Getting Things Done
Getting Things Done (GTD) is a method of gaining control of your life articulated by David Allen in his 2001 book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.
Allen’s mantra can best be summarized as follows:
Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up — not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you’re doing (and not doing) at any time.
Essentially, he calls for us to front-end our decision-making in order to gain control and improve productivity, instead of wasting time and energy worrying.
Google Mail and Calendar products are freely available and nearly ubiquitous. While either was designed to be used with GTD, both are flexible enough to cover all the necessities. If you use Firefox with GMail, there is even an extension for Firefox, GTD Inbox, that optimizes the GMail experience for GTD-ers everywhere.
This blog is about my experience with GTD and Google.
