Many mobile PIMs  (Personal Information Managers) are either too stripped down or over wrought with unnecessary features and have a user interface that is kludgy at best.  The reality is that a good UI designer when porting an application’s interface to a new environment should take into account the unique advantages of the mobile device that they are designing for, rather than trying to create a one size fits all application. One example of bad design or at least poor programming is the opera mini on the AT&T Blackberry Bold 9000, although fast on a number of other cell phones—it runs painfully slow on the Blackberry Bold 9000, making it highly undesirable. (Note the full Opera Mobile browser on a AT&T Tilt 2 running Windows Mobile 6.5 flies and is utterly amazing.)  Other applications include any number of web applications on the Blackberry and iPhone that simply create a front-door to a preexisting web application, making these free applications often nothing more than glorified web site short cut links.

For these reasons alone, I found a refreshing difference recently when I was invited by Yuriy Savchenko, the Project Manager for WebIS’s Blackberry development team out of Kiev, to join their beta testing team. I found a completely different approach to product management and programming development at WebIS. They are a company that cares not only about the quality of their products, but actually about their end-user’s experience.

As many Blackberry Developers know, there has been serious synchronization issues for third party app developers with RIM’s Blackberry Desktop Manger 5.01 and Yuriy’s  team tackled these problems ferociously  creating what  I have come to see as a world class application.  I believe that Pocket Informant 2.01 for the Blackberry is a serious game changer in the development of RIM mobility applications.  First off,  WebIS CEO Alex Kac and his team under Savchenko have done a superb job of porting  Pocketing Informant  from the Windows Mobile Platform to the Blackberry.

Any long term user on the Blackberry knows that RIM is famous for its shortcut keys  and Pocket Informant’s  speed keys on the Blackberry are where the application begins to shine. Learning these shortcut  keys turn Pocket Informant into a worthy, if not far superior alternative to the Blackberry’s native PIM applications.   Using Pocket Informant’s short cut keys is a  powerful option because Pocket Informant allows  a user to access their tasks, their journal notes, their calendar and their contacts all from  a single highly customizable user interface that can be easily modified to your heart’s content. Here’s the real kicker, Pocket Informant’s short cut keys are also fully customizable allowing the user the ability to define which buttons launch which PIM functions.

Pocket Informant also works with any of the major time management systems from David Allen’s Getting Things Done to Stephen Covey’s First Things First.  In fact, Pocket Informant actually comes with GTD  and Franklin Covey preconfigured settings built right into it. Pocket Informant is the de facto mobile standard application on Windows Mobile and now the Blackberry for Franklin Covey’s PlanPlus mobility solution.  For example, a mobile license for it now ships with Plan Plus. The Franklin Covey tools include the weekly compass, goals, projects, mission statements and daily notes functionality pre-built in. These settings can be turned on and off in the Pocket Informant options tab which is so customizable that the feature list alone could fill up multiple blog entries.  The daily notes actually sync with Microsoft Outlook’s journal application—a feature that some mobility developers actually develop and sell separate applications for.

Pocket Informant 2 can fully sync with or exist separately from the  blackberry native PIM database (allowing for a person to carry around two separate sets of information – one for personal and one for professional information) giving the end user more options.

In conclusion, I encourage every Blackberry user to test drive the new Pocket Informant PIM application as it hands down one of the best blackberry applications on the market today.

A similar conscious thought policing was proposed by Anthony Robbins in his book Awaken the Giant Within about 15 years earlier. Tony calls it the 10-Day Mental Challenge. Robbins focuses not just on complaining but more importantly on refusing to have any crummy thoughts, feelings, questions, words or metaphors and that to me is the added bonus.

My fellow blogger and mischievous collaborator from Aurora (Mr. Christian Brooks) has also recently decided to embrace this with me further with a few changes and alterations. I propose a simple combination of the two to create a 21-Day Mental Challenge hybrid to redefine our minds or as Will says reformat the mental hard drive. I thought it was important to combine the two because the wrist band really helps us to create awareness of our actions. The 21-days straight is pretty much the popularly accepted amount of time it takes for us to break in a new habit or to change a bad habit. Here’s my take on it:

Rules

Using a wrist band, your goal is to go 21-days with out switching arms with the wrist band:

• Go without complaining
• Go without criticizing
• Go without gossiping
• Go without using any vulgarities (vulgar language or vulgar jokes )
• Go without  hanging on any crummy thoughts, feelings, questions, words or metaphors for more than 5 minutes at a time.

