Who is the target audience for this book? The most charitable answer I can give is "people who are productive individual contributors that have literally never worked in a team setting before"; a less charitable answer (but one that I suspect is more accurate, both towards the authors' aims and the average reader's characteristics) is "people willing to buy Yet Another Management Book because it has the GTD stamp on it."

Certainly, if you have read any sort of literature (and by literature I am mean to be broad enough to include, like, blog posts) around management the vast majority of this book is of no use. Lamont and Allen offer advice of the genre: "meetings should always start on time", "it's important to have clear lines of communication", and "knowing who owns what is important". Nothing is incorrect; everything is anodyne.

(Lamont even has an aside towards the end of the book about how the editor commented on the draft as being "particularly lean" and not needing much editing, trying to spin this as a good thing and that the book was a useful primer to revisit over the years.)

I am being particularly critical of this book, because it left a particularly poor taste in my mouth. I think there is a real need for a practitioner's guide towards GTD in a group setting (how do you integrate tooling? how should you revise your understanding of delegation?) and, modulo a too-short appendix, none of this is addressed and indeed David's main contribution to the book probably accounts for all of ten pages (five of which are simply him saying "I agree with what Ed said".) It's certainly not harmful, but it takes everything I loved about GTD (directness, idiosyncracy, concreteness) and excised all of that in favor of table-stakes collaboration ideas that most competent people are already familiar with.

Do not buy this book!

★