David Allen reveals his GTD APP (Reaction)

what's up youtube in this video i'm reacting to david allen outlining his ideal app for getting things done it's an excerpt from a talk he gave at a seminar which was recorded and published on youtube as well so i'll link the original video in the description interesting to me because i've been practicing the gtd method for many years now and on this channel i've got dozens upon dozens of tutorials outlining how you can use all kinds of apps for the gtd methods david allen creator of the method has been critical of many of these apps in some interviews that i've seen i believe even follows a primarily paper based method so i'm very curious to see how he actually sees this how does he view an app for gcd this is a fictional sketch if i recall correctly i haven't seen the presentation i have seen the sketches before but the david allen company hasn't ever released a gtd app of their own there are a few ones that have been built for gtd like nirvana or facile things both of which i've reviewed on my channel as well but i'm curious to see how david allen views all this let's dive into the video and see what he has to say i had a topic called the gtd app right i actually created the ultimate gtd app i have it i think he's being a bit cheeky here i've seen him act this way in a few interviews as well look at his face i don't think he's 100 serious here obviously we know that he hasn't released an actual gtd app as of yet willing to give it to you by the way because you know in the newsletter soon if you get our gtd newsletter hopefully you all do i'll give you a link to this there's the home page that's what i want to see when i hit f1 right i want to see what got to happen today what i need to know about today what needs to happen specifically on the time today and i need to see what just happens sometime to this is interesting this sketch on the left top hand side we can see the inbox we see different buttons for projects next actions waiting for calendar and so on and so forth which is something i've seen very few apps implemented by in their default design i remember amazing marvin has something like this in their pre-built gtd setup however that also has some flaws so i used that and improved upon it and i have a video on that as well what i really like about this initial sketch is how the calendar is shown instead of only this classical view with time boxes it shows today's date which happens to be sunday april 10th in this presentation i guess in the front view but just like in a physical tickler file there are these days that follow after sunday that you may be able to scroll through in his design here and of course the focus on next actions on the left hand side now in his case that seems to be this kind of block approach as well calls other errands etc as example contexts personally i think filters can perform this role just fine so there's actually a more focused view to next actions than what he's proposing here but i haven't even given him the chance to speak to it in detail so let's continue the video today for sure i need to have all the rest of it at my fingertips so i can see longer or shorter on the process i need to see then the other stuff i need to do in and around what's on my calendar and quickly be able to see a map of all the projects i have i also by the way want to see and want to have the ability to be able to hit a note anywhere on my computer and a post that shows up and it drops into an end basket and also the size of that in basket will change color as it grows and it will be on the corner of my screen all the time there's a few apps that actually allow you to do this tic tick comes to mind primarily because they have a desktop widget and several hotkeys to easily do exactly what david allen just mentioned to capture new thoughts new inputs and for mobile this is even more accessible todoist for example has a fantastic widget that you can just put on your home screen press plus enter inputs in various different ways right going to let me know how many projects i have that don't have next actions on them and any previous things i thought i was supposed to do on a day that went forward and didn't get done i need to see that that f1 that's what yeah basically an overdue list so if items have a due date associated with the time that's before now you'll want to see that and it's kind of nudging you to think about it i agree and that's what many apps allow you to do as well honestly you want to hit f1 now by the way each one of those things each one of those boxes you could click on any one of those and they will take you to other uh other things just if you're processing your own basket that should look a little familiar to you folks it's going to do that but as you're doing going through that each one of those things when you click will take you to that area so that you can then manage that appropriately and you know the right way yeah that's a good point and i think this is already the next screen so i'll scroll back a little bit because here talks about the processing workflow of gtd anything that's captured is just stuff until you've defined what it is and you can see that that's one of the first questions is this actionable yes or no if no do i need to discard it is it something to put on the back burner for some day maybe or is it reference or support material in other words it's not actionable but it may help you in an active project in one way or another and if yes you go through these different steps to finally arrive at next actions perhaps or communications in his case activate incubate or eliminate i like those three words those are basically your three choices with capturing it is something that some apps have built in quite natively and i mentioned nirvana and for seal things before i think they're one of the best at this because they are built for gtd so obviously they're going to have this and they may have watched this talk as well and included that in how they built the app for other apps i used todoist for example this process happens more in the head but it is possible to execute on it in my way of working with it i use tags or labels as they're called in other softwares as well to distinguish what is something you can have labels for different kinds of contexts for time estimates even an energy required if it's all actionable but you can also have different lists inside various kinds of software to distinguish between actionable non-actionable reference support material etc folks it's going to do that but as you're doing going through that each one of those things when you click will take you to that area so that you can then manage that appropriately and you know the right way if you have a project that project page should be processed there you should have the ability to manage as much of that detail on that project as possible if you want to get to take a look at that project by the way if you identify something as a project this will also instantly give you whatever you program as the time you want to have for your project brainstorming software to come just come to screen i'd it to me give mine manager for two minutes if i wanted to extend that i could extend it if not then it goes onto something else but it asks me is there a next action on this david before you leave your brainstorming that's a good one so to have this tool support your way of thinking about projects in that you first want to clearly lay out what is the desired outcome here now i'm not even that good at mind mapping and all this stuff i tend to get better at it this year and there's some software out there that serves this purpose but it's definitely a good key question to ask yourself when you're setting up a project what is the next action does this project even have one yet send me an alert if it doesn't and i think this is something that should be included in more tools as a default setup even if it's not for gtd if you have a list or if you have a project and it contains no items inside of it no tasks to complete whilst the project isn't marked complete on its own there is a disconnect there so i would love to see more tools implementing this automatic alert in the future that just says hey lucas this project you just marked an item complete from your next actions list that's where i