What a nice comment! The next time I feel tempted to describe how GTD solves some problem or other, I'll wait until the urge passes and message you instead; clearly my one read through Getting Things Done has taught me just enough to be dangerous.

Er, I'm not able to tell if you're being serious or sarcastic here. But do note that I was just pointing out a systemic problem with talking about cognitive algorithms, not criticizing you OR jimrandomh for attempting to do so. In particular, I didn't say your statement was false or incorrect, just that it was imprecise enough for somebody else to project a different meaning onto it.

My own experience trying to teach things is that in any one-way communication about cognitive techniques, it is virtually impossible to prevent this kind of projection, because you not only have to state all the distinctions, you also have to explicitly contrast them with whatever people think is the "default".... and people have different defaults!

The only reliable way to get somebody to really understand something in the domain of experiential behavior, is to get them to actually do that something... which is why I'm so vocal about telling people to try things before they evaluate them, not after.

Anyway, the point was not to be critical of you, since the thing I would be critiquing is literally unavoidable. No matter what you write or say, people can project on it, and a feedback loop in the communication (plus willingness to listen on both sides) is the only way to guarantee a fix for the misunderstandings that result.