systems

In What Are The Laws Of Work? I made a humble stab at defining the first principles that might inform designing a productivity method from scratch. The discussion was stimulating and led to more thinking, in particuarl how might we structure our environments for success, hopefully tying in Fritz's work in Path of Least Resistance.

Since starting my study of the field of personal productivity (first GTD-related post: August 2005 - Actually Getting Things Done With Getting Things Done!

As part of my self-training to be a personal productivity presenter and coach, I'm reading [1] every related book I can get my hands on. (My goal? Be a world-class expert [2] in the field.) One thing I regularly come across are relatively simple ideas for workflow management, esp. "TRAF" (Toss, Refer, Act, File) and the "Four Ds" (Delete, Do, Delegate, Defer). How do these compare with the more complex GTD workflow diagram? Read on!

The players

In this section I'll describe the three approaches to managing inputs that we'll be comparing - TRAF, the "Four Ds", and GTD's workflow diagram.