Chris Lott has found the GTD system to be quite to his liking, but realizes that he is somewhat late to the party:

Unfortunately, I’m now discovering that this is old news. Not because the book is old (I knew it was a few years old) but because it’s already become a meme in the real world and, just a month or so ago, in cyberspace. I’m like the poor kid who shows up to the 1988 prom in his Miami Vice white suit and pastel t-shirt, just a short few months late, when dressing like Crockett is so over.

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It’s amazing—and humiliating—to discover that even within a group I’m relatively connected to there can be so much activity that I’m completely clueless about. I recently heard a guy in the coffee shop talking in amazement about instant messaging and how it was possible to talk in real time with anyone anywhere, right over the internet. A few weeks of being too busy to surf and now I’m that guy!

I have yet to dive into the now-ubiquitous GTD method myself, though I understand that my own planning tool (Emacs PlannerMode) has some support for it. I’m not sure I want to have one more way of measuring my lack of productivity, and I have some gut-level opposition to the whole this month’s revolutionary time-management strategy thing. I still vividly remember when my mom, then an employee of the State of Utah Department of Wildlife Resources, was sent to a two-day Franklin Planner boot camp. She came home with a scheduler the size of a phone book that, when opened, exploded with colors, tabs, priorities, and overlays. It was magical, it was complicated, it was impossible. She bought a larger dresser and stuffed the planner in a drawer, and somewhere it still sits, a Franklin-Covey embossed reminder of all the time wasted trying to save time.