Poojan Wagh’s list of learnings from a recent GTD seminar makes interesting reading. There may be some things you can learn as well.
The biggest thing I learned from the seminar was that I need to experiment more. I had taken the GTD methodology to be a mandate.
Most of my frustration with GTD has come from either doing exactly what was suggested or not doing exactly what was suggested. It takes time to find what works for you. This typically involves running down further non-productive paths in order to find what doesn’t work first; the widest path being a need to link projects and next actions.
I have tried to implement GTD on a Palm Pilot, Pocket PC, in Microsoft Outlook, in MindManager and have finally settled on PersonalBrain. I’ve connected projects to next actions and wasted time managing the connections. I’ve have half my system one way and half another, only to flip them around and find it still didn’t work for me GTD black belt mastery takes more time than expected and comes from practising the methods and that peculiar knowledge which can only be understood by trying and failing. Wax on, wax off.
Update: As of July 2011, I’m using Omnifocus on a Mac. This is by far the best solutions I’ve found to date.No input files specified.