Every time I am given a seat above the wings on an airplane I am amazed by the instructions written on them: « Don’t walk outside this area ». The written instructions get even shorter on the jet engine itself: « no step » and « no grab » can be seen there. Having...
“I’m trying to get you the same result, but with less effort.” I was surprised to hear this from someone other than myself, but I wasn’t the one coaching this time. It was Youness, my surf coach. Under normal circumstances I’d have had a fair amount to contribute to...
Neuroscientists have confirmed it over and over. Our brains are very clever. So clever and trained that they cannot make out the difference between the real thing and what we imagine. Ever woken up from a nightmare sweating? Wasn’t real. Even though your body had a...
Have you noticed just how much your performance varies from day to day? Some days you do the work of three people as if it were nothing, and other days it is a stretch to get dressed for work. You may have gotten used to that, but actually it is kind of a strange...
If ever there was a time to get our visions perfectly clear, it must surely be in 2020! Often at New Year, people scout around for opportunities and ideas to add to their ‘Resolutions’ for the coming year. Trying to remember or think of great things they could achieve...
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,...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries, and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” -Blaise Pascal What if nobody likes this blog? What if I’m all out of ideas about GTD®? What if I go to write and nothing shows up?...
Boxer, the horse from George Orwell’s classic text Animal Farm, had one answer to adversity: “The solution, as I see it, is to work harder.” It is a poignant allegory for Stalinist exploitation of working-class Russian revolutionaries. But it is also...
“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...
