(“That’s just nuts,” he wrote.) The site became so popular that Mann quit his job to work on it full time. Mann soon announced that, in just thirty days, 43 Folders had received over a hundred and fifty thousand unique visitors. data, which would allow different apps to display the same tasks in multiple formats, including “graphical map, outline, RDF, structured text.” He told me that the writer Cory Doctorow linked to an early 43 Folders post on Doctorow’s popular nerd-culture site, Boing Boing. The discussion was often highly technical: in one post, he proposed the creation of a unified XML format for G.T.D.
In an introductory post, Mann wrote, “Believe me, if you keep finding that the water of your life has somehow run onto the floor, GTD may be just the drinking glass you need to get things back together.” He published nine posts about G.T.D. In September, 2004, Mann started a blog called 43 Folders-a reference to an organizational hack, the “tickler file,” described in Allen’s book. was appealing, and the method itself seemed ripe for optimization. To someone with Mann’s engineering sensibility, the precision of G.T.D. It’s a rigorous system for the generation of serenity. Allen uses the analogy of cranking widgets to describe this calmly mechanical approach to work. In his book, Allen recommends organizing the master list into contexts, such as or Moving through the day, you can simply look at the tasks listed under your current context and execute them one after another.
This list can now provide a motive force for your efforts. During reviews, you transform your haphazard reminders into concrete “next actions,” then enter them onto a master list. Allen calls this final, crucial step regular review. But jotting down notes isn’t, in itself, enough to close the loops your mind must trust that you will return to your in-boxes and process what’s inside them. Throughout the day, you might add similar thoughts to other in-boxes, such as a list on your computer or a pocket notebook. One such in-box might be a physical tray on your desk when you suddenly remember that you need to finish a task before an upcoming meeting, you can jot a reminder on a piece of paper, toss it in the tray, and, without breaking concentration, return to whatever it was you were doing. It begins with what Allen describes as full capture: the idea is to maintain a set of in-boxes into which you can drop obligations as soon as they arise. G.T.D.’s solution is a multi-step system. To maintain such a mind, one must deal with new obligations before they can become entrenched as open loops. If we could avoid worrying about what we were supposed to be doing, we could focus more fully on what we were actually doing, achieving what Allen called a “mind like water.” That anxiety, in turn, reduces our ability to think effectively. He proposed a theory about how our minds work: when we try to keep track of obligations in our heads, we create “open loops” that make us anxious. Allen combined ideas from Zen Buddhism with the strict organizational techniques he’d honed while advising corporate clients. The time-management system it described, called G.T.D., had been developed by David Allen, a consultant turned entrepreneur who lived in the crunchy mountain town of Ojai, California. It was titled “ Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity,” and, for Mann, it changed everything. In 2003, he came across a book that seemed to address his frustrations.
“E-mail is a ball of uncertainty that represents anxiety,” Mann said, reflecting on this period. Work lives that had once been sequential-two or three blocks of work, broken up by meetings and phone calls-became frantic, improvisational, and impossibly overloaded. Many e-mails brought obligations: to answer a question, look into a lead, arrange a meeting, or provide feedback.
GETTING THINGS DONE PROFESSIONAL
With nearly all friction removed from professional communication, anyone could bother anyone else at any time. In the nineteen-nineties, the spread of e-mail had transformed knowledge work. “I was in this batting cage, deluged with information,” he told me recently. He had held similar roles for years, so he knew the ins and outs of the job he was surprised, therefore, to find that he was overwhelmed-not by the intellectual aspects of his work but by the many small administrative tasks, such as scheduling conference calls, that bubbled up from a turbulent stream of e-mail messages.
GETTING THINGS DONE SOFTWARE
In the early two-thousands, Merlin Mann, a Web designer and avowed Macintosh enthusiast, was working as a freelance project manager for software companies.
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