chirmer said:
... using "artificial" dates when in fact, we are not. We are using hard deadlines. There just seem to be a lot of us with structured projects that must be done by certain dates, and therefore we must use dates
I can understand that perfectly. Often there can seem to be greater differences of opinion between us on the forum than there actually are, as Longstreet and I have also concluded when debating this very issue.
For example, I know and agree that when working in a collaborative project or organization, most of the planning is, and must be, date based. I do not see any other way when agreeing to a plan among different people. So, all those dates from the agreed master plan are then definitely hard input to your own personal plan. No argument there.
At the other end of the spectrum we have the typical low-priority or backlog things that no one in the world would put a date on, not even the fiercest date-planner.
That essentially leaves us with more the difficult gray zone, the "upper" part of which is the most difficult, those tasks that are very time critical but not necessarily tied to any exact day in particular - as long as it happens very soon indeed. I have lots of those myself. A typical example is if I say to a potential high-value customer that I will send them something as soon as I can. There is no date, but it is still very time critical. I, too, miss a prescribed way in core GTD 2001 to deal with these. I am not happy with the complementary dating approach that I now keep hearing about (even if it comes from DA himself and has been described correctly), so I use colors, but I do agree that these critical things need to be highlighted in one way or another.
What I tried to express in my earlier post above was just my surprise at the sheer numbers of people why say (in other threads) that they are date-planning. I had not expected that on this forum (maybe on the RTM forum, or the Toodledo forum, but I had not expected it here, not to that extent)
But I appreciate your input. It makes sense to me, even if I do not quite handle it like that myself.
Longstreet said:
One CAN do things a little differently than what was in the original 2001 book. Of course, you can still follow that book to the letter.
I actually do not
follow GTD at all. GTD just happens to coincide with my own system that I have honed since the late '70s. I never used soft dates. I never accepted the date planning methodologies of the '80s. I wanted to use hard fact as a base, and make the decisions as I ago, so that is what I did. I struggled a lot to get this onto a computer in the late '90s. When I finally understood, only in 2011, that there is this guy on the planet who actually wrote a book about this ten years earlier and also has apps named after him, and who essentially preaches what I preach, I decided it is time to stop fighting my own war with app developers who keep re-inventing ever newer versions of snooze buttons and alarm bells. I though maybe I had found a "home" of like-minded people with GTD. And to some extent I think I have. It is much "worse" at the RTM forum or the Doit forum. Those people are way more date-crazed than any of you guys here ;-) But I do prefer a "hard landscape" outlook.
Longstreet said:
It is what works best for each of us is how we should approach our GTD system.
Yes, I have heard that one before. So if I drive a Mercedes and choose to call it GTD, then my car is a GTD. Fine. Great. With this interpretation, the word GTD actually only means "works for me" (WFM?). Let's say as a scientist you were to compare two methods, one being called "molar extraction" and the other WFM, the latter just being a summary term for any method ever invented (whatever has worked for someone - ancient herbs, whisky, knock on the head, prayers ... anything, including molar extraction). How would you actually go about making the comparison between something well-defined and something only vaguely defined? For example, how would you describe the difference between GTD and DIT? Or between GTD and collaborative project planning?