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...
How to speak to your brain when you want to get more things done
When setting out to do work, how we define our projects and tasks has a huge impact on whether we’ll make good choices in terms of doing the right thing, keep working, overcoming procrastination and even simply getting started. This is an actual (sic) transcription of...
The elephant in the room
Fifteen minutes into the meeting my former colleague’s eyelids had become heavy. Soon after, they drooped, fluttered, then gently closed. Yet despite the circle of smirking faces around the conference room table, nobody said a word. The elephant in the room could have...
What computers know about GTD
Artificial intelligence has made impressive gains in our time. That said, I am still more excited by the possibilities of the human mind. In particular, I am interested in how our vast collective investment in thinking about how to train computers to adapt and solve...
In praise of amnesia
Someone once explained to me how to think about computer backups. She said “every night when you turn off your computer, just think what would happen with your data if the hard disk died and the computer simply wouldn’t start up again the next day”. Once you start to...
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...
Avoiding target fixation with GTD
On April 21st, 1918 Manfred von Richtoven, ‘The Red Baron’, was shot and killed by an anti-aircraft bullet. Considered the greatest flying ace of his time, he had made a rookie mistake by flying too low into enemy territory. It was a mistake he himself...
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...
From screenspace to headspace
“Have you heard a word that I’ve said? It’s like your body is here, but you’re not.” Mike had been caught bang to rights with his mind elsewhere on date night at his favourite restaurant. Fortunately, the lady eyeballing him over the bread rolls was his wife so,...
“I can’t help you if it’s all in your head!”
“Ready when you are!”, I hollered. My wife looked back at me and sighed, “We’re nowhere near ready to go.” “Sure we are!”, I beamed, holding up my personal packing list, each item carefully ticked. I was, after all, a faithful...
Citizen Kane and productivity
Orson Welles was an astonishing talent. Famously brilliant, he produced, co-wrote, directed and acted the lead role in Citizen Kane, a film that won an academy award and has consistently topped the ‘all time best film’ lists in my lifetime. We can quibble about...
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...
What are you hiding?
From the outside the restaurant looks promising, and you’re hungry. You get a table and the waiter brings the menu. You have a browse. A few things look OK, but you’re not really that up for anything on offer. With a sigh, you order something that looks acceptable but...
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....A dog’s breakfast
“Oh Dad! You promised!”, my son shouted through the Travelodge lobby at an hour that will not have gone down well for those with Boxing Day hangovers. He was not happy. He’d just discovered that there was no all-you-can-eat full English at the Epsom branch, just a...
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...
Buying paving stones at the grocery store
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...
GTD at Christmas
It’s that time of year when we start thinking about Christmas. For many, it’s not all red-nosed reindeer and fairy lights, however, because Christmas is in fact one of the most stressful times of the year – mostly due to the amount of planning that...
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.
The fine art of renegotiating
“She’s gonna blow!” It is a phrase they shout in action films, just before the pressure gets too great, and whatever ‘she’ happens to be erupts in a spectacular ball of flame. Hopefully, this is not a phrase you hear shouted too often...
The genius of being stupid
The genesis of genius is often in being stupid. Not the idiotic kind of stupid, but more the keeping-it-simple kind. Stupid enough to just do the not-terribly-exciting stuff consistently, to create the conditions in which great results can show up. One example of this...
The art of stillness
In ‘The Land of the Rising Sun’ during the 1990s, the madogiwazoku – which is Japanese for ‘the window tribe’ – were ageing employees who were no longer seen as useful to the organisation. However, since there was a reluctance in Japan’s corporate culture...
