Quick Quote: GTD vs. GOE

[Paul Keith]

A lot of you may notice how I'm resurrecting many old GTD concepts lately - this is because I'm recently going on a p2p surge of reading everything David Allen has written that's being seeded on a torrent. (just so I can completely drop my doubts about anything GTD again)

This one is from his 2nd book: Ready for Anything - 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life. (Productivity Principle #41)

Are you an Organizing Groupie?

Just "getting organized" misses the crucial point: the need for thinking and intuitive decision making to get real work done. Once people catch on to the power of organization per se, they sometimes go too far and try to microorganize everything: "Let's create a system so you have to think at all!" But it can't be done. My systems do indeed relieve the mind of the tasks of remembering and reminding as much as I can, but they don't replace the need for regular executive thinking about my stuff. Organizing systems are there purely to serve as crude place-holders for targets and their critical parts and pieces. You must still engage your mind, your intelligence, and your vision to integrate those moving parts into the whole of how you interact with your world. No matter how good you are at creating macros in your spreadsheet or how sophisticated your PDA add-on, you won't be able to push a button, run a formula, and have the result be "Call Fred." Even if it did, you would have to consider a lot more things not on the spreadsheet or in your PDA to trust that judgement about your action decision

If everything's under control, you're going too slow - Mario Andretti

By the way...

Is there any "overkill" in your system? What tools or procedures have you set up that you are not using? What can be eliminated?

Do you feel you need to do more "project management"? Are you examining appropriate details and status of all your projects completely and consistently enough? If not, what could you do to install a more regular review process?

Take this for what you will. My intentions for sharing this quote is not so much to start spreading pirated content in DonationCoder as much as to bring to thought whether the GOE should have a name and concept lift or not. (assuming there's going to be a next GOE)

[barney]

While your motivation can be appreciated, I'm a bit questionable 'bout your source - especially that quote  .

I've never found any of the acronym books to be particularly helpful - except to the author's bank account, of course  .  If you think about it - really think! - you, or most anyone you know, could write such a book.  All it takes is a concept and a bit of creativity - and not all that much creativity.  Most of the major religious texts send the same message, in one form or another.

Admittedly, I'm a fan of Earl Nightingale (sp?), but for the most part, he reiterated the teachings of those gone before.  And the likes of Anthony (Tony) Robbins to Zig Ziglar, simply reiterate truths already told.  I'd deem most of the how to accomplish authors to be in that A-Z list.  No preached methodology is appropriate to all, sometimes not even to the author - that person is selling the methodology, not necessarily living it.

That said, a number of folk do get value from such teachings, mostly from thoughts previously unthunk, thus being inspirational - in that light they can even be mind expanding.

Oh, yeah, methinks the Mario Andretti interior quote was taken slightly out of context.

[Paul Keith]

While your motivation can be appreciated, I'm a bit questionable 'bout your source - especially that quote

Sorry, I'm a little bit confused. I understand the general theme of your reply but I don't really get what you mean by questionable source. David Allen authored Ready for Anything.

The reason why GOE and GTD's relationship is notable is due to the fact that GOE (at least the records in the 2006 sub-forum since I wasn't here from the beginning) is largely based on the idea of experimenting on ways to get organized with GTD being one of it's primary assigned systems not just in some of the assignments but also in how Mark Forster and David Allen are the biggest names DC has interviewed in terms of people that represent the symbol of GOE: http://www.donationcoder.com/podcast/

P.S. Thanks for pointing that out. Maybe you could post the correct context in your next reply.

No preached methodology is appropriate to all, sometimes not even to the author - that person is selling the methodology, not necessarily living it.

This is a much bigger question worthy of it's own thread. If you don't mind I would like to create a separate thread addressing this above issue.