thinking that you can actually fix this,” Allen says. “It doesn’t because it’s not about information, it’s about behavior.”
Only a tool that grows out of an awareness of the behavioral principles behind GTD will be truly helpful, Allen argues. And Intentional’s meta approach, he says, may be the first programming philosophy capable of capturing those principles.
The ideal GTD app, Allen says, would be “alive and personalized to you and the moment you’re in.” If you just need a place to “dump stuff out of your head,” he says, it should give you a place to do that. If you’re on your way to see your boss, it should show you a map of all the thoughts you’ve recorded lately related to your boss or pending assignments. “It will be very visual, with basically all the stuff you need to see if you want to be totally appropriately engaged with your world.”
A GTD app that can do all that would certainly be a big help to millions of knowledge workers. But in the end, Intentional Software also has a lot at stake. Though it’s been around since 2002, the company has never built a piece of consumer-facing software, let alone a mobile app.
GTD is “the perfect showcase” for Intentional’s Knowledge Workbench approach, says Anderson—who’s confident that the company’s method will work well in the mobile sphere.
“In the Knowledge Workbench, knowledge is captured in a platform agnostic way – the knowledge itself is pure and clean,” Anderson says. “The knowledge is then targeted to a specific platform for its implementation as part of a generation process. Whether the target is a mobile, tablet, Web, desktop, server, the technology choice has implementation implications for the generation process, but the knowledge is the same at its core.” Plenty of GTD disciples will be waiting to see whether Intentional Software can effectively capture that knowledge.
