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...
Happy UNWCISA Day!
When you sit down at your computer after a morning of back-to-back meetings and you’re greeted by 87 new emails, you’d be forgiven for cursing technology under your breath. Today, however, is the United Nations World Communications and Information Society Awareness...
How to Get More Balance in Life with GTD (Video)
How to Get More Balance in Life with GTD (Video) Todd Brown talks about how it is important to get balance in life, and how Getting Things Done® (GTD®) helps to create better balance through the Threefold Nature of Work Model. Click to play this...
Are You a One-Context Wonder?
Toni Basil. Los del Río. Baha Men. You may not recognise these band names, but if you lived through the 80s, 90s, and 00s, you are almost certainly familiar with “[Hey] Mickey”, “Macarena”, and “Who Let the Dogs Out?” All of these...
Paper Quirk
I was at a dinner party recently where the conversation – implausibly – turned to ‘paperwork’. We’d exhausted topics like real-estate trends (luxury – in; affordable – out), our ongoing Circus Brexitus, and the ambient geo-political madness. Things had clearly gotten...
Held at Ransom
I was ten minutes into a meeting when my colleague at the other end of the conference line said, “Something’s going on. I need to switch off my computer”. Two minutes later, I received the same message from our IT team – we were the target of a...
A Prescription for Procrastination
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...
GTD & D&D Part II: How to Lead a Team of Dragon-Slayers
I have a confession to make. I have been routinely engaging in conflict-resolution sessions with a group of creative, talented mid-career professionals. We have been collaborating on solutions to complicated, high-stakes problems by drawing on the unique strengths and...
GTD & D&D, Part I: How to Master Your Own Work/Life Dungeon
There comes a time in one’s life to put away childish things. But there also comes a time to take them out again. After a 25-year hiatus, I took a risk and asked some of my smartest, funniest, most creative (and, naturally, busiest) friends if they would like to...
And now for something completely different…
Last month my colleague Todd Brown blogged about Aristotle and GTD, and the topic must have jiggled loose some errant neural connections in my brain because later that day I found myself remembering a classic Monty Python sketch called the ‘International Philosophy...
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,...Guest interview with Sam Wigan; trainer, facilitator and coach
Sam Wigan is an avid student of personal development and self awareness for 20 years, having completed numerous advanced courses in the field and more recently, a Masters Class in personal transformation with an emphasis on coaching. Sam is also a corporate training...
Life Lessons from a Street Performer
The parallels aren’t always obvious, but there are in fact plenty of lessons about productivity from the world of circus skills
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...
Shifting gears
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...
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...
Guest Interview: how does a polar explorer use GTD?
Ben Saunders is one of the world’s leading polar explorers, and a record-breaking long-distance skier who has covered more than 6,000km (3,700 miles) on foot in the Polar Regions since 2001. Ben is the third person in history to ski solo to the North Pole, and holds...
Gearing Up for Summer (Podcast)
In this episode Todd and Robert discuss how to make best use of summertime to unleash creative thinking and relaxed focus. Click to play this episode Subscribe to the Podcast
We’re 7! How has GTD helped us get this far?
On Wednesday this week Next Action Associates turned seven years old. We’re quite proud of that. We live in a world where many start-ups don’t make it past the toddler stage, and the majority fail before they begin primary school; yet here we are confidently making...
What GTD can’t do for you
“There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking” – Sir Joshua Reynolds Doing a bit of a spring clean this week, I came across a book I bought back in the early days of the web called “Don’t make me think”. It was written by...
What can we learn about GTD from successful people who haven’t used it?
Over the years in my blogs I’ve naturally quoted a lot from David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done. David has an astonishing ability to encapsulate powerful ideas in pithy sayings that stick with you.* But one of my hobbies is also collecting quotes from...
Six GTD Projects that might inspire you to do great things
A few weeks ago in my blog I asked people to have a look through their reminders and to send in their favourite Projects, Next Actions, and Someday/Maybe list entries. In our blogs over the last (can it be?) four years our goal has always been to inform and inspire....
