The roof of the tent was glowing red. Not a good thing in dry conditions in a forest, what with the wildfires and all. I shucked my sleeping bag, unzipped the tent door, and staggered outside to take a look. It took a moment to get my bearings, but then it became...
“Oh, oh, oh, look at me, sending important communications from the terrace of a café in Paris!” That would have been the unfortunate thought bubble above my head, had some curse revealed my thinking on a business trip to the City of Light back in the late...
I thought my last post had settled it. I’d made the point about the value of investing in yourself and your people. Readers would get it, change their behaviour, job done. A few days later some feedback came in: Dear Ed, A great post with little or nothing to...
“That’s too expensive for us.” We’d been talking about offering our services to her people, and the remark caught me a bit off-guard. She was the CEO of a decent sized business, who had just finished rhapsodizing about the benefits she’d been getting from using GTD®...
This silence was definitely not golden. My audience looked at me expectantly, willing me on, but I had run out of words. I looked over to my parents seated in the second row. They too were encouraging but didn’t have the words I needed. Head down, I made a run for my...
April is Stress Awareness Month. Are you stressed? As you are reading this, there is a good chance that you are. I’m not clairvoyant and I haven’t hacked your phone. It’s an educated guess. I know this simply because if you get our blogs you are likely a knowledge...
It always starts small, and – in the beginning – it always makes sense: “I’ll just stay here over lunch to take care of some things I didn’t get done this morning”, or “ I’ll stay a bit later to work on that report for tomorrow”, or – more and more – “I’ll use a bit...
In this second instalment on persistence with difficult things that take a long time, we look at some more ways to help you get motivated to stay motivated. Let’s assume you have a clear and inspiring goal, and a plan on how to get there. All good, right? Not...
The approach is called ‘Getting Things Done®’. Some of those ‘things’ happen quickly and easily. Some are difficult and take much more patience and persistence. This two-part piece is about how to motivate yourself to go from twinkle in the eye to consistent progress...
Here we are. 2022. The fireworks are well done, this week some of us are moving beyond last week’s pretence of being back at work, and – as hope springs eternal in the human heart despite the headwinds of the couple of years – t’is the season for resolving. “Any...
Towards the end of nearly every seminar I lead, someone says a version of the following: “Okay, this all makes sense. I can see that this is the way that I should be working. But I’ll need a lot of discipline to keep it up”. I think there are two opinions expressed in...
“We help our clients get more of the right things done, with less stress.” There are more poetic, and more nuanced versions, but the above is the most succinct summary of our work I’ve been able to find. Twelve years ago, when we set up the business, most of our...
Every day around the world, companies large and small are bought or sold. Huge sums change hands in that process, but also around that process. Because of the amounts involved, an entire industry of specialists has developed to facilitate – and earn from – these...
I’ve been reading a book on human movement concurrently with a book on the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle of a productivity expert, for sure. These days, the fittest of us get something like 300 minutes – or 6 hours – of movement...
The shirt had been white. It mostly still was, but the crisp pressed cotton now had a fan-like pattern of tomato guts sprayed across the front. Perfect if I had been heading off to film the climax of a horror movie, but my meetings that morning called for something...
“Not that way.” At the end of a brief meeting with a potential coaching client, I’d stood up to go for lunch with them, and headed for the door I’d been let in through. My error, apparently. “I thought we were going to lunch,” I said. “We are. I just don’t want to go...
At the beginning of the pandemic, when the experts first started talking about mental health, I had no idea what they were talking about. “It’s a virus, not a mental illness”, I thought. I had no clue. A little over a year later, I know a bit more about what the...
When a business is in a cash crunch, collecting overdue invoices is one of the things you’d expect to be a top priority in the organisation. Strange as it might sound, that is not always the case. One leadership team I heard about recently was so busy fighting...
Fasten your seatbelts. We are almost a quarter of the way into the year, and so far it looks like another odd one. Global pandemics and political shenanigans aside, the first months of a new year have always offered an opportunity for making long-desired changes. Or...
2020 was a great year! 2020 was a terrible year! It was both, of course, depending on what I’m choosing to look at in the year. For me it felt like a very challenging year as we went through it. Endless uncertainty, non-stop reports of human tragedy, and inconsistent,...
Ed Lamont interviews Alex Gisdakis, CEO and Partner of Breitenstein Consulting, on the nature of ‘new work’, the implications of remote working for agile teams, and optimising mental wellbeing.
“I think I might need to go back into therapy.” Close to tears, my friend was clearly in a bad place. “I’ve been having huge problems at work, and I feel like something really bad is about to happen.” She’d called me out of the blue, close to the end of her tether....
Consider this: over the course of the last one hundred years, we have moved from being a largely rural population that was incredibly active, day in and day out, to being mostly urban and sedentary. It is generally understood that this has been better for our wealth...
In the dream, the client has deep pockets. Deep conviction too. They are a long-term GTD® user who has leveraged their practice of GTD into a promotion, and wants their new team to get the same benefits they have personally experienced from using the approach: more...
