Mitch Wagner had an interesting article on his blog at InformationWeek recently about David Allen’s Getting Things Done book and using PDAs to manage to-do lists, etc.

Wagner is right that “GTD has spawned a thriving subculture online.” In reading others’ blogs, etc., I find myself frequently drawn to sites whose author either uses a Mac and/or who’s written about GTD. I guess that’s sort of the intersection of my interests with a lot of others, i.e. personal productivity and creativity.

I’m not quite sure what Wagner meant when he wrote, “the popularity of GTD and related productivity philosophies has spawned a sort of backlash against Palm Pilots and other PDAs”. The PDA is still a great concept, though I think Palm has forgotten the form factor’s obvious weaknesses, i.e. a very small screen and lack of keyboard.

If Palm would put more emphasis on a better/slightly bigger screen and put decent keyboards on more models, I think they’d be moving forward again. While connectivity is certainly helpful, they seem stuck on adding more multimedia features, but I don’t see many teens buying Palms, anyway, and what I really want is for them to keep advancing the productivity software.

Anyway, here’s the comment I left on Wagner’s blog:

I read GTD a couple of years ago and now am reading Allen’s newer book, Ready for Anything. It is a discussion of many nitty-gritty productivity issues with a lot of useful tips and will be helpful to many who are having trouble implementing the GTD approach.

I’m amazed how this bandwagon of opinion has arisen that PCs are dying and PDAs as well. PDAs will become increasingly connected, I suppose, but that’s just a semantics issue in compiling statistics. I use my Palm constantly. At the same time, one of my biggest frustrations is not having enough time to really take advantage of all the wonderful software tools available on my Mac. These are both very useful tools for me.

What hasn’t worked for me (and apparently for a lot of others) are all the to-do list tools. The to-do list is the only part of my Palm that I really don’t use much. I think there’s some kind of problem with to-do lists that no one’s figured out yet. Lists are very helpful for planning and breaking down complex activities but unless we pretty much get everything done each day, the lists just start to grow to where they’re no longer of much help.

David Allen’s approach is basically to write everything down and review it on a regular basis, not to work off a to-do list. Instead, by clearing things out of your head, you can effectively keep the day’s list in your active memory, and actually concentrate on one thing at a time.