(2007-09-28) Wolf David Allen

Gary Wolf on David Allen. (Recovering) heroine addict, (current) John Roger follower, refers to himself in the 1st-person-plural.. what's not to like?

Allen is remaking the self-help tradition for the information age. The contrast with earlier schemes is instructive. The two most influential self-organization gurus of the 1980s and 1990s were Stephen Covey and Hyrum W. Smith. Covey is the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; Smith is the founder of the company that created the Franklin Planner. (The two men merged their companies in 1997.) While Covey and Smith each offer many practical tips, they both start with philosophical reflection.

Bookbinder and Allen became close. Bookbinder taught him karate, and soon Allen was using heroin, too. He left his marriage, abandoned his academic training, and eventually found himself out on the street, practically penniless, "crucified psychically," as he would later put it, "absolutely at the bottom physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually." Worried about the radical change in his behavior, some of Allen's friends had him committed in 1971.

The man who put him on a new path was then at the inflection point in a long and varied spiritual enterprise. Roger Hinkins was born during the Depression in a poor mining town in central Utah. By the early '70s he had been introduced to Eckankar by its founder, Paul Twitchell, learned esoteric philosophy from a correspondence course, changed his name to Sri John-Roger, started a series of spiritual seminars, and given up his work as a high school teacher to found a church called the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness.

Allen explains that while he won't hide his beliefs, he doesn't want his personal faith confused with the message he has for people today. "The Marriott family supports the Mormon Church," he points out, but nobody refuses to sleep in their hotels. Of course, a hotel is not an installed thought process, which is the way Allen describes GTD.

Allen is grappling with all the normal challenges of a person who does not have a deep hierarchy above or below him, who is required to make countless small decisions, and who has limited ability to pass mundane tasks off to others. He sets his own goals and uses his own methods to achieve them. Allen's list of open loops includes getting GTD adopted in schools, learning to type 80 words a minute, becoming better at small talk, and achieving a high net worth. This ambitious mind-set, with its combination of boldness and conventionality, says something about where Getting Things Done is coming from, and to whom it is aimed. The book is for people who are striving hard. "The people who take to GTD are the most organized people," Allen says, "but they self-assess as the least organized, because they are well-enough organized to know that they are fucking up."

Allen responds: I was a bit disappointed that Gary Wolf (the author of the Wired article) rather tackily framed my early adventures and explorations, as well as the work of John-Roger, in such a People-magazine-ish light. There's a bit of intellectual dishonesty in not exploring the content of what I learned in the process, nor examining what J-R actually teaches. And that was almost 40 years ago. Good grief. But what the heck. I think he did an admirable job of catching some of the profundity of what the GTD thought process is, and might be, relative to the next level of awareness required in our culture....