Heathervescent is “The Purple Tornado.” A GTD Fanatic and a Marketing Genius, we came across her original video and said; “We’ve got to make sure her stuff gets shared with the community! It’s Great!”
Check out her latest effort, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GkFTsQjvSc
Hi,
I’m motivated to try your method (I own the book published by Penguin Australia in 2015) but my first visit to your web site makes me wonder whether you are simply not following your own advice or whether the whole set up is just a con.
Designing a simple indexed paper filing system seems to me to be a challenge, the GTD book gives a couple of examples (Gardening and London Restaurants) but I would like a few more comprehensive examples so that I limit the time I waste in getting going. I’m looking first in the free stuff to see whether I can find anything interesting. This post https://gettingthingsdone.com/2008/03/heathervescent-gives-us-her-latest-gtd-video-filing/ is from 2008 (ie pretty old) and references a youtube video that the link doesn’t find (old may be ok but a link that doesn’t work is not so good). I also found a Blog entry that said that there was free material on filing in the store and that provided a link. The link took me to the store but the free material did not seem to exist.
The other blog entries on filing indexing generally just repeat the book.
So the free stuff either references links that don’t work or repeats stuff from the book. Probably a waste of my time to read it and your time to provide it so not really “the art of stress free productivity.”
I’m sure there is a better method than the random approach that I have used for the past 50+ years but I am now starting to wonder whether you are either selling the sizzle of a steak that doesn’t exist or using the GTD book merely as a way to entice readers into buying a never ending series of products.
I’m sorry if it seems like we’re trying to con you into buying products. We actually have a lot of free content. I think that, as you point out, we also have some old blog posts with outdated links. We will look into that and see what we can do to update.
Here are two free options that may be useful.
This is a link to a PDF on setting up general reference filing.
https://gettingthingsdone.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2016-General-Reference-Filing-.pdf
This link goes to a page with a variety of free PDFs about GTD.
https://gettingthingsdone.com/free-articles/