Wrangling Squishy Outcomes with GTD (Video Podcast)
How to “de-squish” — that is, elegantly clarify — those items that seem vague or ambiguous, using GTD best practices.
This Summer’s Flotsam and Jetsam
Monika Danner has worked in corporate HR and leadership roles for more than 15 years. She has been a GTD® practitioner since 2014 and is now a certified GTD trainer for Next Action Partners in Germany. “Your projects list is a composite picture of the future you want...
And now for something completely different…
Last month my colleague Todd Brown blogged about Aristotle and GTD, and the topic must have jiggled loose some errant neural connections in my brain because later that day I found myself remembering a classic Monty Python sketch called the ‘International Philosophy...
How to speak to your brain when you want to get more things done
When setting out to do work, how we define our projects and tasks has a huge impact on whether we’ll make good choices in terms of doing the right thing, keep working, overcoming procrastination and even simply getting started. This is an actual (sic) transcription of...
In praise of amnesia
Someone once explained to me how to think about computer backups. She said “every night when you turn off your computer, just think what would happen with your data if the hard disk died and the computer simply wouldn’t start up again the next day”. Once you start to...
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...
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 penny for your thoughts
It’s a sun-filled summer afternoon and you’re strolling happily down the street when a flash of light catches your eye from pavement ahead. You instinctively tell yourself it’s probably just shiny litter but your eyes linger, widen and then sparkle with delight. Yes,...
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...
Tackling the bigger questions
Expat life is full of discoveries. I am particularly fond of the British phrase, “I’ll have a think about that.” It implies deliberation, as though one intends to set aside dedicated time, perhaps by a fire with a long clay pipe, to give...
What can we learn about GTD from successful people who haven’t used it?
Over the years in my blogs I’ve naturally quoted a lot from David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done. David has an astonishing ability to encapsulate powerful ideas in pithy sayings that stick with you.* But one of my hobbies is also collecting quotes from...
