“Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax.” -David Allen One of the hallmarks of true productivity is a sense of fulfilment. In a recent article, I looked at the difference between performance as in professional...
For the inveterate movie hound that I am, the streaming of movies over the internet seems a huge leap forward for our civilization. No more clicking through several hundred channels of an evening to find a speck of gold in a mountain of televisual dross; now I can tap...
OK, so you’ve adopted some GTD best practices at the office. Maybe you have a core organizational system set up on your work computer, and it serves you well when you’re at your desk. You can capture, clarify and organize the inputs in the office, whether...
When – in desperation – I first skimmed the book Getting Things Done back in 2004, I had a number of epiphanies. One of them was that there were people who were regularly able to empty out their e-mail inboxes. This information, in and of itself, re-defined the game I...
One of the clients I worked with recently had quickly understood GTD as a concept and wanted to do it, but was struggling with actually doing it consistently. He finally cracked the problem when he clarified why he wanted GTD, and what it would get him if he...
Ever had an overwhelming sense that the world is coming at you so fast that you can’t keep up? The emails and instant messages are arriving faster than they’re being dealt with. The stacks of paper on your desk are growing, not shrinking. When you see the boss headed...
I’m no doctor, but here is something I’ve learned from experience: when a muscle goes into spasm and doesn’t recover properly, sometimes it gets to a point where it has been tight for so long that the brain simply stops registering the pain signals it is sending. It...
You have a safety net. Whatever acrobatic manoeuvres will be required in the working week ahead, you can leap from platform to swinging trapeze with confidence. Someone down there is going to catch you if you fall. That someone, strangely enough, is you. As I...
We’re offering a new intermediate-level GTD seminar these days, Projects and Priorities, and I’ve run several of them over the last couple of months. It’s a day for expansive thinking; about building on the basics of GTD that enable us to stay in control of our...
‘I don’t like this exercise’. Given the expression on his face I didn’t actually have to get close enough to hear him to know that he was not enjoying the exercise, but – having learned to keep moving when things are looking good, and to step in when things are...
“Baby Steps, get on a bus. Baby Steps, get on a bus.” -Bob Wiley (played by Bill Murray) in “What About Bob?” As a practicing poet, I often “trick myself” into creative flow. It is as if when I look at a subject directly, the...
Welcome back. With a bit of a tailwind and a bit of luck, many of you are re-starting after a two-week break thanks to the miracle of seasonal holidays falling very helpfully in the middle of the week. After a slow start early in the week, digital heads are being...
Scalability is the holy grail of good business practice–both for big companies looking to get bigger, and one-person bands just starting out. The Getting Things Done (GTD®) method is an extremely powerful approach to “scale” an individual’s...
I was on a long plane flight earlier this week, about six hours in the air. While I don’t particularly relish time away from home, I do find that the time I spend on planes is some of the most productive time in my life. On a plane all of my various mobile devices are...
“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” -William Morris The Japanese personal organiser Marie Kondo recommends thinking of one’s possessions as animate, and treating them with according...
Back in the winter of 1976, a low-budget boxing movie came out of nowhere to take the world by storm and win the Academy Award for best picture. You’ll have guessed by now that it was ‘Rocky’, and for this 13 year-old boy it was huge. Epic. Transformational. I pretty...
You’re being stalked right now. No, not by people in camouflage gear and woolly hats. It’s Busy. Busy is after you. When Busy catches you, it gets you to do things. Lots of things. (Doing things is good, though, surely?) Well, Busy has rules. You have to stay in...
When I was growing up, in our kitchen there was a chalkboard that had pride of place on the wall just beside the back door. My mum basically ran the family (with very little assistance from any of us) off of that chalkboard. With hindsight, it was basically a...
This week, a dive into some of the detail with a round-up of answers to frequently asked questions we are seeing on the web: Question: Can you have more than one next action going at any one time for a project, or do you suggest focusing solely on doing one thing...
I think you would be hard pressed to find someone who would argue that their brain was unimportant (and if they did, you would wonder how well it was functioning anyway). Yet on our travels we find that many people misuse their brains. They expect it to perform...
There are many things in life where being able to do something is not necessarily an indicator that it is a good idea. As with Lycra and an overweight cyclist, it seems to me that the ability offered by most digital systems to set reminders on anything that moves is...
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?” ― Rabbi Hillel Organisations have systems–from organograms to annual reviews–designed to ensure that the right people focus on the right...
It seems like the practices of “mindfulness” are everywhere these days. Senior politicians and successful entrepreneurs talk about its transformative value in reducing physical and psychological stress. Talk show hosts from Oprah on down encourage their...
When the brows start to furrow – as they do when mammals get concerned – I know the question is coming. The question about prioritization. People who have not troubled themselves with prioritization in any conscious way for decades are suddenly very, very...
