I’m nearly finished with my 30 day trial of the GTD outlook add-in. GTD stands for “Getting Things Done” and is intended David Allen’s fantastic book on productivity.

The Add-in is very simple. Anyone with any VSTO knowledge could create it quite simply. It provides the user with a toolbar that allows them to set emails to “Defer” (this will put them in a @Defer folder), “ACTION” (this will put them in the @Action folder), etc.

I’d read a lot of good things while searching the web about this add-in. People raving at what a good help it is–how it streamlines their life. I was excited to try it.

I’m unimpressed with GTD for Outlook. The application doesn’t seem to be written by anyone who has ever read any of David Allen’s books. I’m surprised it even got his endorsement. Unlike the Franklin-Covey Planplus outlook add-in, there are no glaring bugs, but for $50, I would expect more than the application saving me the arduous chore of copying an email in my inbox to the @DEFER folder.

There is a short ebook for sale on the David Allen website (http://www.davidco.com) that tells you how to configure Outlook 2003 for maximum productivity. This will cost about $10, but you can probably find the same material on the web for free if you look hard enough. With this PDF, you can get Outlook working as well as you could with the GTD add-in but without cluttering you desktop with another add-in. The URL for this PDF is http://www.davidco.com/store/product.php?productid=16173&cat=0&page=1

So if you found this post because you were doing some product research prior to downloading (as I did), let me offer my opposing view to all the glowing posts I had read and tell you that I don’t think you need it.

So now I get the nag screen telling me to register for the next 10 days. I’m uninstalling. As with all outlook add-in uninstalls, I hope I don’t end up crashing my system.

After reading David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, last week, I decided to order the book from Amazon. I read too many self-improvement books. Lately, I’m getting tired of all the hacks that are re-hashing all the other people’s findings. It gets so tiring reading this crap hoping “if I can just take one thing away from this . . .”, but get nothing.

This book is different. I’ve read other time management books and I’ve made lists with priorities and had my boss come in with an urgent task that throws the whole list out of whack. This book focuses more on a “mind like water” approach (from karate). This all sounds very simple and Allen even admits the common sense to it all.

On the “common sense” note, I constantly hear people refer to the books that I read as “it’s all pretty much common sense”. However, the things the authors like Covey, Allen, Tom Peters, etc, cover are never applied by most people I know. Perhaps it goes back to the Mark Twain Quote–“Common Sense is not that common.”