Great posts, Merlin. As always this site is really helpful.

For me the biggest hangup is simply getting to work. I’m a grad student in English literature, so my working style is actually pretty different from a lot of people on here (as far as I can tell). My work ‘units’ are huge, e.g., “finish this huge 600 page novel”; and I don’t use computers that often, so my day-to-day tools are a Palm handheld, a notebook, some 3M sticky bookmarks, and a pen.

There are certain things GTD just doesn’t address for me: for example, how do you plan when your work needs to happen in large, often unfinishable, units? When one of my tasks is to write a thirty page article on Hamlet, I can’t predictably or truthfully break that task down (yet) into smaller parts that I can commit to. I just have to start working and keep plugging away until it’s done. So far, GTD has had an incredible effect in my personal life—paying bills, returning phone calls, fixing things up around the house, and so on—but a pretty negligable effect on my work life, for which it hasn’t done very much, mostly because the problems GTD is designed to address, which have to do with being overwhelmed by little tasks, are problems I don’t have, exactly.

Has anyone else had these kinds of problems, or found a way to shape GTD to work in this kind of context? I suspect that what I really need to do is simply learn to read and write faster, and GTD can’t help me with that one (so far!).