work from as gtd right i don't go from project to project i just go from context to context so i may mark off a specific item not knowing that doing so leaves a project empty and i want to receive an alert that lets me know hey you need to think about the next step for this project there's an empty space between the achieved outcome and what's to be done by the way if you identify something as a project this will also uh instantly give you whatever you program as the time you want to have for your project brainstorming software to come just come to screen to me give mind manager for two minutes if i wanted to extend that i could extend it if not then it goes into something else but it asks me is there a next action on this david before you leave your brainstorming right that's just three of 19 screens that i drew in 1994. wow i mean i already saw that's being circled in the previous screen here in this presentation but think about that right now i'm speaking to this screen with the luxury of having dozens of apps at my disposal in 2022 so almost 30 years ago david came up with a sketch like this that i think is way ahead of its time and in some degrees it still is very innovative it's an opportunity for app builders productivity app builders to jump into because i haven't seen something that truly resembles the gtd spirit as close as what david allen here is describing now granted you can get very far and i think my tutorials have shown that it doesn't really matter in the end which tool you use you have to be comfortable with it and that's most important but a lot of the processes that gtd advocates they still take place in your head and that's okay and especially over time it's just autopilot at least that's my experience and i can perfectly well adjust to tools limitations but i'm very curious to see those other 16 screenshots now this video is just four minutes long we're already over half of it so i don't think we'll get to see all of them let's see what else we get to see here it hasn't happened yet now coda and squirrel and you know come on all our folks and and ken and omnifocus all have done elegant versions of of of a lot of this but not the whole thing yet right we tried with two different teams with some of the best brightest people in this world and also 15 years of my friend eric mack who designed what i'm still using which is an overlay on ibm notes now which comes close to some of that as close as we could get right an overlay on ibm notes i really wonder who is still using that aside from david allen that's a software that nobody around me is mentioning and i'm not seeing it mentioned anywhere you know active users so that's interesting i might have to try and get it myself and review it just for the fun of it but it sounds pretty old but why is it so difficult i also wonder you've got the brightest minds he says try what did he say let's have a look uh what he said a lot of this but not the whole thing yet we tried with two different teams two different teams brightest people in this world and also 15 years of my friend eric mack who designed what i'm still using which is an overlay on ibm notes now which comes close to some of that as close as we could get right with the technology so talk to eric if you want to see hear a lot of that history where it sounds to me like we need to [Music] merge some of the existing tools that are out there because what i found from reviewing dozens of different tools is some of them perform like he just said a portion of gtd excellently so if you were to be able to connect those at the very least or even merge those then you would have an ultimate setup and honestly i think i'm getting pretty close to it with my own setup which i will discuss in a later video as well my videos so far have been about using one tool to have the complete gtd experience within that tool a very minimal approach in a way but in the end some tools are better at some things than others so why not just use multiple ones together so that you can have an experience as close to what david allen is outlining here let's see what he has to say the two times we did this in the mid 90s and then only about four or five years ago it was eric eric anderson his fabulous company intentional software at that time and neither one of them was able to get success for it for various reasons not because of the lack of talent or the lack of a model to work on but both technological issues bi-directional issues trying to build you know something that would integrate all of this because it has to have calendar has to have the ability to integrate all of the stuff that you're doing and see it on the dashboard and be bi-directional yep true that's expensive and hard to do technologically especially considering some of these portions are so built in to many people's workflows already i mean i'm one of them calendar is a big example everybody uses either google calendar or microsoft outlook and if you want somebody to move away from that that's a pretty big ask especially if that specific calendar tool may be integrated with other tools that they're already using right so i can imagine how that is challenging and perhaps it was the wrong approach to try and build one tool for everything perhaps the better approach is to have different tools and make them work together in the best way possible legally the worst thing is the market didn't think it needed it come on people still walking around with stuff in their heads why would they bother buying something like that so building a valuable that's enough that's a whole other issue that's true though that's true i mean gtd like thinking is still very much in the early adopter stage if we were to take this market adoption framework which is a shame a valuable product whatever you call that in the agile world to begin with start to do it never really got off the ground so this is going to be available publicly and if you want to run with it have at it that's it folks i see i see it sounds like he no he literally threw up his hands in the air there and kind of says well screw it i gave it my best shots i gave you the outline i wrote the damn book i created the methodology now it's up to you to do something with it all in all a really interesting video for me to see i hadn't seen it before like i said i only saw a few of the sketches but i didn't realize they were this old for one i didn't realize the efforts that had been made by david and some of those around him to create a gtd app but from the sounds of it this is still an open challenge the framework is out there the method of course is out there and as i've also concluded from my thorough reviews of all these different kinds of tools is that as of yet there isn't the perfect gtd app yet so anybody watching this take this as motivation if you're able to build a tool like this give it your best shot and let me know when you do because this is what this channel is all about reviewing interesting productivity tech that helps us perform our best at the same time i hope that david or others from the david down company will see some of my videos and become a bit more optimistic about the tremendous opportunities that existing technology does already provide granted sometimes it requires some imagination some reinterpreting of existing features in order to make things work for example todoist for me works formidably well for gtd but you need to reinterpret the projects feature as the lists feature of which projects can be apart but other lists like the sunday maybe list as well the functionality is there the name is just a bit counter-intuitive and you see that with all these different kinds of tools in my experience so if you are a gtd follower take a look at my channel look at the tutorial videos to find a tool that suits your needs and if you're a developer programmer i would say check out david's video the link is in the description and go and build it let me know when you've done so i'll be happy to take a look at it thanks for watching guys see you next video [Music]

Channel: Lucas Prigge

Views: 15,068

Keywords: david allen, getting things done, gtd, david allen getting things done, david allen gtd, getting things done app, gtd app, david allen app

Id: RyYSG0d2vwg

Length: 18min 14sec (1094 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 17 2022