If you stumbled in here with no prelude, Tao of Awesome is a first-rate productivity system and e-course written by Johnny B Truant. This is my review of the product.

I am an avid GTDer– –since the book first came out (I was in high school. Type A? You don’t say.) But Johnny nailed the big problem with GTD— it’s all too easy to chase the small wins.

I bought the course in June 2011 because I was handling a lot in my life and it was just too much work to do GTD— far too many moving parts for me to handle when I was dealing with a long-distance husband, family drama, and an incipent move, and had my own business to run

The course is delivered by email twice a week, and that was too much for me: I got bogged down. Instead I saved them to a folder and did one a week, and that seemed to work fine.

The other complaint I had was that the emails came in plain-text. Now, however, they come with a nice clean pdf that you can print out if you want, with the important stuff highlighted. I’m glad, because that was the main thing that was keeping me from recommending the course.

Otherwise, I swear by the Tao of Awesome. I used the course through that move, the subsequent dissolution of my marriage, a second (cross-country) move and the complete revampment of my life. Somehow, ToA managed to convert a dyed-in-the-wool GTDer.

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The Nuts and Bolts

The course has two main parts: The System and Putting Your Existing ToDos Into the System. Johnny also does a great job of weaving the why of what you’re doing into the course.

With GTD, David Allen does cover the why, mostly in Making It All Work (his most recent book); but mostly the assumption is that you will be able to figure out the why  by zooming out to 20, 30, 40k feet and that people will unconsciously align from there. The only problem is that very few people actually do zoom that far out. They use it to maintain their day-to-day projects and never go any further with it. Why? Because it’s a lot of really tough mental work to make those long-view mental plans, and even more work to keep them current.

Truant does the same thing, (Lesson 3) but he makes it way more fun and less like a carved-in-stone five-year-plan— and then he explicitly shows you how to incorporate that vision at the actionable level, through the use of the “purposes.”

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These “purposes” are rather like David Allen’s projects, but more flexible and tangible, I found. Plus, you set it up so the purpose is accomplished in a given week, and one thing I found difficult about GTD was feeling like I made any progress on projects when the “Next Actions” were so small. Now, I sit down in the morning with one purpose, in the afternoon with another, and the other stuff all seems to fit in around the edges — Exactly what GTD is supposed to do, but with so much less effort.

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Each of the lessons walks you through one completely doable chunk at a time. Opposite of GTD, though, he gets your commitments under control before he teaches you the system of what you’re doing. He uses the Karate Kid metaphor of “wax on, wax off”. You’ll already be doing the steps for a couple of weeks before he explains where it fits in the larger scheme of things. You might be chomping at the bit (I know I was) but when he does lay it out for you, you’re in a place where you can take full advantage of it.

About the “doable chunks” though — – they are doable, but depending on how over-extended you are, they take some commitment, especially the first handful of lessons. I took 5-6 hours on the first lesson and 4 hours on the third lesson. They were totally worth it. But just be aware that this is not a course where you “read the chapter and do the questions”. This is a course where you read the chapter and do a project.

Who Needs This?

Look, if you’ve ever tried any kind of productivity system, and you’re not completely happy with it, you should try this out. I would never have believed there was a system that beat GTD. Ever. If you had told me this one would, I would have smiled blandly and changed the subject.

I only bought this course because I didn’t have time to maintain GTD.

I bought it because it was cheap, and it looked easy to implement. I planned to go back to GTD as soon as I had time to overhaul the system again.

But right about Lesson 7, I saw a dramatic upsurge in how I got things done. I wasn’t just DOING things. I was ACCOMPLISHING things. I was spending virtually no time maintain a multitude of lists and todos, and all my time powering through projects that I thought would take much more time than they did.

There’s another thing that Johnny promises that I didn’t neccesarily give creedence to. He says he’ll help you integrate all the facets of your life.

If you’re a GTDer, you know that’s one of GTD’s claims to fame, too.

Both systems give equal weight to the things you have to do in your personal life and your home life. But GTD has you write a mission statement. Tao of Awesome has you describe a dream. It’s in Lesson 3, and it walks you through imagining what every facet of your life would look like if it were ideally realized. And every week, when you’re planning your life, you read through that dream to make sure you’re on track. This one lesson is worth the cost of the entire course.

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What’s The Learning Curve Like?

If you’re familiar with GTD, the first four lessons are like GTD-lite. Because, as I said, I bought the course because I couldn’t maintain a full-blown GTD system, this made me THRILLED with my purchase.

Then, as he unveiled more and more of the specifics of the system, I wept in awe. David Allen’s GTD system is a marvelous architecture. But it doesn’t sufficiently address human psychology. Certain types of people adapt very well to that type of rigid framework, and others fail horribly.

The brilliance of ToA is that it ties every single action to a motivation. Every. Single. One.  And let me tell you, that’s where most of the work of maintaining a system comes in– figuring out why you want to do a given project.

Most of the work in GTD comes from defining the project, planning the project, and tracking the project.

Its simplicity is striking. Which is precisely why it works so well.

The simplicity means that the learning curve is not at all steep. It only requires practice. Wax on. Wax off.

In Summary

It’s obvious I’m a raving fan. The only concerns I had were cosmetic, and they’ve since been corrected.

Now, I’m willing to concede that not everyone needs more productivity in their lives. But that’s the beauty of the Tao of Awesome. Because each and every action is tied to your personal motivations, you’ll never get wrapped up in your work at the expense of your family. You’ll never lose sight of your health because you were focussed on relationships. The Tao of Awesome wrangles everything with what I believe is the minimum of effort and the maximum of elegance. That makes it cheap at twice the price.

Click here to check out Johnny’s description of the Tao of Awesome.