use papertemplates but I am unsure If an hipster pda would work. It is surely a really cool hack but isn't it too tricky to search in all the leaves? And how do you implement the gtd system including next action list connectod to several contexts and projects? In which way do you use a calendar and how ofter will I have to change the sheets?
    Would be great if you could help. Otherwise I will try a webbase implementation which I can could carry arround with my n810.

    Thanks for help
    Shnifti

Get Free Updates

Enter your email below to get free and freeing updates:

You can opt-out any time.
We don't do spam.

Popular Posts

Search the Site