August 13th 2007 
GTD 
1 comment
Last week I did the first two parts to this series looking at questions you should ask yourself when thinking about designing your GTD system. Over the weekend I had another think and came up with a further three questions. Have any readers found them useful? Can you think of any other questions of your own? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Experienced or beginner?
The danger for a lot of people is to jump in at the deep end. While a lot of focus is given to the tools you can use in GTD, it’s really all about the set of habits you need to build up that encourage productivity. The tools simply help to promote those habits. Until you have a feel for GTD do you really want to buy a complex or expensive system? If you are more experienced you will naturally have a better feel for what works for you.
Fall off the bandwagon often?
As I said above GTD is primarily a set of habits , and habits take time to form. I’m sure a lot of you will have experience of “falling off the bandwagon,” where you skip the weekly review, stop writing down next actions and let stuff pile up. That’s usually a warning sign that your current system needs a rethink. However, if you have a system that does work for you and has done so for some time, then do you necessarily want to shake things up? Even though I have a system that I feel works for me currently, I still tweak it on a weekly basis to fill any holes that show up.
Do I really need it?
Productivity has only really become a major issue in recent times and is quite a big buzzword in many circles. Thus, people can want to become more productive even though their lifestyles don’t really warrant it. David Allen said it best when he talked about cranking widgets; those mindless, stress-free jobs, where you have the same small number of projects and next-actions everyday. Do you really need a system to manage that? If you have lots of emails, phone calls, meetings, documents etc to work through daily then there is naturally a big advantage to it.
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