Planning to create a crowd-sourced list of tips on Quora.com on: How best to use GTD

S

Ship69

0
Hi

I had this idea in the night to start a thread on Quora (or somewhere else where users can vote things up and down) asking:

- "What are the core underlying principles behind David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) and what is the best bit of advice you can give users?"

I am hoping to end up with is a crowd-sourced list of tips on how best to use GTD that might be quite useful for beginners, with all the most important/popular tips at the top of the list.

J

P.S. Can anyone suggest anywhere better than Quora to build a crowd-sourced document through voting things up and down?
 
I have my doubts whether it will be useful. The best tip is probably to simply read David Allen's books. Beyond that, there is very little agreement on anything, which is why I doubt that such a forum thread would be able to produce any distinct conclusions.
 
Folke said:
I have my doubts whether it will be useful. The best tip is probably to simply read David Allen's books. Beyond that, there is very little agreement on anything, which is why I doubt that such a forum thread would be able to produce any distinct conclusions.
Click to expand...
Point taken... However nonetheless David Allen has 1.2 million followers on Twitter so the fundamental/key points of what he himself says must be considered useful by rather a lot of people.

Do you think it would be best to focus on top tips or fundamental principles behind GTD?

What I find intriguing is that a fair number of people seem to like GTD but use their own version of it. In effect, modified GTD. I also understand that David Allen will be publishing a new book later this year. It will be interesting to see how his own views have evolved since 2004.
 
@Ship69,

I think you will find that David Allen Company has already done all of this. Have a look around the home page of the website, and check out the store for the system guides and maps.
 
Ship69 said:
- "What are the core underlying principles behind David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) and what is the best bit of advice you can give users?"

I am hoping to end up with is a crowd-sourced list of tips on how best to use GTD that might be quite useful for beginners, with all the most important/popular tips at the top of the list.
Click to expand...
Never used Quora and wouldn't go just to respond.

OTOH there are hundreds of tips and tricks availanle directly from David Allen Co both free and paid for. The various tips and suggestions discuss all the various ways people can adapt GTD to their specific needs.

Other places would be here, you'll likely get more feedback from people here on the forums. No voting per se but I think voting on features/tips is a vastly overrated way to get information. A lot of people won't bother to vote because it's a hassle to go through and select what you do and don't like. You're creating a document from an unreliable sample so the results will not be accurate nor even particularly statistically significant because your methodology is suspect. That would make me totally ignore any results because they are created from irrelevant and inaccurate data.
 
Oogiem - I hear you about unreliability etc. However at core this viewpoint of what is in effect crowd-sourcing seems to be becoming increasingly out-of-date. Take for example Wikipedia. Even though you cannot trust a single word that it says, due to various checks & balances it ends up being frankly astonishingly accurate overall. I'm not at all sure that Quora is the correct tool however voting stuff up or down on Quora is trivial - a single click.
 
I say go for it. What is the worst thing that could happen? The effort to post is very small, so you aren't risking much. :-)

would just make your question very specific, or you will get very general answers. (and even if it is specific you will still get many general answers back)
 
I'm not going to offer an opinion on whether or not it will work as first of all, you didn't ask for it, and second I don't think it's relevant - we'll only know once you try and like JamesT said - this is a low cost risk ;).

Quora seems like an ok bet although I do think that many GTD'er or potential GTD'ers have joined a number of social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. So I think if you want to connect to a larger number of folks you should add in some way to propagate to those channels. Quora has a couple of automatic links but you may need to supplement.

It all comes down to how you structure it because there are so many practices within GTD, I can imagine Quora not quite being flexible enough. So I wonder if a polling solution like SurveyMonkey is easier to configure.

Good luck!

Enyo
www.enyonam.com
 
The wisdom of crowds...

People have a perfect memory so they will vote down the ridiculous idea of writing things down...

People hate consistent routines so they will vote down the ridiculous idea of Weekly Reviews...

People have too much to do so the will vote down the ridiculous idea of putting actions on context list and maintaining the system...
 
Give it a try and see what happens. Personally, at the end of the day, each person has to decide how best to implement GTD for themselves. I think GTD is rather personal and what works for one doesn't work for another. So, I am not sure crowd sourcing will result in anything meaningful. But that is just my opinion I am only somewhat familiar with crowd sourcing, but only in a base2 world.
 
To get clear I was thinking about a crowd-authored description of what GTD really is.
Perhaps what is required is a WikiPedia page - except that every sentence on Wikipedia is supposed to be backed up by published material.
 
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