David Baillie | Michael Hyatt | Orchant | Hoxsey

"If you're not doing a weekly review, you're not doing GTD," says Orchant, who favors Friday afternoons for his reviews. "On the surface level, you're just tidying up, and it has value for that alone. But it's also training, trying to get to black belt level. You're constantly trying to refine your ability to make good agreements with yourself and others. This is an opportunity to see how well you did."

Of course, nothing works for everyone. And no doubt scores of people have jumped off the GTD train for one reason or another. But again and again, GTD devotees praise its power to drive personal and corporate changes. "When I'm on my game and everything is where it should be, I come up with the [craziest] out-of-the-box things that turn out to be really good for the business," says Hoxsey. At General Mills, Wilde sees productivity gains flowing from GTD. "I've heard that people feared or ducked certain projects in the past because they didn't break it down to that next simple action. They say, 'Now that I've defined the project and know what success looks like, I can take the first step.'?"

David Baillie says GTD has been great for him as a manager and a supervisor. "Communication is so crisp and clear and prompt," he notes. "People have started using some of the same thought patterns. Now, we don't have a meeting without defining the successful outcome and asking who's got the next action."

Publisher Michael Hyatt observes another change wrought by GTD: a dramatic drop in his tolerance for the hopelessly disorganized. "It drives me crazy," he confesses.­ "I had to terminate a few high-profile people who would commit to something in a meeting and then just wouldn't follow through, so it was a colossal waste of everyone's time."