getting freaked out by Getting Things Done

[waider]

A month ago I'd never heard of Getting Things Done, a self-help book for digging yourself out of the sort of procrastinating habits that most people complain they have but never do anything about (how many times have you said to someone, "man, I got nothing done today!"?) Via Boing Boing I picked up a few pointers to 43 Folders, a site devoted to one man's experience with GTD (as the aficionados call it) and his assorted tips and tricks for applying it to your Macintosh-oriented life. From what I've read around the book, I understand the general principles being applied, and it seems pretty sane and also pretty well suited to being geekified by using your email client, PDA, task scheduler, etc. What's freaking me out now that I've started to look around at who else is pushing this is the number of backlinks to the author's site and/or the Amazon page for the book. 43 Folders is littered with them, to the point where every mention of GTD seems to get a link even though there's a sidebar link and possibly other links elsewhere on the page. I just found a review of Palm tools for GTD and discovered that there's a Yahoo group specifically for people using the Palm to manage GTD, but also on page two of the article there's the link to the author's site. EEP! It seems like GTD is either so great that everyone wants to push the book and/or the author (I think he does seminars for $$$) at you, or maybe that the EULA for the book says, "by reading this book you agree to put copious links to it and its purchase vectors all over your site".

Getting things done, indeed. Getting the dollars, too, I imagine.

Comments

The Book

[veep.livejournal.com]

It's just the basis for all the other stuff on 43 Folders. 43 Folders is an implementation details site; the book is the philosophy and reference guide. None of the system tweaks really make sense without the book.

As to the copious linkage, it may be that the kind of people who take to GTD are the kind of people who like things to be "correct" (like, say, engineers) and thus must link every book mention to the Amazon page, because that's how linking works, dammit. I dunno.

You're reading the advanced tips guide and wondering why it keeps pointing back at the main guide and reference. That's the only way it all makes sense.

(In short, Getting Things Done is so great that everyone wants to push the book.)