One of the many side-effects of both Ruby on Rails and del.icio.us is the meme of Gettings Things Done. del.icio.us is full of links about how to organise email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird to follow the rules of GTD. There are plent of @todo and gtd style tags there too. RoR, on the other hand, spawned 43things.com which is full of GTD style articles.
All of which I’m broadly in favour of. GTD is great news as a meme if it means that I’m more likely to come into contact with people who believe that being organised about work is a positive achievement. However, GTD is a meme propagated by someone trying to sell a book and, as such, is ultimately more about Selling More Stock than it is really about Getting Things Done. It’s something of a self-fulfilling prophecy though, as people who fail to get things done according to the GTD plan are clearly not paying it enough attention.
As you can tell, I’m no GTD user.
I believe there is a harder task that GTD fails to acknowledge. To use another meme, the elephant in the room according to GTD, is Seeing Things Through. That’s right, end product. Or, to borrow a much older meme, one that I am far more fond of, Real Artists Ship.
My ongoing resolution for 2006, no, it’s not 800 by 600 or even 1024 by 768, it’s Seeing Things Through.
NPR : The Funniest, and Scariest, Book Ever Written
del.icio.us