I just skimmed, in the last half hour, a wonderful book: Robert Boice's Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing.

Published in 1990, it long precedes David Allen's GTD. But I find it notable that even the subtitle of Boice's book echoes David's GTD subtitle: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Boice does recommend the time-management techniques of Alan Lakein's How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, which is a fine book but which has been made obsolete by David's GTD.

What is nice to find in Boice's book is data. He has done some empirical research on which methods work and which do not. Boice's approach combines behavioral, cognitive, social, and time-management techniques to get people writing. Although this book is targeted at professors with writing block, his methods have much broader application. They can be generalized to anyone who wants to write and then they can be generalized again to anyone who wants to get anything done.

The parts of his method that are specific to writing rely heavily on the work of Peter Elbow, whose books I strongly recommend to anyone who is looking for help writing. The genius of Boice is that he takes Elbow's specific writing techniques and embeds them in an overarching life system. This is why I find that his approach resonates so nicely with David Allen's GTD.

As I said in the first sentence, I've only spent 30 minutes on this book. It remains to be seen if I can use it to enhance my creative output. When I first read GTD, I didn't know whether it would work or not. But reading Boice, I already feel that it can't help but work, especially since he has the data to prove it.