I've been working at adopting David Allen's GTD system (here's the original book) for about 6 months now. It seems to suit my personality and lifestyle very well. My Read and Review stack (rnr) is still disparate yet but I do have a couple places that I understand are well-described as "rnr". That makes it easy enough for me to grab something on my way out the door to an appointment anywhere with a waiting room. Like this morning. I had to go have a consult about my teeth. The wait wasn't long but reading about debugging device drivers (thanks for the free magazine OSR) is a lot better than twiddling my thumbs or playing games on the phone.

There was an interesting side-effect that I really didn't expect though. My choice of reading material tells people something about me. So when Dr. McManus came in we got to have an interesting conversation since he's also a technology buff. I talk about software a lot, I talk about hardware a lot, I know, but the reason is that those are my interests. So I posit that choosing something from your rnr stack to take with you will give you a chance to reinforce things you're already in to and have more interesting conversations.

GTD really is actually the reason I ended up at the endodontist at all today. I had gone to see him a few years ago and dropped the ball because the project got confusing to me. Then I had a form I didn't know what to do with. Then there were other teeth that needed work. Then I couldn't figure out what the insurance company was telling me. The papers all went into an anonymous stack and I gave up on it. Then earlier this year, seeing the dentist made it on to one of my lists and since then the GTD system has carried me through and helped me responsibly keep track of the different things that all have to happen inside my mouth to make things work better for me.

Oh, and to the guys at OSR, I'm sure I saw BugCheck 0x1A a lot in the one Windows 2000 driver I wrote.