If you violate any of these rules then you have to switch the wrist band to the other arm and start the count over again.

Now any suggestions (rules, ideas or advice) about how to adjust this conscious living experiment would be greatly appreciated. Similarly, is there any one else up for the challenge who is willing to join us?

Here’s my gift to you — an exclusive  interview with my life long hero Steve Wozniak discussing the iphone:

In life it’s often difficult to find authenticity, the true self within ourselves. Barbara De Angelis, Ph. D, writer, researcher and relationship expert summarizes this universal timeless struggle when she writes, “We need to find the courage to say NO to the things and people that are not serving us if we want to rediscover ourselves and live our lives with authenticity.” Which in of itself is the utter simplicity of being yourself having the clarity of the vision to see deep within who you are and what you are meant to be and do with your life.

On the surface, writer Leo Babauta is an ordinary man of ordinary means who lives a life of utter simplicity in Guam with his wife and 6 children, yet its this very life of integrity and utter deep introspection that has produced a profound change in himself, creating a digital ripple effect upon the waves of the Internet that has inspired others to follow his lead. . The fascinating aspect of Leo’s life is that he just isn’t another writer, but a man who actually upholds the standards and the paradigms he teaches through his web site Zen Habits. He is authentic.

Babauta briefly spoke with me about how David Allen’s Getting Things Done inspired him to create his own personal life productivity management system Zen To Done (ZTD)

Why do you think that GTD has been so successful and popular?

Leo Babauta: GTD has been such a success because it does several things extremely well. First, it teaches quick in box processing, which is so crucial during these days of email and an influx of information in many different in boxes. Second,it is a comprehensive system for handling everything in your life, and making sure things don’t slip between the cracks. The combination of these two things (among others) really makes a big difference for most people — so much so that it’s almost a revolutionary system for some of us.

What is GTD’s limitations? How does your ZTD differ from GTD and how is it similar?

Leo Babauta: There are three basic limitations to GTD, and for some of us they are major: first, the system takes a lot of time to maintain, and sometimes that is enough that people will stop using GTD for a little while. Second, while GTD has a higher level of operation, for the most part it focuses on runway- level tasks (all the stuff you need to do right now), rather than higher

levels like goals and dreams. That means that you are often focused on what you need to do right now rather than what you really should be doing. Third, GTD is really a series of habit changes that are adopted all at once. For many people, habit changes are difficult and in my experience it’s better to focus on one at a time.

So I created Zen To Done (ZTD) to address these limitations. Again, I love GTD, but I needed some modifications in my system. So my system focuses on simplicity — just a few key habits to adopt and a few simple tools. It also focuses on the important things you should do, and eliminates everything else if possible — so you can focus on high-impact tasks and projects and not get overwhelmed or distracted.

And it asks you to adopt these habits one at a time, so you are more likely to stick with them.

How can people best implement ZTD for maximum effectiveness?

Leo Babauta: One habit at a time. Choose the habit that will make the biggest difference right away, and focus on that for 30 days. If you are really focused on being consistent with that habit, you will create a habit you can stick with for a long time. Then, after that habit has become ingrained, work on a second habit, and so on.

Why did you invent ZTD ?

Leo Babauta: Because I needed a way to focus on what’s really important, while adopting some of the great techniques of GTD and other systems. I wanted a system that was simple, and that I would stick with for a long time. I just combined a lot of great principles into a system that works for me, and allowed others to adapt it to their needs.

Leo Babauta has recently published his productivity system into a simple ebook entitled Zen To Done: The Ulitmatte Simple Productivity System that you can purchase if interested.

“Man has a limited biological capacity for change,When this capacity is
overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock. ” writes Futurist Alvin Toeffler in his 1970 Landmark book Future Shock, where he coined the phrase information overload. Toeffler poignantly argues that man’s ability to deal with his reality — his “sanity itself thus hinges on man’s ability to predict his immediate personal future on the basis of information fed him by the environment.”

When he cannot keep up, man loses himself to the fray of the moment, experiencing information overload. Information itself has been defined technically and measured in terms of units called bits, he further writes, which exists in the form of actions based on decisions — a bit is the amount of information needed to make a decision between two equally likely alternatives.

