GTD and The Hero’s Journey (Video Podcast)
Todd Brown and Robert Peake talk about how GTD can help you achieve–and perhaps redefine–your own heroic journey. Click to play this episode Subscribe to the Podcast
How to Get More Balance in Life with GTD (Video)
How to Get More Balance in Life with GTD (Video) Todd Brown talks about how it is important to get balance in life, and how Getting Things Done® (GTD®) helps to create better balance through the Threefold Nature of Work Model. Click to play this...
Guest Interview with Alex Lee, University Manager
Alex Lee manages the strategic communications, planning and policy development for Library & Student Support Services at Sheffield Hallam University, leading a team of seven. Her role as Head of Management Services covers a broad range of service delivery for a...
“Cheer up, it might never happen”
As cold, wet weather and grey skies descend on the British Isles, out come the scowls. A particularly cheeky response to encountering a dour-faced stranger is the peculiarly British quip, “Cheer up, it might never happen.” Obviously, there are situations...
What’s Missing from Your Organisation’s Wellness Programme
In many organisations these days, wellness is ‘the new black’, a hot topic from board room to break room. In a recent report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, “The Wellness Effect – The Impact of Workplace Programmes”, the report’s authors found...
Permission to stare out the window
“Honey, I just realised – nothing is going to try to kill me out here.” My wife and I were ambling along one of England’s many public footpaths through gentle countryside. I agree it may sound like an unusual observation. But having come from...
Action Man becomes Strategy Director – my first 12 months’ experience of GTD
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...
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...
What computers know about GTD
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...
Walk this way
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...
“I can’t help you if it’s all in your head!”
“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...
Scaling down (yes, down) with GTD
It seemed like it was going to be an ordinary Tuesday. Then the phone rang. Have you ever had one of those moments when the camera seems to pan back on your life suddenly, and everything that seemed so important up to that moment falls away in the clear, cold focus of...
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...
Does your work feel like planing, or ploughing?
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....
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 fine art of renegotiating
“She’s gonna blow!” It is a phrase they shout in action films, just before the pressure gets too great, and whatever ‘she’ happens to be erupts in a spectacular ball of flame. Hopefully, this is not a phrase you hear shouted too often...
Stressed at work? You’re not alone.
In our increasingly always-on, too-much-to-do, pay-attention-to-me-now world, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that stress in the workplace is on the up, but in a recent study we have some hard data to ponder. Stress was at the top of the list of health and...
The art of stillness
In ‘The Land of the Rising Sun’ during the 1990s, the madogiwazoku – which is Japanese for ‘the window tribe’ – were ageing employees who were no longer seen as useful to the organisation. However, since there was a reluctance in Japan’s corporate culture...
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...
What GTD can’t do for you
“There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking” – Sir Joshua Reynolds Doing a bit of a spring clean this week, I came across a book I bought back in the early days of the web called “Don’t make me think”. It was written by...
What Cowboys Know about Productivity
Growing up in the American Southwest, I have long been acquainted with a familiar parable about the young greenhorn (inexperienced rancher) attempting to brand cattle. What I never realised is how relevant the tale is to twenty-first-century knowledge work. The story...
