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Getting Things Done and other Life Hacks How we try (and fail) to be as productive as David Faure

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a system invented by David Allen who specializes in personal productivity consulting. It gives a very practical approach to personal organization and how to optimize it.

GTD is what we consider the start of a line of thought in personal organization which can be compared to the Agile approach in software engineering, or the Lean approach in business organization and production. It inspired several other ideas to improve your daily life like Inbox Zero, ultimately culminating with the emergence of a new term to caracterize them all: Life Hacks.

As technologists, we're all very connected to modern means of communication. We've to deal with a lot of information, take decisions based on it, effectively making us knowledge workers. But still we have to participate in software projects. That's a lot to deal with for a single person and -- except if you're David Faure -- it is very easy to get overworked and drown under the mass of information to deal with.

In this talk we'll introduce you to the Life Hacks we practice and how we're effectively fighting against the continuous stream of information. Of course, since we are still geeks, we will cover how software can make the difference by introducing Zanshin, a new todo management application entirely based on Akonadi and following some of the GTD principles.

About the authors: Kevin Ottens and Till Adam work at KDAB, where they try to appear as talented and productive as their colleagues, with varying success. They both found themselves interested in Agile Software Development and Getting Things Done approaches, hoping those would help them deal with their lazyness and dread of complicated processes. Of course they just ended up writing software for it, in all that time freed up by the new found efficiency.

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