“Bits are heavy. Though they have no physical weight,” opens Mark Hurst’s ground breaking book Bit Literacy. “bits..place a weight on anyone who uses them” Each piece of information that enters our life – be it digital or physical requires us to make some form of front-end decision about how we should engage with them or suffer some dire consequences of greater confusion and frustration in the moment or in the future.

Hurst’s solution to the quagmire of information overload is to introduce a brand new set up skills and habits that stresses simplicity — a series of best practices he terms “Bit Literacy.”
In an interview with Productivity Consultant Matthew Cornell, Hurst
points out that many current productivity systems are based on previous systems that were built for managing the flow of paper, and to apply systems for paper productivity to our new digital world is not appropriate.http://matthewcornell.org/blog/2008/01/conversation-with-mark-hurst-web.html

Complete disengagement from these new inputs also is not the solution, Hurst further recommends, nor is engaging them with the whole gauntlet of existing paper organizers now on the market or highly complex digital planning systems and software. “Today’s information overload is caused by bits,” Hurst writes in his Bit
Literacy book,” and so the tool to manage overload must work with bits, Using paper to manage todos simply does not make sense..today it’s slow and unnecessarily painful and more then a little ridiculous.” (see his blog for further information http://goodexperience.com/2006/07/managing-digital-overload-with.php)

The Bit Literacy Difference

The Bit Literacy paradigm challenges the conventional wisdom of even many popular productivity systems today. In his Good Experience blog,
Mark Hurst quotes Khoi Vinh, who heads up design at NYTimes.com as an example of how many productivity systems are just too unnecessarily complex for people to actually properly implement. These paradigms often offer highly complex methodologies that cost their users copious amounts of time to learn, practice and implement only to quickly discover that they don’t yield the gains they promised. http://goodexperience.com/2008/08/when-productivity-is.php).
Hurst holds a similar disdain for Getting Things Done,”David Allen’s approach is a bit of a throwback to a pre-internet age when having complex flowcharts, filing papers and creating tickler items was relevant,” Hurst said in a recent interview with omenentrepreneur.com. “The more flowcharts and frameworks in the method,” Mark writes in Bit Literacy, “the more time it takes to learn and practice and the less productive the user becomes.”
Most ordinary digital todo lists just add even more problems to the equation,so they either suffer from being too simple or too complex. More often then not Hurst argues they try to pack everything into the application — example Microsoft Outlook — to please everyone which in the process ends up pleasing no one because they overload users with too much information. The problem with list categorization (example your GTD action lists), Hurst argues is that they
add more bits than the user needs to manage causing them to spend more time playing around with the system then actually getting any work done.

The Bit Literacy Paradigm

Mark Hurst briefly sketched out for me the Bit Literacy productivity paradigm. Although it’s not groundbreaking in its structure, its profound in its simplicity, some critics may find it too simple.

It can be, however, found as a refreshing change from some of other overly complex systems with their proprietary planning methodologies and tools.
1. VALUES. At the top most level of the Bit Literacy system rests your values. For example:

Simplicity, Charity, Fortitude and Integrity.
Hurst offered “simplicity” as a value; I’ve added the others above. One might also expand them into affirmations like: :
Fortitude. I pursue daily with great strength and courage what is most important and what is right.

The interesting thing about just listing values is — you have to be clear and you have to write them out using simple and easily understandable language. The word Fortitude as a value may actually in of itself not be as clear as just writing out the word courage. The complexity of the word fortitude then may necessitate a person having to write out an affirmation with it to push their subconscious into accepting it. Mark writes a brief blog post on the need for brevity in clear writing http://goodexperience.com/2008/10/examples-of-clear-wri.php

2. MISSION. The next item Hurst lists beneath values is a Mission statement. Here is the mission statement Hurst offered:
Allow people to solve information overload, easily and permanently
Again this is more carefully summarized and written then a typical mission statement in many traditional planning systems like:
My purpose for being on this earth is to help others recognize, develop, and use their God-given intuitive abilities to ease suffering and grow in goodness, love, compassion, and wisdom. My mission is to help take away fear–the fear of death, by proving that we don’t die and will see our loved ones again, and the fear of living, by showing how we can tap in to our wisest selves and make our lives much happier and easier. My desire is to help each of us connect to the love that is eternal, that is the reason for our existence. http://www.missionstatements.com/personal_mission_statements.html

3. GOALS. The third level Hurst mentioned was goals. You set a goal which is defined by your mission that you follow through on while adhering to your Values. In essence then each goal then has a mission and governing principles (values attached to it). Making life planning as simple as one, two and three.

