In my mind to have a cult you need other people, and I’ve never met with anyone for a GTD meetup. To me the point of GTD is for it to be as low drag and out of the way as possible, so that you spend as little time on it as necessary.
It’s a tool in the tool belt like anything else. The key ideas I (try) to use:
- Weekly review (just carve out time to get organized each week in a structured way)
- Inbox / place to capture things
- 2 minute rule - if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it (sometimes 5 depending on the context)
- Contexts to let me think about work and personal items separately (though I keep them physically separate and work stays on work machine).
- Agendas (@person) which is a bucket used for anything and everything I need to talk to the person / team / group about. I’ve got tons of agenda lists.
- Snoozed items - need to change oil in 6 months? Put it in the inbox to call the shop to set up an appointment, and snooze it for 5 months.
- Delegate / Defer / Do workflow for email and (somewhat) zero inbox.
- Horizons of focus, and making sure I’m not too heavily focused in one area or missing one completely.
- Natural planning method is also good.
Viewing GTD as a cult to me is like viewing agile as a cult (which… now that I think about it…). In all seriousness, GTD is a way to think about to do lists and all the incoming information, and presents a way to handle it to get it out of your mind. There are a lot of ways one could do that besides GTD, but the book + tools (I use omnifocus) are well established and mature, so it’s a good and time tested approach.
Its about having the right information at the right time so that you can take the desired (pre-planned) action to achieve some outcome. If you want it to, omnifocus will tell you when you are nearby a physical store (context @bestbuy) and show you the to dos or things to purchase only when you are there (project get kids’ Christmas gift & task buy printer ink). Or if you shop online you could make your context @computer, so when you open the computer you can look at the list and work out of it. I don’t go that far, but some do.
