getting things done applications?

On a recent trip to San Francisco it seemed that all my tech friends were talking about “GTD apps” or Getting Things Done applications. It seems this movement sprang out of a book written by David Allen, Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, that first saw the news stands in 2002. The basic premise of Allen’s time management system surrounds gaining perspective and control over the stuff in our life - where stuff are things we want or need to do. The system is delightfully described by Gary Wolfe in Wired as:

1. Collect and describe all the stuff. Everything must be inventoried without distinction or prejudice. Errands, emails, a problem with a friend: It all must be noted for processing. Small objects, such as an invitation or a receipt, go into a pile. Everything else can be represented with a few words on a piece of paper (”find keys,” “change jobs”). Once the stuff is collected, processing begins. Anything that requires two minutes or less is handled on the spot. The remainder is governed by the second rule.

2. All stuff must be handled in a precise way. Allen offers dozens of clever tricks for classifying, labeling, and retrieving stuff. Expert users of GTD never leave old emails cluttering their inbox, for instance. Nor do they have to rifle through a bunch of paper to see if there’s anything crucial they’ve left undone. Emails to be answered are in a separate folder from emails that merely have to be read; there’s a file for every colleague and friend; stuff that must be done has been identified and placed on one of several kinds of to-do lists. Allen calls his to-do lists next-action lists, which are subject to the third rule.

3. Items on next-action lists should be described as concretely as possible. Breaking down stuff into physical actions, Allen says, is the key to getting things done.

The beauty of Allen’s technical, precise and measured system is that it can be stored and processed on most anything: pencil on paper, software applications, etc. So, as the popularity of the book and this system have taken off so has the explosion of GTD software applications that support it.

But seriously, talking with my friends you would think it was a cult. I was repeatedly asked: what were my favorite GTD apps? Of course my off the cuff comment was “pen and post-it” (as I’ve previously mentioned I’m addicted to post-it’s). But I couldn’t stop wondering why my tech friends were so obsessed with time management systems. I mean, really, time management systems have been around in business forever. It then dawned on me: these were technical people, “knowledge workers”, whose life seems to be disappearing in a series of endless mundane things that consume the finite time in their day (meetings, emails, text messages, conference calls, facebook … blah, blah, blah). They were in search of balance and GTD is the latest fad. Add to that the Google Tech Talk series that had David Allen come speak on GTD late last fall and Merlin Mann speak on GTD-lite this spring and it is no wonder that everyone was talking about it.

I’ve now listened and read up on GTD and my go-to GTD app still stands:

standard 3×3 yellow post-it and 0.5mm mechanical pencil.

This has been my time management system since the mid-80’s and has survived The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, day-timers, PDA’s and now GTD. What is yours?