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Stop!
Whatever you’re doing right now, stop doing it. I want you to take ten seconds and click the following two links:
You back? What did you notice?
If you’re at all like me, you picked up on the fact that for “gtd” there were 5.67 million results. For “getting things done” there were two million more.
Wait. There’s more. For grins, I used Google’s blog search to find out how many times “getting things done” appeared in blogs in the last week. About forty thousand, give or take.
Taking a peek at Technorati’s Top 100 the other morning, there’s four notable sites devoted to “getting things done”: Lifehacker, Zen Habits, Lifehack.org, and 43 Folders.
Four percent may not sound like a lot, but there are more than 28,000 blogs that link to these sites. Add one more to the list, I suppose.
I shudder to think what the combined RSS subscription numbers are… given that Zen Habits alone boasts nearly 40,000 subscribers.
For the life of me, though, I can’t figure out how a cottage industry surrounding David Allen’s super-popular, hyper-active, to-do list on steroids system of personal efficiency ever popped up.
Please don’t misunderstand… this isn’t a case of sour grapes here. I just began to wonder, with all the writing and reading about getting things done, how are all the adherents, you know, getting things done?
Am I the only one who’s noticed the irony here?
Tags: 43 folders, David Allen, Getting Things Done, GTD, Lifehacker, personal efficiency, Zen Habits
Sphere: Related Content
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Naomi Dunford 02.19.08 at 8:27 pm
You are definitely not the only one to catch this irony. Great idea for a post, I like it.
Rob @ 52 Novels 02.19.08 at 8:38 pm
Naomi: Skellie caught it, too.
Lisa Kenney 02.19.08 at 11:04 pm
Jeeze, and meanwhile, since you made me stop and go check out those links I got even less done!
Tom Roompot 02.28.08 at 6:19 am
Have you seen the movie “Little miss sunshine” ? The father of the family tries to sell his “how to be successful” program when he, to put it bluntly, is failing at life. Your post once again proves the old truth that writing about doing something is easier than actually getting to do it
Faina Sechzer 03.02.08 at 11:46 am
I can’t settle on the gtd tool. Many of them look like a Rx for spending more time. I just wrote about the same topic. Great minds think alike:)
Rob @ 52 Novels 03.02.08 at 12:59 pm
@Lisa: Hee hee.
@Tom: O, the irony!
@Faina: So true. So very true.