GTD Fast
I first heard about GTD from the mercola.com website. The initial recommendation on that site told me to save my $ and buy the book only, not the audio tracks, since the same info was in the book.
If you are truly hard up for $, I would buy the GTD book only. It is less expensive and it will be much easier to implement the system using the book.
If you've read and implemented the book and you, like me, think GTD is the greatest thing since the invention of Arabic numerals, then you might want to deepen your understanding of the system.
I bought the audio tracks with some trepidation. I figured the book probably told me everything I need to know. It does. But it was enlightening to me to get the same information presented in a different way.
Reading the book, I felt as if I were some super high-pressured bigwig who works 75 hours a week and David was spending the weekend with me showing me how to implement the system. I suppose that's how David made the bulk of his $ before the book was published (just a guess).
In the book David basically takes you through an implementation where you set everything up at once. You're doing this because you just paid $10,000 ( :lol: another wild guess) for two days with DA and you want to learn everything you possibly can.
In my real world I implemented slowly over days, weeks, months (?).
The book is about DA sitting down with you one-on-one. The audio tracks are DA lecturing to what seems to be a rather large audience. It is a two-day workshop. There are lots of exercises, which are basically practice sessions, to get you to start thinking GTD-like, so that when you get back to the office you can begin your implementation.
Since I am obsessed (kudos to CosmoGTD for allowing me this bit of self-insight :wink: ) with GTD because I believe it is of extraordinary value, I find it useful to hear the same information presented differently.
As others mentioned, David adds more humor to the audio presentation than he has in the text. That's nice but not sufficient to make it worthwhile.
What I have found is that hearing the same info in a different presentation allows me to attend better to particular aspects of the system that I did give sufficient attention to in the text format. For example, I know that it is in my interest to structure my NAs in the form of the next physical action I will take. But I have not been as rigorous as I could be in following this precept.
Now that I have listened to the audio version, and have heard the same info but with different emphases, I have a better understanding of the motivation behind this recommendation. DA says (obviously with exaggeration) that he only thinks once a week. He means that he only thinks during his weekly review. But, I interpret this to mean that we only think during processing. Processing is when we
decide what the next action is. This is the heavy thinking. The heavy lifting (i.e., execution), as DA explains it, will be physically taxing perhaps, but not intellectually taxing because the intellectual work is done during the processing stage.
So, this whole distinction between intellectual or knowledge worker on the one hand and physical or material worker on the other fits right in with the next action concept.
Doing the action will be analogous to stamping out widgets. I will essentially be an unpressured drone because the thinking "I" set the work plan for the doing "I" back in the Processing stage.
Just as the modern workplace separates mental from manual work so I, as a mental worker, must make the separation in my daily existence, to keep myself "stress-free". I do this by making my "doing" as akin to manual work as it can be by ridding it as much as possible from stressful decision making.
So not only does GTD encourage us to become more obsessive-compulsive, it encourages us to adopt schizophrenic tendencies. We will divide what seems to be our unitary self into two separate and distinct selves. The thinking "I" processes daily and reviews weekly. The thinking "I" does hard work but is active for only a short proportion of the day. The doing "I" is active most of the time but it is not making decisions--merely carrying them out--therefore it experiences little stress.
So, now you don't need to buy the audio tracks because I've told you everything in them that's important and not in the book.
