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Welcome to my latest blog. I spent the first week of 2007 reading David Allen's book Getting Things Done and I have been hooked ever since. What is Getting Things Done (usually abbreviated to GTD)? Sit down, how much time do you have? :-)

I think Merlin Mann summed it nicely in his Google Tech Talk calling it a "tool-agnostic framework" for productivity. Those are big words, I know. Simply put, GTD is a concept and not a product. I entered the corporate world in 1987 when I was a college freshman working for AT&T. Right off the bat they sent me to a time management class. They gave me all sorts of nifty stuff including a nice binder, heavy tan-colored filler, and a wide assortment of tabs. Wow! My life would be hyperorganized now!

No, it wasn't. The system was very cumbersome to use. The refills were quite expensive. It didn't work well at school.

I returned to AT&T spring quarter 1988 and what do you know? They switched to Daytimers. Apparently the previous system was all wrong. This one almost fit in my pocket. Yeah, almost. I found having each date presented on two facing pages not to be a really good format for me. There was nothing to trigger me to look forward or back for what I really needed to do. I could write "Design project due!" on May 23, but I wouldn't look at that page until May 23. Sort of late to be starting a project. Plus how do you "do" a project?

I plodded along eventually finishing college and kicking off my career back in Florida. I found lab notebooks to be useful while in school, so I continued keeping a notebook throughout my first job and into my second. I have seven or eight full lab books sitting on my shelf. I call it my WOM or "write only memory". I would dutifully record all of my action items then forget them.

I moved back to Texas in 1998 (I seem to cycle between Florida, Texas, and Georgia) and my employer sent me to on-site training by Franklin-Covey. I learned my team, my family, and every organization to which I belonged needed a mission statement. Not sure why. But we needed one! When I finished that training I really felt like I had just joined a cult. I half expected Tom Cruise and John Travolta to appear from behind a curtain to measure my thetan levels.

Late last year I bought a Moleskine notebook because... well, just because. I had filled my last lab notebook and I wanted something more pocket-sized. There seems to be some obsession in the GTD community with Moleskine. I don't really understand it, but one thing led to another and next thing I knew I had purchased David Allen's book.

And here I am in October 2007 with ten month's of GTD experience behind me. What have I learned? Subscribe to this blog and find out. My focus is GTD in a large corporation. There are many GTD blogs out there and most of them are good. But they're written primarily by people who are self-employed, work in a small firm, or otherwise very self-directed. I work for a corporation (which you've never of) that employs almost as many people who live in Iceland. There are barriers to GTD in a corporate environment. I plan to share what has worked and what hasn't.

Now for some disclaimers. I am not in any way associated with David Allen. I do not represent him or his company. I, for now, will not name my employer. We were acquired by a competitor this month. Previously I was forbidden from disclosing my employer's name or use of their logo on my personal blog. Fair enough. I do not know the blogging policy of my new employer, but I'm going to play it safe. I am a test engineer in the electronics assembly business.

Some quick shoutouts to Neal who works behind the scenes at Geekbrief.tv and the awesome podcasting author Scott Sigler for their words of encouragement.