I receive a free email newsletter from Dr. Joseph Mercola. I've tried a number of things he has recommended in the past and none of them were of any value to me at all. He once raved about some Brian Tracy book. I had never heard of Brian Tracy. I bought the book and it added nothing to my life.
Mercola spoke highly of GTD. I went into GTD totally jaded. I felt I didn't have much to lose, but the odds of my gaining much from another self-help book were quite low.
I feel forever indebted to Dr. Joseph Mercola for turning me on to GTD. GTD has truly transformed my life. If I can get one nugget every two years from mercola.com that is as valuable as GTD has been, then I will be quite fortunate.
There have been past discussions about what it is that distinguishes those people (like me) for whom GTD is a godsend, and those who get nothing out of it. I don't think anyone has come up with a truly satisfactory answer. I am just grateful that Mercola was able to grasp the genius of GTD and that he shared GTD with his millions of subscribers.
That said, GTD cannot accomplish miracles. Personally, my life still has a lot of stress. There is no formula for making the right decisions and doing the right things. GTD is not a formula for success. GTD is a technique, like Mindmaps or Gantt Charts for flow charts. GTD is an enormously effective technique. But the user has to be smart enough to recognize that GTD will not do the work for her, GTD will not make the decision for her, and GTD will not get her out of a jam. GTD is a structure--and enormously powerful and effective structure--for doing, deciding, and creating. I like to think that as Arabic numerals were to Roman numerals, so GTD is to traditional planning. Arabic numerals don't eliminate errors, they just reduce them relative to Roman numerals.
