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...
