But the key point is that GTD is trying to help you answer one question: 'what should I work on next'.
It offers no help with the question: 'Can I get all these different pieces of work done by their various deadlines (and how hard I am going to have to work to get them done)' And that is the very important thing for many of us. The first is also important - which is why I stick with MLO. And yes, the beauty of MLO is that it can support different ways of working. My dispute is with those who argue, you don't need this 'calendar/planning/gantt' capability because GTD says you don't need it. So given that MLO can support multiple ways of working, we would like extended a bit to support our particular way of working. And whilst I agree that adding this facility is not going to be easy, I do think it is possible. I have lots of ideas - drawing in particularly on some of the forms and techniques used with the Pomodoro Technique - only problem is that I am flat out designing a different system for one of my clients at the moment. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dwight Sent: 24 January 2011 7:09 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MLO] Re: Preventing bottlenecks due to conflicting/crashing project deadlines I'm not much of a GTD expert. But I believe that there's a misunderstanding or misquote. I believe that GTD suggests a better way to do forward planning, and that better way is to collect all your tasks and obligations in one place, identify those that have actual timing constraints, identify the context within which each is actionable, assign importance (and urgency?) as well as level of effort and duration, then use all of those factors to pick the most productive thing to work on right now. That's forward planning, I would think. What I think GTD discourages is assigning a date "next Monday" to a task just because it's important and I hope it gets done next Monday. Because we all know that something will come up and it will get pushed to Tuesday, and we will end up investing time that could have been used to get things done, on rescheduling the task from Monday to Tuesday then to Wednesday until it finally gets done. GTD may not be the appropriate methodology if you are managing 20 people on a 10,000 hour project with incentives and penalties. But MLO can be used with methodologies other than GTD. -Dwight Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T -----Original Message----- From: Mike T <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2011 18:22:49 To: MyLifeOrganized<[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: [MLO] Re: Preventing bottlenecks due to conflicting/crashing project deadlines On Jan 23, 3:27 am, "Richard Collings" <[email protected]> wrote: > > I think it is partly the GTD mindset that says (as far as I understand) > "don't bother with forward planning it is a waste of time.". This works > fine for things like household tasks where there are no particular deadlines > but is useless for you and I who have clients/customers who expect things > done by certain dates and, rightly, are not very happy when you miss those > dates. > While I wouldn't claim to be a GTD expert, I do think this is a caricature of the GTD approach. In fact Allen says that one reason people are so enthused when they first start down the GTD path is that for perhaps the first time they actually see all the things they have committed to laid out in front of them. He then goes on to say that many people never do anything in the GTD system past the capture phase since this alone can make such a difference in their life. This seems difficult to reconcile with a claim that GTD rejects forward planning, but maybe its just me... And in fact GTD does recommend regular reviews of your immediate tasks, your projects, your longer goals, as often as you need to do so to keep on top of them. While MLO may not provide a mechanism for easily seeing conflicts or overscheduling in the way that Gantt charts, Microsoft Project, etc. do that is hardly something to lay at the feet of GTD. MLO is a tool for implementing a GTD approach, it is not GTD. As has been said, the map is not the territory. For many people MLO provides sufficient tools to implement a GTD approach, but for others it may not be enough (or even useful). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized?hl=en.
