Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars

One of the projects I worked on at O’Reilly was a joint report with another company that produced research reports. Among other things, it was a great way to learn how other businesses managed their processes and methodologies. The report came out well, but there’s one thing our prime contact at the other company said that, I hope, will stay with me.

“If we lose our way,” he said, “we always go back to our framework.”

We all want to be agile. But it’s easier to respond to anything if you have a starting point. Having just an adequate framework, I’ve found, might be almost as good as having a great one. Having thought about it for a while, I think simply having a framework is more important than which framework you have. Why look for the perfect system for writing a novel or getting in shape when any of them is probably better than just bumbling in the dark, which is what most of us do most of the time? A framework has to be unusually wrong to hold you back.

That’s new thinking for me. For a long time I didn’t trust explain-it-all systems. Until recently, I made fun of people who adopted GTD with an almost-religious fervor. Yet, after flirting with GTD for more than a year, I’m following it, too, although not with quite the fervor you’d expect of the recently converted. Even if it’s not a perfect system, it is a good system, and I’m starting to believe that’s almost all that matters.

And now, on to my GTD weekly review…

I just checked my email and I realized what my favorite email subject line is:

“Meeting cancelled”