The author acknowledges this: > Though I still appreciate some of GTD’s principles (next action, desired outcome as project, brain dumping, etc) His issue is

The author acknowledges this: > Though I still appreciate some of GTD’s principles (next action, desired outcome as project, brain dumping, etc) His issue is with GTD as a complete approach, and I very much agree with him. And while David Allen himself might give his blessing to 'partial' implementation (although his comment on the article suggests otherwise), the most common response I get when I talk about taking the best bits of GTD is that GTD only works if you implement all of it. And I actually agree with that. I've 'religiously' applied GTD for years, but I kept falling off the wagon and forgot to do my weekly review, or some other crucial part of it. And without exception, the results were disastrous. Sure, there's bits and pieces that are useful, very useful maybe, but they're isolated enough to not be considered GTD anymore. If you do next actions the GTD way, you pretty much need to do the weekly review the GTD way, and you pretty much need to keep tabs on your inboxes without leaving any slack. That in itself can work against the more creative professions. > So as long as you collect everything out of your head and into a system where you can review and prioritize, that's GTD for everyone regardless of your station in life. If that's GTD, then I'd argue most productivity systems are GTD. Which makes GTD an empty signifier. On a more positive note: even though I abandoned GTD as a whole, I did learn a lot of valuable things. And it did work very well in certain periods of my life when I had a lot of disparate things on my plate. And I might very well start using the system again if my work becomes more managerial or otherwise fit for GTD. tl;dr: GTD in any meaningful sense means applying it as a whole. That's what sets it apart from other approaches. And for many of us, it doesn't work for a variety of reasons. For others it does, and that's okay too.