GTD for Bloggers: The Art of Stress-free Blogging
The ever-popular productivity book Getting Things Done, by David Allen, caught on fire within the last few years through the power of blogs. And while many a blogger has fallen in love with GTD, and in fact many GTD blogs have been created …
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2007, David Allen's Getting Things Done had already made an unusual journey for a business book: its confirmed rise came through blogs rather than traditional channels, and enough bloggers adopted the system that dedicated GTD blogs became their own subgenre. This Web Worker Daily piece applies that loop inward — using GTD to solve the very publishing pressure that blogging creates.
The article lands amid a run of practical blogger-facing how-to coverage, following pieces like HTML tricks for adding style to posts earlier in 2007. What distinguishes it is that the subject isn't craft but sustainability: managing posting workflows, not improving them.
First-order effects
- Bloggers who adopt the method gain a concrete workflow for idea capture and posting schedules, and the pool of GTD-focused blogs grows as practitioners document their own systems.
Second-order effects
- David Allen's franchise gains a self-reinforcing distribution channel: every GTD-practicing blogger writing about the system markets the book to other bloggers at zero cost to the publisher.
- Toolmakers and template creators get a ready-made niche, since bloggers adapting GTD need digital implementations — lists, calendars, editorial queues — not paper trays.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, productivity itself becomes blog content: methodologies spread, mutate, and monetize inside the same medium they organize, weakening the gatekeeping role of traditional self-help publishing.
- The framing of blogging as workload to be managed signals that sustained posting volume is becoming an accepted occupational strain for independent writers — a tension the broader blogosphere was beginning to name openly.
The trend: Personal-productivity methods are increasingly popularized, adapted, and distributed by the blogs themselves, turning readers into both audience and marketing channel for the underlying books.