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October 04, 2005

Lunch with Jim Fallows

Had a lovely lunch with Jim Fallows today in DC, after which he took me on a tour of the DC offices of the Atlantic. Soon to be the HQ for the whole magazine. Bit of a change, the venerable intelligent rag moving from Emersonian Boston to one of the Watergate buildings (owned by current Atlantic owner David Bradley). Fun to find out that there are several highly-placed GTD champions on the magazine, and to hang again a while with Jim, a lazy-geek-engaged soul brother, very involved in what's happening at certain horizons in ways I really admire. Jim and his wife Deb are moving to China next spring - going to report for Atlantic and the NY Times from a place that Jim says he needs to spend some time in, just because it's the thing to do now. Cool. We should be getting some great stories and important world-view perspectives from the smart straight story teller Jim is...

BTW, Jim wrote a nice column in the NY Times October 2, talking about Mac Micro and Brainstorm, amongst other things.

Posted by David at October 4, 2005 10:54 PM

Comments

Hello David:

I'm a big GTD fan, having just implemented it over the past month. Thanks so much for your work.

I'd love to have you as a guest on my podcast, SavvySoloCAST, the official podcast for savvy solopreneurs. SavvySoloCAST recently broke into the iTunes Top 100 Podcasts and is currently at #59 among thousands of other podcasts available on iTunes. In fact, my most recent podcast has been downloaded by over 7000 folks. That's not to brag but simply to (hopefully) convince you it would be worth your time to be on the show.

I'd like to talk to you about two things:

1. The GTD brand and how you've built it so successfully.

2. The GTD system itself and the value it can provide to my listeners.

How it would work is we would get together on the phone for about an hour and just have a conversation. I'll record the call and publish it as a free podcast. Pretty simple. If you're on Skype, that would be ideal for me, but a landline is fine too.

Whatcha think?

Best - Michael

Posted by: Michael D. Pollock at October 5, 2005 08:06 AM

I've been a James Fallows fan for a long time. What a great life you have to meet such interesting people. And to help them be even greater with GTD. Keep up the good work!

Posted by: Sharon Delman at October 5, 2005 07:20 PM

David, I think you mean the Mac mini rather than the Mac Micro... Love the site!

Posted by: Pam Bennett at October 6, 2005 12:57 PM

David, thanks for the nice mention. It was great to see you here in greater DC. (And, for the amusement of the readership, there was one item David showed me that he wasn't sure how to organize! I had my own not-very-elegant solution to that same problem, but for a moment I felt all-powerful.) I will elaborate on David's understated comment: when I introduced him to a few GTD devotees on the Atlantic's staff, you could tell that at last they felt they had met a true celebrity. Much better than these run-of-the-mill politicians.

Posted by: J Fallows at October 7, 2005 01:36 PM

Wow! A mention of BrainStorm by David Allan. That's very kind of you.

And you heard about it in The Atlantic offices. How appropriate. Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic Monthly article "As we may think" was the final push I needed to start writing BrainStorm when it was reprinted in a 1980 edition of Creative Computing.

Of course BrainStorm has undergone many transformations in its life and, today, I know that a number of GTD'ers use it.

If you think it would be useful to you or your fans, I'd be happy to make contact.

Please email me or find me on Skype as tebbo1. I tend to notice instant messages more than phone calls (because I rarely have my speakers on!)

Thanks for the mention. And it must have been great meeting James Fallows, one of our favourite customers since he mentioned us so eloquently in the New York Times.

Posted by: David Allen at October 31, 2005 11:58 PM

James Fallows may be the best writer out there today on the practical use of technology. The stuff of his I have read, especially in the NY Times, is as useful as it is well-written.

Posted by: David Hollis at November 14, 2005 07:23 PM