Most time management systems have elaborate place holders or reminders for the most important areas of a person’s life. These are often called roles or Key Focus Areas — I asked Mark – When you set goals do you use any form of roles or “Key Areas of Focus”

Mark Hurst: Not really. But Bit Literacy and Gootodo are flexible to however people want to work. (Gootodo is Mark’s on line todo list) The method doesn’t *obligate* you to set up a complex framework of goals and contexts, but the tool supports it if you want. Mainly the tool is really simple to encourage you to stop spending time setting up a complex system and GET TO WORK. That’s *real* productivity – not noodling with every little detail in your system, but accomplishing the tasks themselves. That’s why I think it’s important to have the simplest system possible – take the focus away from the system itself and enable people to get on with their todo list.

4. PROJECTS. I asked Mark about the fourth level of his planning paradigm — how do you plan projects in gootodo – do you track them as a single larger to do?

Mark Hurst: Generally I break things into discrete tasks and track them singly. This works nicely for my project load – I run a 400-person conference and a private social networking site, not to mention all my other duties between the two companies – all with Gootodo. These are big projects that I simply track and redate todos for, all using Gootodo’s few simple functions.

However, if people prefer to track projects with a single todo, they can accomplish that as well – simply by noting the progress of sub-tasks in the detail field within the todo. I’ve done thatoccasionally, and it’s worked well.

5. TASKS. Mark’s Gootodo (short for Good Experience todo list) task management system works without having multiple lists and must reside outside of an email application and not be paper based. The perfect todo list has four major components:

1. Each todo is associated with a particular day.

2. Users can create new todos via email either for today or a specific day in the future.

3. Each todo has priority ranking within its day.

4. Each todo must contain a detail and summary information like an email.

You then only have one daily todo list which is day specific and your actions become active based upon your calendar.

Hurst’s philosophy of simplicity mirrors the sentiments of Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden first published in 1854. In “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Thoreau urges, “Simplicity,

simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen … Our life is frittered away by detail.”

Thoreau ironically foresaw it best the millions of details — the sea of potentially infinite bits flowing into our life through emails, through the Internet, Voice mails, PDAs and hundreds of other new and emerging digital tools. The very bits that Mark Hurst coaxes us to let go of.

Spencer: Why do you think that Getting Things Done (GTD) has been so successful?

Keener: GTD helps people overcome procrastination. It does so through several techniques, with the more powerful ones being:

1. Its emphasis on the distinction between a project and a task …too many people put projects on their task list and keep putting those projects off because they haven’t thought through the next action for
it.

2. Its emphasis on Being Where You Are: that is, in having lists ofnext actions organized by context so that you are not looking over a list of Home actions intermingled with Computer actions intermingled
with Office actions intermingled with Phone Calls and so on. Procrastinators get stuck when they have intermingled lists because they can’t decide what to do next. GTD simplifies by telling you to do something consistent with Where You Are.

3. Its emphasis on Just Do It … that is, the two-minute rule. Why belabor a task if you can just go ahead and do it in short order (presuming that it is one you should do).

4. Its emphasis on Getting Everything Out of Your Head and Into an Appropriate List (or action stream). Admittedly, all time management systems speak to this … GTD just does a better job of emphasizing
it, and emphasizing that it should be a periodic activity.

5. And, of course, its emphasis on Capturing All Actions … again, all time management systems speak to this, but GTD speaks to it best.

Spencer: What is your preference for an approach to time and life management systems Top-Down or Bottom-Up?

Keener: Regarding my preference for a Top Down or Bottom Up approach, my preference is Top Down. I am 59 now, so more of my life is behind me than in front of me, and I realize looking back over the years that I have been fortunate to have worked on the kinds of things I wanted to work on … a lot of
people are not so fortunate. But, it all begins with deciding what you want to be about, who you really are, what you want to accomplish, and then designing activities that let you do that. Oh, I’ve done a lot of things that wasted my time … nobody is perfect. But, if you don’t keep a list of
your priorities in life in front of you, if you don’t periodically examine who you are and what you feel you should be doing, then you are truly susceptible to being a leaf in the wind.

