Rebecca Stevens is a Manchester-based psychologist. She is registered as a Practitioner Occupational Psychologist with the Health Professions Council and an Associate Fellow & Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society Division of Occupational...
Last month my colleague Todd Brown blogged about Aristotle and GTD, and the topic must have jiggled loose some errant neural connections in my brain because later that day I found myself remembering a classic Monty Python sketch called the ‘International Philosophy...
Dr. Peer Wiethoff is the Foreign Trade Manager at NOKIA and has been a user of Getting Things Done® (GTD®) for over nine years. His journey with GTD revealed interesting benefits for him, even as a person who is already organised. Peer is now a certified GTD Trainer...
The occasional thud you may have been hearing in the neighbourhood lately isn’t the sound of huge falling conkers but the sound of credit card statements hitting people’s mats. Yes – all that holiday fun coming home to roost. The flights, the hotel and that...
Not everything in life – or even in GTD – can be illustrated using wood chopping as a metaphor, but it does seem to offer some helpful parallels. I noted some of them a few years back in a previous blog, but this year I noticed a few other lessons that translate well...
“They’re good for you.” <Sound of silence.> “You won’t get any dessert.” <Look of daggers.> “JUST EAT THEM!” It’s a familiar mealtime scenario. Children and parents in a stand-off over vegetables. Eventually, though, point-blank refusal turns to grudging...
Scott Walker (not his real name) is a good friend of mine. He has nine black belts. Note, they are not in Judo or some other martial art. They have been acquired as a result of arriving at a hotel, looking for a belt for his trousers, and realising that it was still...
James McBrien is Managing Director of Clearwater Advisers Ltd. Clearwater specialises in showing talented individuals how to be great communicators. We show people how to be natural when under pressure. As well as running individual and group coaching programmes we...
“I’m not seeing the benefit”. I’d been holding forth in a seminar on how to get clear on what all the new stuff that shows up each day means for you before getting stuck in to moving things forward, and the remark from one of my participants came as a surprise. Caught...
Do you ever have days where your work is driven by your email inbox, where you’re constantly replying to emails – barring the odd meeting or a hurried lunch at your desk? With the average office worker receiving around 70 emails a day, it’s no surprise that the...
When setting out to do work, how we define our projects and tasks has a huge impact on whether we’ll make good choices in terms of doing the right thing, keep working, overcoming procrastination and even simply getting started. This is an actual (sic) transcription of...
Fifteen minutes into the meeting my former colleague’s eyelids had become heavy. Soon after, they drooped, fluttered, then gently closed. Yet despite the circle of smirking faces around the conference room table, nobody said a word. The elephant in the room could have...
Artificial intelligence has made impressive gains in our time. That said, I am still more excited by the possibilities of the human mind. In particular, I am interested in how our vast collective investment in thinking about how to train computers to adapt and solve...
Someone once explained to me how to think about computer backups. She said “every night when you turn off your computer, just think what would happen with your data if the hard disk died and the computer simply wouldn’t start up again the next day”. Once you start to...
I’m a rambler from Manchester way I get all me pleasure the hard moorland way I may be a wage slave on Monday But I am a free man on Sunday ~ Ewan MacColl (from ‘The Manchester Rambler’) On a glorious spring morning last Friday, under a radiance of blue skies, a...
On April 21st, 1918 Manfred von Richtoven, ‘The Red Baron’, was shot and killed by an anti-aircraft bullet. Considered the greatest flying ace of his time, he had made a rookie mistake by flying too low into enemy territory. It was a mistake he himself...
“That’s it?” It was expressed as a question, but if it had been written as dialogue there would definitely have been an exclamation point added, as in, “That’s it?!”. That is what he said out loud, but I heard from his tone that what he meant...
“Have you heard a word that I’ve said? It’s like your body is here, but you’re not.” Mike had been caught bang to rights with his mind elsewhere on date night at his favourite restaurant. Fortunately, the lady eyeballing him over the bread rolls was his wife so,...
“Ready when you are!”, I hollered. My wife looked back at me and sighed, “We’re nowhere near ready to go.” “Sure we are!”, I beamed, holding up my personal packing list, each item carefully ticked. I was, after all, a faithful...
Orson Welles was an astonishing talent. Famously brilliant, he produced, co-wrote, directed and acted the lead role in Citizen Kane, a film that won an academy award and has consistently topped the ‘all time best film’ lists in my lifetime. We can quibble about...
Gundula Welti is a certified GTD Trainer and has 21 years of experience in both buying and sales roles within a large international corporation. She is highly specialised in sales and negotiations and uses GTD in all aspects of her life. She says that GTD helped her...
From the outside the restaurant looks promising, and you’re hungry. You get a table and the waiter brings the menu. You have a browse. A few things look OK, but you’re not really that up for anything on offer. With a sigh, you order something that looks acceptable but...
If you’ve ever been in a speedboat, or seen one on video, you may have experienced that magic moment when, as the boat accelerates, it reaches a “planing” state. Once up on a plane, the boat skims over the surface of the water rather than ploughing through it....
“Oh Dad! You promised!”, my son shouted through the Travelodge lobby at an hour that will not have gone down well for those with Boxing Day hangovers. He was not happy. He’d just discovered that there was no all-you-can-eat full English at the Epsom branch, just a...
