Email guru: BlackBerries are irrelevant

• 
• 

 1 of 2

Gallery

By Tim Danton

Posted on 16 Jan 2009 at 12:42

Author David Allen's hugely popular Getting Things Done is an antidote to the modern-day curse of being engulfed by email and the other demands on your working day.

His system demands that workers keep an entirely empty inbox and deal with any email immediately - provided it doesn't take longer than two minutes.

Here he tells PC Pro editor Tim Danton how his system works, why BlackBerries are a power toy too far and why learning to clear your inbox is like learning Russian.

Getting Things Done asks people, in many cases, to completely change their way of working. So how do you make them change?

GTD is like learning any art or craft, it takes two years. It's going to take you two years to learn Russian or Italian or to tango or to learn the banjo, right? So when you're talking about learning a new set of behaviours - it's going to take time.

But even to be aware of GTD has a huge amount of value, as you can go, wow, in case I ever really get in trouble I know there's a way out.

I think a lot of the reason GTD hit such a nerve is that not a lot of people implemented all or most of it, but everybody was glad to know it was there.

So to some degree, just to know that you've got a safety net there so that if it really gets so bad you can get yourself out - in a way, that makes it better. If you never knew there was a way out, then you live with this numbing angst.

Do you need to throw yourself wholeheartedly into GTD for it to work effectively?

Yes and no. If all you did was get the two-minute rule [where, if you can deal with an email or task in two minutes, you do so immediately] then you'll thank me the rest of your life. You know, it'll give you an extra six months in every year [laughs].

The real power of GTD is having an extended mind, in that you're using the system as a placeholder for open loops and incomplete stuff you need to keep track of. If you're trying to use your head for that then good luck. And if you still have some of that in your head then you won't fully trust, psychologically, everything that's out in your system so you'll still try to hang on.

There are very few people that actually do [GTD] completely and therefore there are very few people who really taste it. That's a whole different game when your head is not being used to remind, but instead being used to think.

GTD is still number 43 on all of Amazon this morning and it's eight years old. I think it's started to hit a nerve because I think we're starting to reach a critical mass out there of people who are going "Wait a minute, not only does this system work but it's a must-have rather than a nice-to-have".

In terms of technology, what's the biggest obstacle to people working effectively?

Out of sight, out of mind. I've got a lot of very sophisticated GTDers that are going back to paper right now as they it makes them more conscious. You can get so numbed into just whipping stuff into your computer and sticking it on to a list that you never look at.

The technology still doesn't really map to the way your brain maps. You'd much rather walk into a room and see your life all around the walls. It would be a lot easier for you to real quickly say "Hey, I'm sorry Tim you now have three minutes to figure out what you need to do for the rest of today given everything in your life."

You with a computer and me with the stuff on the wall, I win.

My stuff is on the computer because I need it. My head's empty, so I have to get into the computer to find it. It comes back to the point: are you trusting your head or an extended system to give you the options of what you've got to do? And if you're still trusting your head, you will not be motivated to click, click, click, scan, click, scroll, page down, oops, where was it... give me a break! I'm gonna lose you with the first click.