Merlin Mann recently described some experimenting with a Mac application, iGTD. Strangely, what most caught my attention was his reference to the enormous amount of competition that this application has, and he gives a link that shows competing Mac GTD applications via versiontracker. Of course there is a lot of Windows-based competition in the GTD applications area as well.
This reminded me of how much I have personally wasted looking for the perfect GTD app. And, it reminded me of how many others are doing the same thing (all you have to do to see this is look through popular GTD forums). You can almost read between the lines on many of these posts that those looking for new apps are really looking for something to make them actually do their actions … of course, no application can do that.
Some experimenting is good, of course. In fact, I encourage it. Sometimes you just have to step out of your routine and try new things. But, the real beauty of GTD is that it can be implemented with the built-in applications on most PDAs. And it can be implemented with plain old paper. If you have tried using these and couldn’t get GTD to work for you, my hunch is that you weren’t really implementing GTD properly, OR, maybe you need to switch to a different time management approach.
I would say the same for the Covey approach time management: if you can’t get it to work with basic tools, then you probably need to try a different time management approach, not just another application.
With either the GTD or Covey approaches, once you get them to work on the basic systems, then you might want to look for ways to tweak the systems. But, as you experiment, bear in mind that some specialized applications do not support portability between different devices (such as your laptop and PDA).
If you find yourself experimenting too much, it might be time to simplify and slip back to the basics.
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