Task managers - what should they be able to do?

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Apr 1, 2008 at 03:27 PM

Graham, I find your comments on GTD being American-centric and other cultures interesting, and would like to invite you to join our discussion on the Yahoo GTD group. This group, which I own, is one of the largest GTD groups on the net with about 6,000 plus members. We have talked about many aspects of GTD, but I cannot recall that we looked in any detail at the points that you raise.

Our group often discusses various software alternatives for GTD also. But some of us are more paper oriented, and prefer talking about the latest sales at Levenger, and what’s happening in the high tech world of fountain pens and inks—actually, there is a high tech fountain pen ink, developed by Noodler; it is water based as all fountain pen inks need to be for the health of the pen, but a special chemical in the ink immediately binds the ink tot he cellulose in paper, thus making it truly permanent, non-smudgeable, etc.

Anyone here is also welcome to join us in our discussions, which have made references from tie to time to this group.

Daly

Discuss and learn about David Allen’s Getting Things Done:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Getting_Things_Done/

Graham Rhind wrote:
>>Graham, can you
>>point me to your Amazon review? I don’t have time to wade through the
>hundreds of
>>comments.
>>
>>Jack
> >This is what I wrote in my GTD review:
> >“As the
>author admits throughout this book, it contains little more than good common sense.
>There’s nothing wrong with this - many people need common sense solutions to be
>spelled out to them. However, it’s a real slog to get through this book - the material is
>dry and it could have been better written and less repetitive.
> >The book is very
>USA-centric. It annoyingly uses local product names, for example, that won’t mean
>much to people outside the USA. Furthermore, despite Allen’s protests to the
>contrary, I would contend that his system needs tweaking to make it more useful for
>many people outside his own main area of experience (white collar higher management
>in Western societies). Understandably, Allen’s experience with those of us in other
>jobs and in other cultures and who wouldn’t dream of hiring a consultant to tell us how
>to organise ourselves, let alone be able to pay them, is limited, and though the main
>(common sense) approach is fine, it can be approached more flexibly than Allen
>suggests.
> >I do have to ask myself how Allen’s customers had managed to become top
>executives of large companies without being able to organise themselves, even with
>all the resources at their disposal ...”
> >Graham
>