Enigma: a person or thing that is mysterious or difficult to understand (see Weekly Review®) Variation: a different or distinct form or version of something First, I should mention that many people who tell me they can’t stick with a Weekly Review habit are also those...
Dr. Daniel Glaser is a neuroscience expert and has held leading scientific and research positions at University College London, Wellcome Trust, King’s College London. He is an accomplished speaker and long-time advocate of the power of GTD. A few weeks back, after a...
Veteran Getting Things Done® (GTD®) coach Robert Peake reflects back on how he first got started with the methodology, and what it has taught him by using it all day, every day, for the past 20 years.
I always thought I was far too young to be needing check lists. In my mind, check lists were the inevitable accessory for (generally speaking) parents, and in particular my parents, when they were preparing our ski vacations and making sure that everybody in the...
Todd Brown talks about how to use your Getting Things Done® (GTD®) system to help you get through the Christmas holiday season as friction-free as possible. Utilising the right tools and processes to keep you organised during this busy festive period will result in...
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...
Any parent with more than one child knows that however identically you think you treat them, kids grow up completely different to each other. It’s a humbling realisation, how little influence you really have. I have two children who have moved through high school two...
When we help someone build their GTD® ‘external brain’; their ‘trusted list keeper’ for remembering all of their commitments, sometimes they feel that they don’t want to put all their personal items into their company computer. This can be for various reasons: they...
“I thought you said we didn’t need my tent!” I had been happily setting up what I thought was my tent for the evening, but this snippet of conversation from the other side of the clearing dragged me out of my wilderness reverie. We were 18km into a four-day canoe...
Written by Kelly Forrister; Senior Coach and Presenter at the David Allen Company. I’ve been practicing and teaching David Allen’s productivity methods for over 25 years. I consider myself pretty organised and minimalist in the way I live (so much so that someone...
Last Christmas I was given a gift so special I became teary-eyed. It was a book by my favourite author and inside the cover was a touching handwritten message from him to me. However, what I found even more remarkable about it, I realised only later, wasn’t the gift...
Yum. Sea Bass or T-Bone? Delightful options for sure, but as I pondered the choice, I felt uneasy. I was sitting in my living room browsing the online menu for a meal that was still six weeks away and, along with everyone else in our party, I’d been emailed the link...
Near the end of a seminar someone will often say some version of the following: “I like the sound of what you are proposing, but I think it will be difficult”, in a tone that makes it clear that they feel it shouldn’t be. Here is my take: given the benefits GTD®...
No part of me is more English than my need for a regular cup of tea. So, with the end of the webinar that I’d been delivering close at hand, my attention was turning to a hard-earned cuppa. For this reason, perhaps, I was caught slightly off-guard by the excellent...
I was flying out to Lisbon the other day, and noticed – yet again, with almost self-harm triggering frustration – just how crazy long it was taking to get us passengers onto the plane. To give them credit, the airline was going through the motions of making it faster,...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you gather together musicians of a certain age, eventually they will start quoting ‘This Is Spinal Tap’. Rob Reiner’s 1984 mockumentary – if you will, rockumentary – chronicles the demise and fall of one of...
“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.” -Voltaire I was fuming. I could feel the blood surging up to my head, fuelling a litany of judgmental thoughts. Brexit. Trump. That maniac on the M1. Something had...
Written by Moni Danner. When new parents return to work after maternity/paternity leave, they are often noticeably more efficient than before. Managing family life, especially with small children, forces us into a tighter temporal corset, and that demands pretty...
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...
Toni Basil. Los del Río. Baha Men. You may not recognise these band names, but if you lived through the 80s, 90s, and 00s, you are almost certainly familiar with “[Hey] Mickey”, “Macarena”, and “Who Let the Dogs Out?” All of these...
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...
GTD is different than other approaches to personal and professional development in some fundamental ways. Join David Allen, creator of the methodology, in conversation with Todd Brown and Robert Peake. Click to play this episode Subscribe to the...
I was ten minutes into a meeting when my colleague at the other end of the conference line said, “Something’s going on. I need to switch off my computer”. Two minutes later, I received the same message from our IT team – we were the target of a...
