Six Ways to Preserve Your Sanity in a World With Way Too Much Choice
True story: A few months back, a well-dressed Italian woman in her early sixties walks into a local Sicilian cafe in search of a panettone for Christmas. Having surveyed a ceiling sagging under the weight of dozens of them, suspended from festive ribbons, she...
Paper Quirk
I was at a dinner party recently where the conversation – implausibly – turned to ‘paperwork’. We’d exhausted topics like real-estate trends (luxury – in; affordable – out), our ongoing Circus Brexitus, and the ambient geo-political madness. Things had clearly gotten...
Working Standards: Where Do You Want to Go Today?
In the second blog in this series, we looked at how you might get a sense of what the current reality around working standards is in your team or organisation. If that exercise – of uncovering current standards – highlighted the need for change, what to do...
Working Standards: Where the He?? Am I?
In my last blog, I opened a conversation about the possibility – and the value – of raising acceptable working standards in an organisation. If you liked the sound of that – or simply can no longer bear the waste you currently see in your place of work – this blog...
Working Standards: an Approach to Transformation
Imagine for a moment you work in an organisation where people no longer respond to their e-mail. One where it has become ‘normal’ to have to send messages two or three times – then pick up a phone and call people – to get a response on some issue you are working on....
The wistful lumberjack is back
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...
Leading with GTD
When a leader of a team or an organisation ‘gets’ GTD® for themselves, there is a desire – often felt as a burning need – to offer it to their wider team. The desire to pass it on can be altruistic (“this has been great for me, would be good if others had it too”),...
Scenes from a seminar #563: “Why would I do this?”
“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...
Deadline + decision = ideas + inspiration
Occasionally, readers with writing aspirations of their own will ask something like, “How do you manage to produce those blogs every month?”. Mostly I’m kind and offer a one line response. Occasionally, if I’m feeling mean and/or expansive, I’ll check first that they...
Scenes from a seminar – #254 – Trust your gut
“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...
Citizen Kane and productivity
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...
Out of control on a river in Egypt
It was the smell I noticed first. Standing at the checkout in a supermarket in Berlin waiting to pay for my breakfast, it enveloped me like an olfactory force-field of reheated human secretions. It didn’t take long to locate the source. In front of me, a man of my age...
Life Lessons from a Street Performer
The parallels aren’t always obvious, but there are in fact plenty of lessons about productivity from the world of circus skills
Jingle hell – a cautionary Christmas tale
Somewhere in an office near you…. Mid-September – Office Christmas party invitation received today. Really? Christmas already? It was January just a few weeks ago. Speaking of which… still time to complete this year’s resolutions: lose 10kg (that ought to get...
Freedom ain’t free
To get to a mind like water, sometimes you need to do some paddling on the front end. Here is how to get fiddly projects off your mind and in motion sooner rather than later.
The genius of being stupid
The genesis of genius is often in being stupid. Not the idiotic kind of stupid, but more the keeping-it-simple kind. Stupid enough to just do the not-terribly-exciting stuff consistently, to create the conditions in which great results can show up. One example of this...
A wagon full of hope
I bumped into a former GTD participant earlier this week, and I could see from her body language that she wasn’t keen to see me. Initial pleasantries past, I found out why. “I’m off the wagon”, she said, sheepishly. “That’s great!” I countered. This did not seem to...
No work, no playa
A bad system will beat a good person every time. – W. Edwards Deming Tuesday was my first day back after a couple of weeks of stay-cating here in London. Doing London-y things, some of which I’ve been meaning to do since arriving 21 years ago. It was a delicious...
GTD: the proof is in the results
For the past seven years we’ve been out doing this GTD thing for clients large and small, and we’ve been getting consistently great feedback on how it is positively impacting the lives of those who use it. As people who have made it our job to spread these...
The discipline of bad breath
Mr Melnyk, my grade 2 teacher, was a lovely guy. As one of only two males and the only Ukrainian on the teaching staff at my primary school, he was a poster child for diversity well before his time, and a great athlete to boot. In theory, someone for little boys to...
NOT Getting Things Done
In a recent seminar I clocked that one of the participants was not happy. He was trying to be, but his question betrayed considerable doubt: “Love the lists”, he said, “but I still don’t have any more time than I did before. When am I going to actually do the things...
Why GTD is not Time Management
At some point when meeting new people, once we’ve passed the pleasantries and have moved on to occupations, I’ll have a stab at describing what I do for a living. When I’m less successful, I’ll hear a version of the following reply: “Oh, so you do time...
