Over the past couple of months, I have found out something out (thanks to some anonymous forum posters) about David Allen and most of the employees at The David Allen Company (if not the intent of GTD itself) that is kind of creepy. I have sat on this for weeks before blogging about it, however, it affected my performance and my implementation of GTD.
It is this: David Allen is a member of a somewhat fringe religion called The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA, pronounced messiah!). If you really want to find them, you can follow the link from David’s comments on his now defunct blog. They believe that the guy that leads them, who goes only by the name John-Roger, is called the “Mystical Traveler”, and that he is in line with Jesus and Moses. Reading the stuff available on the web, it is evident that this is not a mainstream religion. I have even mentioned in previous postings that I have “drunk the ‘Kool-Aid’”, and it weirds me out a little.
I had originally started this post about a month ago, and had a long and at this point I had a long diatribe about how I found all this out, links to various forum postings and pieces of information, and other such stuff. I’ve thought about it for weeks, and my answer is as follows – stuff it. Who cares what David’s religion is? Who cares what he believes? He has given us a system that does as advertised – increases our productivity. I’ve decided to put it out of my head, use what I can, and dump the rest.
That said, as I have mentioned in previous posts, I did cancel my GTD Connect membership. I was a little worried about how the money would be used, sure, but at the end of the day I didn’t get $50USD value out of the thing. So I cancelled, and they were gracious about it and wished me well in my future GTD endeavours.
Getting Things Done is a great system for personal productivity, and irrespective of how David Allen got his experiences and developed the program, he has chosen to share it with the rest of us. Take what you need, leave what you don’t – and leave his personal choices out of it. Just get on with getting things accomplished.
I really encourage some discussion about this issue. It caught some peoples' attention at the Davidco Forums when it was first brought up. There is no denying that David is a member of MSIA, but what does that have to do with GTD? It bugged me for too long, so I'm going to move on and ignore it, while still using GTD. Your mileage may vary.
Technorati tags: gtd , gtd+cult , David+Allen , Weekly+Review
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