Get-organized propaganda is a big business, accounting for multibillion dollars solely in the US. To grasp the size of the business, see chapter 1, the cost of neatness, of A perfect mess. Efficiency zealots might have failed to make the world a better place, or a more efficient one. But, at least they have succeeded in turning it into a big moneymaker.

At the center of the turmoil stand two efficiency gurus: Stephen Covey and David Allen.

Allen wants you to arrange items on the list according to convenience — that is, tasks that you can accomplish together should be listed together. Stephen “Highly Effective Habits” Covey, on the other hand, emphacizes placing the items that are most important to your goals at the top of the list. (A perfect mess, p. 119)

I certainly agree with Eric Abrahamson that there are times when it’s kind of nice being messy: “The truth is, we are all at least a bit of a mess — and all the more interesting for it.” (p. 145)

I wonder, however, if the comparison may be a little bit of oversimplification. Did you notice that Stephen Covey is highly effective toward the corporate market, whereas the GTD thing is extremely popular among programmers. If in doubt, just look around familiar blogs and websites, like lifehacker, 43 Folders and lifehack.

Why? I vaguely infer that the relationship is similar to, to oversimplify the matter, the approaches adopted by Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds respectively. Something like the relationship between top-down and bottom-up thing:

bottom-up implementation /n./
Hackish opposite of the techspeak term `top-down design’. It is now received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to build things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together. (from The New Hacker’s Dictionary)

And, the most interesting question of all: Why are we so obsessed with the effeciency/productivity/organization stuff? Maybe it’s because we see flaws all around us, but if you accept the method, then those flaws magically turn into a trivial, technical digression rather than the character flaw, wrong training and education, stuipd choice or even evolutionarily failed experiment… In other words, we can assure ourselves that there’s nothing we can’t do anything about. Not a big deal. And, probably we’re paying huge amount of money for the condolence we get from the advices.