Comments on: First Look At David Allen’s Making It All Work

By: MIAW + SmartTime « i need a reality check

MIAW + SmartTime « i need a reality check — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 04:16:33 +0000

[...] Jason Spenser Seven years later David Allen still remains a fresh and insightful voice in the field of business and personal development. He electrifies his reader with his profound and poignant down home style that is at once practical as it is philosophical. [...]

By: r

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:25:00 +0000

a succinct and thorough look at success and the steps needed to reach them-Mr.Spencer gives insight on this topic.

By: admin

admin — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:01:16 +0000

Thank you so much Matthew for the excellent responses. Allen compares his system writing perfect code, quoting one programmar aka GTD convert”David you’ve just laid out all the subroutines that need to be run on whatever shows up in your universe. ” Allen also calls his system “system independent” so I used the term open source loosely as outlined in Wikinomics to refer to the fact that people are allowed to tweak his system without there being an uproar from his organization. If you tried to “publish either RPM or Franklin Covey Forms” in detail at soemthing like the DIYplanner they would come after you (the Covey and Robbins companies).

Regarding complication and simplicity this is

The new models of thought an action actually is a matrix that Allenintroduces the Matrix of self-management using “Control” and “Perspective” instead of the Covey Quandrant of “Importance” and “Urgent”. I am going to discuss these in more detail in future articles.

Allen frankly uses Albert Einstein’s famous quote “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” as a reoccuring theme throughout his books. This is Allen’s way of explaining why it uses these complex flow charts to diagram the idea of keeping simply lists. It’s a paradox that I really didn’t explain well enough in this article.

Secondly, David’s multi-layers of “Getting It” are the Six Horizons of Focus that Pavlina completely ignores as does a lot of other people when they attack GTD as not being a good leadership managment system.

Tell me what do you think ( I will be viewing your links in more detail). It’s a real honor to have you responding to my articles.

By: Matthew Cornell

Matthew Cornell — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:18:13 +0000

Thanks for the post. I couldn’t tell from it what the book is actually about, though.

> open source productivity

From the OS def: “practical accessibility to a product’s source (goods and knowledge).” Given this, I’m not sure GTD applies. They have restrictions on how their work can be used, and I think they’re much more limited than OS software. My 2c.

> new models of thought and action

What are they?

> true simplicity of its multi-layers of complexity

This is contradictory. Is it simple, or is it complicated? And what are the layers, specifically?

Inquiring minds want to know!