[defilmj]

Originally Posted by Toadling

I was thinking exactly the same thing when I read that passage in the book. Maybe David Allen and I are just from different generations, or different subcultures, but I'd personally never imagine handling my task management with anything other than a computer. It's like the difference between a hand drill and a power drill.

I know lots of people get along fine with old fashioned paper, but I'm a digital guy. Every time I get out a pen and tablet, I keep feeling like I want to save my work and copy and paste. Heck, my handwriting has atrophied so much that my 5-year-old daughter has better penmanship! :-)

-Dennis

I have about 7 years of Daytimers. It is fun to look back at that time
early in my career. But when you see the Daytimers and there are 40 items for a day, you get backed up and before you know it you have 22 A1's, 11 B1's and a few C's, which means you have 22 items to get done today.
Glad one, as an example is "Modify market feed receiver front end to handle Multicast addresses along with UDP broadcast". Nice 2 week project! LOL.

Then of course you look at the next day and there are the same tasks copied from the day before. How painful. David pokes fun at the daytimer method
because it is too simplistic for our knowledge work.

There is something to what you point out about "paper" vs. "Digital". As an Engineer for 22 years I put everything on computer, but often keep a paper copy in a folder. Where-as the younger guys I hire for my team (Gen X, and some Gen Y) strictly use Electronic. No file folders at all please. I keep my
folder for a project with papers in chronological order of generation. I don't know how to integrate some emails, diagrams, papers, budget items, project plans, etc. in order electronically to keep an "audit trail". My engineers seem to be able to do this electronically. I suspect they keep that in memory and can come up with the same chronology. They had computers in K. I had a Teletype connected to a IBM 360 Mainframe when I was in Middle School. First Micro computer PC came out when I was 17.
So this may be the issue. So there is real evidence to support your statements.

I do almost everything on computer now. Multiple systems and I too could
not go back to an organization system that is not on a computer. I forget how we found things out before we had the "Internet". I recall R&D and
homework, college work being a lot more work! We lived without cell phones and PIM's. Don't ask me know... I don't know how people lived without Air conditioning.... OMG!

Thanks Again!
Mark