Flow, flow, flow your boat…
Again? Can’t be. We stopped paddling to allow ourselves to focus. Sure enough, there they were: an older couple, drifting along in their inflatable canoe. Ahead of us, again. My canoeing partner and I exchanged minor expletives under our breath. We were about 90...
Mastering the Art of Effective Delegation
How do you delegate? Delegation isn’t always what you might consider as traditional ‘downward’ delegating – you can delegate to anyone. Here’s an insight into how to master the art of delegating.
How Do Your Energy Levels Affect Your Focus?
How much energy do you have right now? Our energy levels dictate how well we can focus, and sometimes, it’s useful to take stock of how much energy you have to make the best decisions about what we should engage in next.
Held at Ransom
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...
Interview with Rebecca Stevens, business psychologist
Rebecca Stevens is a Manchester-based psychologist. She is registered as a Practitioner Occupational Psychologist with the Health Professions Council and an Associate Fellow & Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society Division of Occupational...
Aristotle helps you with your iPhone
In the week that the latest iPhones were launched, I’d like to encourage you to take a mental journey back to classical Greece, for some helpful advice about modern life. Those of you who have been reading my blogs for a while will know that I’m a history buff, and in...
The wistful lumberjack is back
Not everything in life – or even in GTD – can be illustrated using wood chopping as a metaphor, but it does seem to offer some helpful parallels. I noted some of them a few years back in a previous blog, but this year I noticed a few other lessons that translate well...
Eat your greens
“They’re good for you.” <Sound of silence.> “You won’t get any dessert.” <Look of daggers.> “JUST EAT THEM!” It’s a familiar mealtime scenario. Children and parents in a stand-off over vegetables. Eventually, though, point-blank refusal turns to grudging...
Does your email inbox do strategy?
Do you ever have days where your work is driven by your email inbox, where you’re constantly replying to emails – barring the odd meeting or a hurried lunch at your desk? With the average office worker receiving around 70 emails a day, it’s no surprise that the...
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...
Scenes from a seminar – #254 – Trust your gut
“That’s it?” It was expressed as a question, but if it had been written as dialogue there would definitely have been an exclamation point added, as in, “That’s it?!”. That is what he said out loud, but I heard from his tone that what he meant...
Life Lessons from a Street Performer
The parallels aren’t always obvious, but there are in fact plenty of lessons about productivity from the world of circus skills
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....
Chocks away
Given the electoral earthquake across the pond this week, the decision to develop a third runway at London’s Heathrow Airport somehow feels like it all happened ages ago. It was actually only a fortnight, but its origins do indeed go back years. The UK government’s...
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...
On bookmarks and being
“A truly good man does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone. A foolish man is always doing, yet much remains to be done.” – Lao Tse, from Tao Te Ching, Chapter 38, trans. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English I read a lot of books. To keep track of where I left...
NOT Getting Things Done
In a recent seminar I clocked that one of the participants was not happy. He was trying to be, but his question betrayed considerable doubt: “Love the lists”, he said, “but I still don’t have any more time than I did before. When am I going to actually do the things...
Five reasons to not do GTD
When I’m working with clients helping them to try out GTD best practices, skeptical questions pop up pretty regularly. I don’t mind, actually. I understand that behind the skepticism are important considerations about the effectiveness of GTD, and whether it’s right...
Scale Up and Delegate Out, with GTD
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...
You’re Already on the Journey
When it comes to making things happen, does your world look like this? Things that need your attention arrive. Some are generated by other people and appear without any effort on your part, like email, or your friends’ Facebook posts. Other things that grab your...Worth Celebrating
Last week my father had a birthday, and it’s got me thinking about celebrations. We celebrate things that represent progress, like the calendar reaching another milestone; though in my father’s case he says he would prefer not to be reminded of the number of...
