I always thought I was far too young to be needing check lists. In my mind, check lists were the inevitable accessory for (generally speaking) parents, and in particular my parents, when they were preparing our ski vacations and making sure that everybody in the...
As we move into the middle of the first month of the year, the most ambitious among you are either looking at – or still gently polishing – your goals for this year. Most people will have given this ‘new year, new you’ idea some thought as we rolled into a new decade,...
In my last blog, on dealing with what might be called ‘morning mind’, I mentioned the idea of a default setting, and that out of the box (or bed) that setting isn’t necessarily optimised for relaxed productivity What would a useful default setting be? Well, at a bare...
It is in the morning that we are most vulnerable. Barely awake, the thoughts start coming. Sometimes positive, but often not so much. The reason for that negative start-of-the-day slant I’ll leave to others more qualified, but after 30 years of coaching and mentoring...
Any parent with more than one child knows that however identically you think you treat them, kids grow up completely different to each other. It’s a humbling realisation, how little influence you really have. I have two children who have moved through high school two...
The other day I was searching my email archives for some old correspondence and a blast from the past appeared in the search results; Lovefilm was a UK DVD rental service, subsequently gobbled up by Amazon, whereby you chose your movie on their website and a couple of...
I’m not a fan of fitness. What’s to like? Basically it hurts while I’m doing it, again the next day, and then – go figure – it’s worse again on the day after that. Seemingly not a lot of upside in all of that, but by day three after a workout I’m feeling great and...
Last week, I hosted a regular conference call with our certified trainers and coaches here in the UK. One of the many hats I wear at Next Action Associates is that of Master Trainer, which basically means that I look after developing and certifying our trainers, and...
When we help someone build their GTD® ‘external brain’; their ‘trusted list keeper’ for remembering all of their commitments, sometimes they feel that they don’t want to put all their personal items into their company computer. This can be for various reasons: they...
Mike Stenberg, Head of Digital Marketing at Siemens AG, is a long-term personal user of GTD®, and has implemented it on several teams that he has led or consulted for. Returning from vacation to find an email inbox with hundreds of unread emails is...
Robert De Niro asks a very important GTD® question with his famous quote in the movie ‘Taxi Driver’. “Are you talking to me?” You wouldn’t believe how many projects are found on lists that don’t ‘talk’ to their owners. First of all, some project names don’t talk to...
“I thought you said we didn’t need my tent!” I had been happily setting up what I thought was my tent for the evening, but this snippet of conversation from the other side of the clearing dragged me out of my wilderness reverie. We were 18km into a four-day canoe...
Monika Danner has worked in corporate HR and leadership roles for more than 15 years. She has been a GTD® practitioner since 2014 and is now a certified GTD trainer for Next Action Partners in Germany. “Your projects list is a composite picture of the future you want...
Imagine you’re the CEO of a huge corporation. You’re naturally very busy, and your time has to be carefully managed from moment you get to the office in the morning to the moment you leave at night. But you have the best PA in the world, at your side at all...
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...
Each Day In Life is Training Training For Myself Though Failure is Possible Living Each Moment Equal to Anything Ready for Everything (Soen Ozeki, Daisen-in Zen Temple, Kyoto) I’m sitting in an Amsterdam coffee shop reflecting on the mind-altering trip that I’ve been...
“Raise the scarlet standard high Beneath its folds we’ll live and die Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer We’ll keep the red flag flying here.” ~ The Red Flag If Karl Marx had celebrated his recent 200th birthday with a trip back here to Manchester,...
Growing up on the US-Mexico border, a feature of my childhood friends’ birthday parties was the piñata. For those unfamiliar, it is a colourful papier-mâché figure, ranging from a traditional donkey to a popular cartoon character, stuffed to the crêpe-paper...
I’ve found myself in a number of conversations recently with people who seem seriously unhappy with how little they are reading these days. In certain cases, I know this is not even close to being true because I’m party to what is hitting their inboxes on a daily...
There are many benefits to tidying up and decluttering our lives, as Marie Kondo has successfully demonstrated. But what is missing? Marie Kondo focuses on physical clutter, but many of us are struggling more with mental clutter. What if we took the basic idea of...
Lamb jalfrezi, chicken korma, mutton biryani… while the rest of the world was going vegan last month (a.k.a. ‘Veganuary’), there was a defiant outbreak of meat-based curry-making taking place chez moi. The spark for these culinary adventures was the lovely new...
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...
