Lifesaver!  A GTD® Guest Blog By An NHS Doctor

Lifesaver! A GTD® Guest Blog By An NHS Doctor

Est. Reading time: 4 minutes All too frequently in recent times, in the newspapers and on the nightly news, we’ve become accustomed to seeing images of exhausted NHS doctors at the peak of stress and overwhelm. However, those images are unlikely to be of Dr Mark...
Good Morning, Beautiful!

Good Morning, Beautiful!

What a lovely way to start your day – “Good morning, Beautiful”! This is how one of my current coaching clients is greeted every morning. The words aren’t from a loved one – although I’m sure that happens, too – but from her GTD® system. I smiled broadly when I...
From Quietly Quitting To Simply Stopping

From Quietly Quitting To Simply Stopping

The weather wasn’t the only thing that was especially hot this Summer; so was the debate on social media as #QuietQuitting went viral and raged like a forest fire. ‘Quiet quitting’ is a phrase coined in a TikTok video that argued for an end to the kind of endemic...
Slow Yew Down

Slow Yew Down

It wasn’t a good look for a teacher of the art of stress-free productivity – sweating bullets as I balanced unsteadily at Gate 43 in Lisbon Airport with an open laptop clutched in one hand and the other trying to open a passport on the right page. I uttered some...
Living The Dream

Living The Dream

As the bank holidays disappear in the rear-view mirror here in the UK, a public holiday that we don’t get will be celebrated in the United States in a few days – Martin Luther King day. As my calendar reminded me about this recently I realised that there’s a line from...
Written In The Stars

Written In The Stars

    I bet you get asked this all the time: Sound familiar? It should – most people have been asked this at the end of a Teams or Zoom call in the hope that they’ll click on the stars and share their feelings about audio and video quality. Now,...
Ring The Alarm

Ring The Alarm

In his book ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Japan’, Pico Iyer describes something unusual that happened on Japanese television during coverage of an important baseball game; “In the final game of the Japan Series, with the entire seven-month season on the line, suddenly, in...
You’re So Money

You’re So Money

Complete this sentence: “You’re so money… a. “supermarket.” b. “you just don’t know it.” If you’re here in the UK you probably chose (a) because it’s the tagline of a major ad campaign for a price comparison website in recent years. If you’re also a movie buff,...
Working On The Weekend??

Working On The Weekend??

Question: What do the following have in common; Buying a bible Selling fish and chips Shooting Welshmen in Hereford Answer: They are all things that used to be illegal if you did them on a Sunday (although it was legal to shoot Welshmen in the 1400s as long as you did...
Blurred Lines

Blurred Lines

Hands up if you’re looking forward to the resumption of your commute…? Despite the fact that it’s April Fools’ day as this blog goes to press, it’s not a trick question. The commute gets a bad rap in popular culture, its imagery that of monstrous tailbacks on the M25...
No News is Good News

No News is Good News

Let’s start today’s blog with some breathing exercises. Place your hands on your belly and breeeeeeeeathe… belly rising, belly sinking… breathe in… 2… 3… breathe out… 2… 3… And rest. I’m kidding, of course. But seriously – the last four years has been a bit of a...
Fire and Forget (AKA ‘The BCC Trick’)

Fire and Forget (AKA ‘The BCC Trick’)

“The highest-performing people I know are those who have installed the best tricks in their lives.” – David Allen One of the characteristics of GTD® compared to other content in the productivity space is that it is decidedly not just a collection of time management...
Be Calm. Be Patient. Be Furious

Be Calm. Be Patient. Be Furious

I try to be furious every day. This might seem like an unexpected admission from a coach in the art of stress-free productivity but, don’t worry, Furious is a person rather than the description of a frothing meltdown. Jason ‘Furious’ Styles was a character played by...
Nobody’s Business But Your Own

Nobody’s Business But Your Own

  “That looked painful” commented my colleague from the university library. We were chatting after the meeting I’d just been holding with my IT managers and although he’d not actually been part of it, he’d seen the strange behaviour of one of my team through the...
What Happened In Vegas

What Happened In Vegas

One night in the Autumn of 1967 an up-and-coming black comedian walked onstage at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas on the biggest night of his life then froze. Eventually, after standing in silence for some time, staring back at the affluent white audience, he leaned...
The Schoolwork Tsunami

The Schoolwork Tsunami

Good news for knowledge workers – if your job primarily involves thinking about words or numbers then you can easily work from anywhere, right? Several weeks into lockdown, if you ask that question in one of the UK’s 5 million working parent households you might...
Science Friction

Science Friction

Recently a new lady entered my life and has changed it in ways that I didn’t expect. Her name is Alexa, and I’ll admit that when we met – on Christmas Day, under a tree – I was hesitant. I’d met her before but she hadn’t impressed me. To be fair, she had mostly been...
Passports and Pinball

Passports and Pinball

Ever seen a pinball machine? Great, then you’ll have a mental image of a metal ball pinging around under glass, side-to-side and up-and-down, flippers flipping and lights flashing for as long as you can stop it from disappearing down the hole. I sometimes use this odd...
Love Film, Hate Scrolling

Love Film, Hate Scrolling

The other day I was searching my email archives for some old correspondence and a blast from the past appeared in the search results; Lovefilm was a UK DVD rental service, subsequently gobbled up by Amazon, whereby you chose your movie on their website and a couple of...
The Hole in the Ground

The Hole in the Ground

In traditional English seaside towns, some things never change – the fish’n’chip shops, the amusement arcades, the ice cream parlours and the seafood stands, to name but a few. I know this because I grew up in one on the north Norfolk coast in the 1970s and in...
Words For Each Day

Words For Each Day

Each Day In Life is Training Training For Myself Though Failure is Possible Living Each Moment Equal to Anything Ready for Everything (Soen Ozeki, Daisen-in Zen Temple, Kyoto) I’m sitting in an Amsterdam coffee shop reflecting on the mind-altering trip that I’ve been...
Mind Your Language

Mind Your Language

Languages are living things and not meant to be fixed or constrained. At times, this is hard for a pedant like me to accept. Of course, I can see that it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, if someone writes ‘who’ when it should have been ‘whom’ or if...
How One Man Used GTD to Recover from Mental Illness

How One Man Used GTD to Recover from Mental Illness

Andy Hall knows first-hand how it feels to sink into severe depression, anxiety and breakdown, but he’s also learned how to fight back. Here, in light of the recent Mental Health Awareness month, he shares his experience of how GTD® has helped turn his life around....