GTD Proves Bigger Than David Allen

A googling of GTD (Getting Things Done) and the word "cult" returns 143,000 Web pages. But for all this discussion of whether GTD and its devoted following constitute a cult, the idea seems pretty counterintuitive. What immediately differentiates GTD from a cult is that there isn't much in the way of requirements, or hard and fast rituals with GTD. You won't find any black-and-white Nikes or flights to Guyana within.

Rather, it's straightforward to implement, populist and democratic, like a self-help version of Wikipedia. So, on a weekly basis, we see new GTD blogs popping up as well as new productivity tricks, better known as GTD hacks. Allen provides his thoughts on the evolution of his system for publications like Wired and the Huffington Post, but it's clear that he's not steering this ship, he just created the initial passage plan. He can only laugh and shrug his shoulders when the legion of techies that swear by his system dream up another GTD-friendly application like the just-released Power To-Do List created by Five O'Clock Software. Allen espouses paper and pencil, you see, he finds it quicker and handier.

It took Allen 25 years to come up with the details of the system, but the beauty of it, and perhaps the reason why people feel that they can tinker with it and add to it, is that it feels like something you would have come up with on your own if you spent enough time pondering productivity.

For more on GTD, see the BNET Feature, "Managing Your Multitasking."

(Picture of GTD-ready "Hipster PDA" via Flickr user Teo, CC 2.0)