I therefore believe that priorities are important, and I don’t think GTD does a very good job of ensuring you align to your priorities. Some people seem to be able to brute-force it to work well enough for them … for me, I had to blend the Covey and GTD techniques in order to feel balanced on “on target.

This senseless Ad Sense Pay-Per-Click title taunted my sensibilities, making me question Allen’s purposes and his models. Allen’s simple mission to help people corral all their stuff (open loops) and break it down into doable chunks (Next Actions) can best be summarized in his definition of effectiveness and success in life: “To lead an effective life we need to be able to make things happen — to engage with our world so it will provide us with the experiences we all seek. Making the right choices and ensuring their efficient execution have always been key elements of success,” David Allen writes poignantly in Making It All Work. “What is missing is a fundamental understanding of and effective model for, the dynamics for the process as a whole… a way to make it all work.” His first book Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress Free Productivity offered a primer and a simple manual for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness, while Making It All Work is intended to provide his readers with a roadmap to keep on course and to help them reach their goals. Again, none of this inherently sounds nefarious at its core foundations.  After nearly two weeks of silent deliberation over the article’s question, this resultant work is my perspective to another’s well crafted overture.

“David Allen made quite a breakthrough in the field of productivity when he proposed a system that started with the simple act of collecting all of your outstanding items, everyone, “Australian journalist Fran Molloy, author of What is Wrong With GTD? responded in an interview. “Stating what seems, with hindsight, to be the bleeding obvious has long been a hallmark of success for innovations and inventions worldwide and David’s basic first step in establishing GTD is no exception. GTD is great, a really good system for many people. I think the key is – ‘for many people.’”

Many people, however, often claim to experience a Zen like reduction in stress and a greater feeling of mastery of their life situation when they go through a complete capturing and corralling of all their commitments into what Allen calls a “trusted system.”  Similarly followers who create an all out implementation claim to experience even greater benefits: more relaxed control, greater flexibility and heightened focus.  Statistics even suggest this. Allen’s book Getting Things Done has sold over 1-million copies in nearly 28 countries and inspired over 70 software applications, catapulting Allen into productivity Guru stardom. Why has GTD been so successful, many have wondered?

“GTD has struck a nerve with individuals and companies around the world. As the pace of information, inputs and change increases, so does an individual’s stress in capturing and processing the commitments that they and others make,” Dave Patrick, chief Marketing Officer of The David Allen Company, reported to me. “A systematic approach to managing this information is critical, and GTD provides that in a powerful and elegant way. ” Arguably the power of this nonlinear approach comes from the ability to apply the central skills of focus and control – two cornerstones of the GTD productivity methodologies that have universal appeal to its adherents.

Despite the fanfare and cult like following that he has attracted – some detractors – the ghostly conspirators of blog and message board conspiracies have spun webs of half-truth and misinformation questioning the true intentions behind his methodologies’ intentions.  Let us all for once and all debunk this blog gaggle bunk as just that mere bunk.  The life planning paradigms of GTD are not some existentialist theory or some dark shadowy conspiracy originating from a sinister new age cult but rather they are shrewdly far more benevolent. It’s the clear headed work of careful soul searching and quiet deliberation etched over time in the psyche of an innovator. An article often cited as at once unabashedly unapologetic is yet somehow seen by others as glossing over a more serious matter – the questions of Allen’s motives. An article by Gary Wolf in September 2007 sheds more light on the facts. Gary Wolf’s thoughtful exploration into Allen’s biography in this author’s opinion frames it in a perspective that is worthy of the content of the subject’s character.  The original unedited email interview conversation appears on Allen’s web site here. A person’s credo, ideology or religion often shapes and forms their character as does their life experiences. Allen’s character was clearly chiseled in a great time of tumultuous life experiences and I firmly believe that what he has taken from his life experiences has helped shape and form a mild mannered man of wit and integrity.

What I have in my relentless search to the author’s question found was not an inherent flaw either in his paradigm or in his character but rather a sophisticated system tapping into the universal principles of productivity.    David Allen masterfully describes the peeling away of the multi-levels of the GTD onion in Making It All Work.  Thus, Allen’s character and biography resulted in not the blossoming of an onion but rather in the crystallization of a multifaceted diamond of a paradigm of perspectives in which Allen traces guide posts for a comprehensive life management system. What will follow in the coming weeks will be a look at the many levels of the GTD and the many paradigms of time and life management that it has inspired, as well as a survey of the other powerful time management systems available to people to help improve their effectiveness, leaving it up to you the reader to define your own paradigms and to pick and choose your own methodologies at the buffet of time management.

