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 Introduction
 ============
 
-The goal is to write a book about how real people have applied GTD in
-their lives, or how they've tried to do so, but have not fully succeeded,
-and what kinds of things they've found to work, or not to work.
-
-The eventual goal is to have a real book, published by a real author,
-but also published under a suitable CC license as an e-book online.
-See how [Cory Doctorow](http://craphound.com/) does it, and mimick that.
-
-The goal is to write the book using an ikiwiki instance, and generate
-a PDF and epub from markdown, using tools to be determined later. Possibly
-using a pipeline involving markdown(1), some HTML templates, a custom
-CSS style sheet, and wkhtmltopdf to generate the PDF,
-and something else for epub. This can all be solved later, once there's
-some actual text.
-
-Only the authors will be able to modify the site on Branchable. For now.
-
-For now, let's not create subpages, but work on the outline on the
-front page.
-
-TODO for this chapter
-----
-
-- audience: people who live on their computers and need to ways to manage
-  overflowing email inboxes, and to deal with excessive amounts of inputs
-- something about the GTD phenomenon and its history; pointer to Allen and
-  his books
-- refer to Mann's "Inbox Zero"
-- pointer to book website/wiki
+David Allen's "Getting Things Done", or GTD for short,
+is a popular, powerful system for
+managing one's life. If you have trouble dealing with your e-mail inbox,
+or feel you're drowning under a flood of inputs and information, or
+just don't seem to have time to do everything you think you should be
+doing, or others want you to do, then GTD may be a good thing for you
+to consider.
+
+This book explains how I, a computer geek, have
+implemented it in my own life. It is aimed at
+everyone whose lives include a lot of computer use, and who know how
+to use their computers.
+
+This book stands independent from Allen's three books on GTD (see
+[[references]] for details), but
+you'll benefit from reading the first or third of those as
+well. (The second one should be considered optional.) I provide
+a different view of, and perhaps opinion of, the GTD system.
+
+I discuss what has been good about GTD for me, what has been hard
+to implement, and what has not worked. My goal is to explain what
+I do, and provide inspiration to you for building their own
+GTD system.
+
+GTD is not a system you buy in a shop and install on your desk. It is
+a meta-system: it provides some tools, a lot of guidelines, and
+principles, from which you create a system that works for you. For
+example, GTD assumes you will maintain lists, but does not specify
+how to do that. You can maintain a list on a pad of paper, in a text
+document on your computer, or by sticking photos of people on a
+notice board. It all depends on what kinds of things you need to
+keep track of, and on what tools you have and enjoy using. I am
+not going to discuss specific software tools in detail, since I have
+not made a survey of them. I will explain what I use myself.
+
+A brief history of GTD and it's place in the greater sociohistorical context of humanity
+-----------------------
+
+Personal productivity systems have been around for a long time.
+Allen published his first GTD book in 2002, and for the next
+few years, there was quite a lot of buzz about it on the Internet.
+Something about GTD spoke to geeks, and they blogged about it,
+and dived into endless discussions about which color pen to use
+to write things down, or which software to use to keep an outline
+on what color computer. By 2007 the buzz had mostly died, and
+those who liked GTD kept using it.
+
+An influential blogger during that era was [Merlin 
+Mann](http://www.merlinmann.com/),
+and his most important creation was [Inbox Zero](http://inboxzero.com/).
+It's an elegant condensation of the GTD system for dealing with e-mail,
+and that may be all you need. Many of us hackers pretty much do everything
+via e-mail, so if you get that under control, you'll be fine. Go read.
+
+Technicalities
+--------------
+
+This book is written using an [Ikiwiki](http://ikiwiki.info/) instance
+at <http://gtdfh.branchable.com/>,
+hosted on the [Branchable](http://www.branchable.com/) service. (I am
+involved in running Branchable.)
+
+Ikiwiki input is in Markdown format. I use scripts and tools to convert
+that into PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket formats, for reading outside a browser.
+I'm currently using [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) and
+[Calibre's ebook-convert](http://calibre-ebook.com/) to do this.
+
+The book is licensed under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 (Unported) license. However,
+the site is only editable by myself, at least for now. I gratefully
+accept suggestions and will consider patches, but since the book explains
+what I do, I am not sure I want everyone to be able to edit it. I you want
+to make your own version of the book, feel free to branch the site on
+Branchable and make any changes you like to the content.