Ring The Alarm
In his book ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Japan’, Pico Iyer describes something unusual that happened on Japanese television during coverage of an important baseball game; “In the final game of the Japan Series, with the entire seven-month season on the line, suddenly, in...Next (Trans)Action
Every day around the world, companies large and small are bought or sold. Huge sums change hands in that process, but also around that process. Because of the amounts involved, an entire industry of specialists has developed to facilitate – and earn from – these...Why, O Why, O Why?
The world has changed a lot since David Allen developed his methodology and wrote the 2001 first edition of “Getting Things Done ®”: Filofaxes have been mostly replaced by laptops, Palm Pilots by smartphones, faxes by emails, and too many meetings by far too many...Never Decreasing Circles
I’ve been reading a book on human movement concurrently with a book on the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle of a productivity expert, for sure. These days, the fittest of us get something like 300 minutes – or 6 hours – of movement...Working On The Weekend??
Question: What do the following have in common; Buying a bible Selling fish and chips Shooting Welshmen in Hereford Answer: They are all things that used to be illegal if you did them on a Sunday (although it was legal to shoot Welshmen in the 1400s as long as you did...Mental Health? What Does That Have To Do With The Pandemic?
At the beginning of the pandemic, when the experts first started talking about mental health, I had no idea what they were talking about. “It’s a virus, not a mental illness”, I thought. I had no clue. A little over a year later, I know a bit more about what the...GTD® and Neuroscience
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...The Schoolwork Tsunami
Good news for knowledge workers – if your job primarily involves thinking about words or numbers then you can easily work from anywhere, right? Several weeks into lockdown, if you ask that question in one of the UK’s 5 million working parent households you might...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.
Calendar Strength Training
“If I’m in meetings all day from 8am until 8pm, when am I ever going to get time to do this Clarifying and Organising thing?” “Well, quite” I reply, “and what about actually working on all the items you have already put on your lists?” Following this common coaching...Snapshot From My Life
Daniel Glaser is crossing America on a Winston Churchill Fellowship (www.wcmt.org.uk) exploring what the fears and promise of AI reveal about human nature. Snapshot from my life: it is mid-afternoon, and I’m trying to decide on whether to offer myself the treat...What Could Go Wrong?
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...‘No’ is Guaranteed
“Not my circus, not my monkeys.” Ever heard that one? It is one of my favourite linguistic imports. If you are not familiar with it, it is the very visual Polish take on staying clear of problems that are not yours to solve, and for me it captures what might be a...Clarifying Your Commitments
In this week’s video blog, Todd Brown discusses the ‘clarifying’ questions in the Getting Things Done® (GTD®) methodology, to help you optimise your commitments in the most productive, stress-free way.Six Ways to Preserve Your Sanity in a World With Way Too Much Choice
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...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...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...A journey of 1000 miles begins with a tangible next action
David Griffin is a senior consultant at Cambridge based 42 Technology, which offers pragmatic engineering innovation, design and development services to clients in a range of industries. He first started with GTD in 2003, when Palm Pilot devices were no longer cool...Watchmaking
Gundula Welti is a certified GTD Trainer and has 21 years of experience in both buying and sales roles within a large international corporation. She is highly specialised in sales and negotiations and uses GTD in all aspects of her life. She says that GTD helped her...Is that yours?
Sometimes simple questions can provoke profound responses. Take, for example, the question, “Is this your project?”. Most busy professionals, once they have built a trusted GTD system to manage all their commitments, end up with upwards of fifty projects...Getting (back?) on the wagon with GTD
“[Once you have learned GTD,] at least you have a wagon.” -David Allen It all makes sense. You want to do it. And yet, you aren’t doing it. If this sounds familiar in relation to your GTD practice, know that you are not alone. The methodology is...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.