Pavlina believes that GTD will make you more efficient but not more effective.  GTD is for Pavlina primarily a low-level system “that will help you do things right…but it does not help you figure out what those right things are. ” To reinforce his point, Pavlina uses the Covey metaphor of having your ladder up against the wrong wall. Or in nautical terms, he argues that those who practice GTD are like a well managed ship that keeps sailing in circles never reaching port. This lack of top level direction or focus in Allen’s second book Ready for Anything, leads Pavlina to taunt, “Ready for What?”   Whatever your boss assigns you?  For with GTD, you are clearly, “doomed to spend your life working on other people’s goals and losing yourself in the process,” he further argues. People need something more than GTD which he sees as just a “personal management system”, Pavlina says, they need a “personal leadership system”.  Pavlina’s Coveyesque philosophy foreshadows Leo Babauta’s interview with Covey earlier this year on the Zen Habits blog. Covey doesn’t find much value in Getting Things Done and The Secret,” I have read these books and have enjoyed them and believe they contain elements of wisdom and practical suggestions. But for me and my world they are too simplistic and superficial.”  Pavlina’s rhetorical glowing praise of the GTD model  and subsequent criticisms contradicts itself and superficially glosses over the system; missing the true flexibility and power of GTD as an air tight and comprehensive  planning and life management system which we will explore in more detail in upcoming articles.  He never even considers the 6 Horizons of Focus first introduced in David Allen’s Getting Things Done and repeated again in Ready for Anything.  Furthermore, David Allen’s Road Map Seminar and his new book Making It All Work even more clearly delineates and expands upon the 6 Horizons of Focus as preexisting planning models that Allen first introduced back in 2001.   It also makes you wonder what tools and time management paradigms, Pavlina embraces.

Franklin Covey? In his article More On Planning, Pavlina calls the Franklin Covey digital and paper planner systems an inflexible “piece of crap” that forces people to subscribe to an often lousy planning model.  Does he use Microsoft Outlook?  Nope. “Piece of crap,” Pavlina writes.   Anthony Robbins Rapid Planning Method (RPM) paper and digital planning systems? “Utter crap,” Pavlina mocks.  How about a Palm PDA? Pavlina thinks that they are “inflexible and puny” junk too, for his Palm is collecting dust in the closet. (Note David Allen swears by his Palm Treo 755P) Pavlina clearly disdains certain GTD tools and conventional time management planners as too overly complicated and too inflexible forcing you to use a particular planning paradigm.

After criticizing the entire time management establishment Pavlina offers his own take on effectiveness. Pavlina prefers to use a pen and paper and outlining software. Using a digital outlining tool for project planning is also mentioned in David Allen’s first book Getting Things Done as a suggested best practice.   A closer analysis of Pavlina’s system suggests that he actually implements very few of the key GTD principles and suggested best practices. These conclusions can be drawn from viewing Pavlina’s own essays.  It’s not to say that the Pavlina productivity paradigm is not without its merits-it clearly is air tight if properly implemented. Anybody following it could easily experience significant improvement in accomplishing their goals. Needless to say its brilliance lies in its simplicity and mainly its roots.   The Pavlina productivity paradigm is nothing more than a traditional best practices  top down life management system that models all the paradigms that Pavlina ridicules making it a hybrid rather than an original methodology, at best evolutionary rather than revolutionary. In fact, anybody familiar with Brian Tracy’s time management books Eat that Frog, Focal Point, Time Power, and Goals would see an obvious uncanny resemblance between Pavlina’s planning methodologies and Brian Tracy’s own recommended best practices as well as those of Anthony Robbins and Franklin Covey.  Brian Tracy sums it up best in Time Power,”What I have discovered is that it doesn’t matter what time management system or planner you decide to use.  They are all good …the most important part of any time planning system is that you use it regularly until it becomes a habit, like breathing in and out. ”    Another interesting distinction between Brian Tracy and Steve Pavlina is that rather than criticizing his predecessors and influences from who he borrows best practices, Brian Tracy often cites where he takes his methodologies from. Tracy for example even offers readers a suggested reading list at the end of his book Focal Point.  What does not work for Pavlina may work for others which Pavlina even admits to in his articles with a few qualifiers. However, the tone of Pavlina’s mocking attack shows no such restraint or respect for his predecessors nor does his humorous pejoratives.  Could Pavlina learn something from this?  Which raises the question – why does the Pavlina productivity paradigm condemn and criticize all the other time management tools and systems from which it borrows its influences, its methodologies and its best practices?

