Slow Yew Down

Slow Yew Down

It wasn’t a good look for a teacher of the art of stress-free productivity – sweating bullets as I balanced unsteadily at Gate 43 in Lisbon Airport with an open laptop clutched in one hand and the other trying to open a passport on the right page. I uttered some...
Ring The Alarm

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

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?

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

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??

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...
GTD® and Neuroscience

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

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...
Calendar Strength Training

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

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?

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

‘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

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.
The wistful lumberjack is back

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...
A journey of 1000 miles begins with a tangible next action

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

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?

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

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

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.

Chocks away

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...