Who Does GTD®? (Video Podcast)

Who Does GTD®? (Video Podcast)

Sometimes we get so caught up in our day-to-day work, simply ‘doing’, often over-busy and fighting fires – that we lose the bigger picture. We can often find ourselves being driven by the ‘latest and loudest’ rather than the things that will really help us achieve our bigger goals and objectives.

This loss of perspective is normal, but the Getting Things Done® (GTD®) Horizons of Focus model can help ensure that your daily work is aligned to big picture thinking – the higher-level values and your wider purpose.

Todd Brown and Robert Peake discuss the Horizons of Focus model and how it can be used to help drive your work, be guided by your purpose, and see the big picture in everything you do.

Are You Being Bullied By Your Inbox? (Video Podcast)

Are You Being Bullied By Your Inbox? (Video Podcast)

Sometimes we get so caught up in our day-to-day work, simply ‘doing’, often over-busy and fighting fires – that we lose the bigger picture. We can often find ourselves being driven by the ‘latest and loudest’ rather than the things that will really help us achieve our bigger goals and objectives.

This loss of perspective is normal, but the Getting Things Done® (GTD®) Horizons of Focus model can help ensure that your daily work is aligned to big picture thinking – the higher-level values and your wider purpose.

Todd Brown and Robert Peake discuss the Horizons of Focus model and how it can be used to help drive your work, be guided by your purpose, and see the big picture in everything you do.

Your Personal Ping-demic

Your Personal Ping-demic

With coronavirus cases recently rising in the UK, every day hundreds of thousands of users of the government’s covid app were pinged and told to self-isolate.  The app mashes up covid test results and location information to determine who has been near an infected...
Superhuman?

Superhuman?

When we started the business 10 years ago, ‘inbox zero’ was a bit of a holy grail for our clients. If we let slip in conversation that we had a means of attaining and sustaining that standard, ears pricked up all Spock-like. A decade later, most still like the sound...
Mind Your Language

Mind Your Language

Languages are living things and not meant to be fixed or constrained. At times, this is hard for a pedant like me to accept. Of course, I can see that it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, if someone writes ‘who’ when it should have been ‘whom’ or if...
Don’t Blame Them, it’s Your Fault!

Don’t Blame Them, it’s Your Fault!

How easy it is to feel smug, you’re up and running with GTD®. You’re completing a Weekly Review®, your ‘ins’ are at zero, your lists are in order, higher horizons aligned and you’re looking through your ‘waiting for’ list to see who you can chase to prove your system...
Don’t Flag Your Pigeons

Don’t Flag Your Pigeons

Those of us who work with our email inboxes regularly ‘at zero’ are aware of the many benefits this brings. It is therefore a surprise, when trying to encourage others to do the same, that their first response is often along the lines of “I don’t care that I have...
GTD and ‘Orienting Maps’

GTD and ‘Orienting Maps’

Do you have a set of useful reminders to help you focus on the right things, in the right place, and at the right time? This week I talk about how GTD’s ‘orienting maps’ can help you reach your desired outcomes with greater...
Don’t Kiss the Frog

Don’t Kiss the Frog

Christina Wallace found love on the internet quicker than most by recognising that online dating was good at expanding her dating pool, but not good for spotting chemistry, intelligence, charm, politics, marital status, creditworthiness, hygiene and anger issues. She...
Working Standards: an Approach to Transformation

Working Standards: an Approach to Transformation

Imagine for a moment you work in an organisation where people no longer respond to their e-mail. One where it has become ‘normal’ to have to send messages two or three times – then pick up a phone and call people – to get a response on some issue you are working on....
Does your email inbox do strategy?

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

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...
The solace of the full inbox

The solace of the full inbox

If you’ve been to one of our seminars or had a bit of our coaching, you’ve no doubt heard us talk about ways of working that allow you to deal with email backlog. If you’ve attended one of our two-day seminars and implemented the new ways of working in your email, you...
Out of control on a river in Egypt

Out of control on a river in Egypt

It was the smell I noticed first. Standing at the checkout in a supermarket in Berlin waiting to pay for my breakfast, it enveloped me like an olfactory force-field of reheated human secretions. It didn’t take long to locate the source. In front of me, a man of my age...
The clashing of email cultures

The clashing of email cultures

We don’t usually see delegates bursting with frustration in our GTD seminars but in one of my former lives it was a sign that a workshop was hitting the mark. That life involved readying business-people for international assignments and the card game ‘Barnga’ was a...
A penny for your thoughts

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,...
The alarming drag of auto-nag

The alarming drag of auto-nag

Like so many of us, I have a love-hate relationship with the alarm clock on my phone. I often hate how early it wakes me up, but of course love that it does so reliably. Like the bookmark, whose simple virtues I extolled in a previous article, the alarm clock is...
To e-, Or Not to e- . . . Handling e-mail on Holiday

To e-, Or Not to e- . . . Handling e-mail on Holiday

Like much of Europe, I’m off on my summer holiday. Unlike much of Europe, I’ve had a an e-mail arrive with a question about how to handle e-mail while on holiday. What to do? The sender did a seminar a year or so ago, and since then has been working at implementing as...
To e-, Or Not to e- . . . Handling e-mail on Holiday

For Whom the Cell Tolls

“You work too hard to be successful.“ Tom had been having a quick look at his e-mail under the table of the sidewalk café, but this last sentence from across the table jolted him back to reality. He considered himself a moderately successful individual, so he was a...
To e-, Or Not to e- . . . Handling e-mail on Holiday

Inbox Zero? Pfah! So Noughties

When – in desperation – I first skimmed the book Getting Things Done back in 2004, I had a number of epiphanies. One of them was that there were people who were regularly able to empty out their e-mail inboxes. This information, in and of itself, re-defined the game I...
A Brief History of Doing Versus Drama

A Brief History of Doing Versus Drama

We have all seen the automobile ads where their makers claim to be “redefining performance” in their industry. The truth is, we speakers of English have been redefining the very word “performance” for some time, and the trajectory is somewhat...
To e-, Or Not to e- . . . Handling e-mail on Holiday

Who is throwing your ball?

  I’m a big fan of dogs. Love ’em. I’m not convinced that there is anything of unconditional love in the response of “Man’s Best Friend” (there is the small matter of MBF having identified a light touch for free food…),...