Despite several attempts at reaching Steve Pavlina with our questions via email and phone calls to his home in Nevada – Steve Pavlina could not be reached for comment. Our conclusions were drawn from his published works.

Brian Tracy is the most listened to audio author on personal and business success in the world today.  His fast-moving talks and seminars on leadership, sales, managerial effectiveness and business strategy are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and strategies that people can immediately apply to get better results in every area.  For more information, please go to www.briantracy.com

In his first book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity , David Allen, the visionary of open source productivity, sparked a global revolution by turning conventional  time management principles on their head.  Allen advocates in his first book that a person must first clear the decks, starting with the mundane by processing the work in front of them (commitments or open loops), before attempting to realign their higher altitudes of vision, purpose and values.

His methodologies are different from traditional top-down life management systems that encourage their followers to create their life mission, purpose and goals based on arbitrary preconceived values which they then use as filters for making their short-term and long-range life decisions. “And Life is far too messy for top down arbitrary life management” Allen argues in his new book Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business Of Life. The traditional systems also often require expensive proprietary planning systems, while Allen writes that, “Getting Things Done is system independent which means that almost any kind of personal organizing structure or software can be used to implement its principles.”  By embracing an open source system, Allen has effectively helped create his own productivity grass roots viral marketing initiative.

Many GTD proponents have found this to be a profound departure and whole web sites and tools have popped up all over the Internet to satisfy the need for helping find the ultimate GTD tool which is great in of itself.   In some cases, however, these web sites of GTD enthusiasts and often overly zealous sophisticated software designers have, Allen states, actually over shot their mark of “real-life functionality” by trying to create their own “latest and greatest” GTD implementations which require too much mental effort to make life fit into their supplied forms.  Making It All Work is as much a back to basics blueprint for GTD practitioners as it is a call to action to renewed life and work simplicity, raising just as many new questions as it does offer answers.   Whereas GTD is a manual for creating a customized personal life management system, Making It All Work is a road map that expands on the existing GTD methodologies by introducing new models of thought and action through clarification of the preexisting structures of Getting Things Done without changing GTDs basic methodologies.

You can do GTD with just his first book and you can easily learn GTD with Making It All Work but you really will need both books to fully appreciate the true simplicity of its multi-layers of complexity.  The system works on many levels without overburdening the mind. In fact, it actually frees the mind opening up its practitioners to greater levels of creativity and relaxed focused.  Critics argue that GTD does not use traditional priority coding systems to determine daily actions and could even argue that Making It All Work never clearly addresses the issues of priority and they would be completely wrong. Both books Getting Things Done and Making It All Work are all about gauging priorities and making subtle distinctions — in fact arguably more so then traditional priority coding systems. Making It All Work is about getting control and perspective. Perspective looks at priority not merely from the moment but actually from all the multi-levels (horizons) of life engagement simultaneously. How can you know what your priorities are if  you do not know what your commitments are and how can you know what your commitments are if you have not captured and clarified all that your work  and life is about.

“GTD is not actually a system”, David explains, “but a systematic approach to managing all aspects of your life.” Making It All Work provides this roadmap successfully and provides a logical follow-up to Getting Things Done. Like a great author and a great coach he guides us through the process and the art of life creation far beyond the conceptual limitations of traditional life management models. Seven years later David Allen still remains a fresh and insightful voice in the field of business and personal development. He electrifies his reader with his profound and poignant down home style that is at once practical as it is philosophical.  Many critics have referred to him as a productivity Guru and he can be conceived of as a Guru in the traditional sense of the word [1] but not as a new age cult leader of enlightenment. Rather he is a maverick in the classical sense of the word – an icon like a Henry David Thoreau of the 21^st century which is not to say that Making It All Work is Allen’s Walden -it’s not, far from it. What is though is a life map for those lost in the bits and bytes of the digital age.

Jaimie Epstein http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/magazine/24wwlnguest-epstein-t.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

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