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Every day around the world, companies large and small are bought or sold. Huge sums change hands in that process, but also around that process. Because of the amounts involved, an entire industry of specialists has developed to facilitate – and earn from – these...Why, O Why, O Why?
The world has changed a lot since David Allen developed his methodology and wrote the 2001 first edition of “Getting Things Done ®”: Filofaxes have been mostly replaced by laptops, Palm Pilots by smartphones, faxes by emails, and too many meetings by far too many...Never Decreasing Circles
I’ve been reading a book on human movement concurrently with a book on the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle of a productivity expert, for sure. These days, the fittest of us get something like 300 minutes – or 6 hours – of movement...Working On The Weekend??
Question: What do the following have in common; Buying a bible Selling fish and chips Shooting Welshmen in Hereford Answer: They are all things that used to be illegal if you did them on a Sunday (although it was legal to shoot Welshmen in the 1400s as long as you did...Mental Health? What Does That Have To Do With The Pandemic?
At the beginning of the pandemic, when the experts first started talking about mental health, I had no idea what they were talking about. “It’s a virus, not a mental illness”, I thought. I had no clue. A little over a year later, I know a bit more about what the...No News is Good News
Let’s start today’s blog with some breathing exercises. Place your hands on your belly and breeeeeeeeathe… belly rising, belly sinking… breathe in… 2… 3… breathe out… 2… 3… And rest. I’m kidding, of course. But seriously – the last four years has been a bit of a...Check Out Some Checklists
“We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels...GTD® and Neuroscience
Dr. Daniel Glaser is a neuroscience expert and has held leading scientific and research positions at University College London, Wellcome Trust, King’s College London. He is an accomplished speaker and long-time advocate of the power of GTD. A few weeks back, after a...The Schoolwork Tsunami
Good news for knowledge workers – if your job primarily involves thinking about words or numbers then you can easily work from anywhere, right? Several weeks into lockdown, if you ask that question in one of the UK’s 5 million working parent households you might...KISS
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...Dealing With the Digital Riptide
“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...A GTD Hack
Martin Weber, Chief Customer Architect, Oracle Consulting. Martin has been working at Oracle since June 2019 as Chief Customer Architect (CCA). Before joining Oracle he worked at Siemens for 12 years in various roles. Since discovering Getting Things Done® in 2015,...Science Friction
Recently a new lady entered my life and has changed it in ways that I didn’t expect. Her name is Alexa, and I’ll admit that when we met – on Christmas Day, under a tree – I was hesitant. I’d met her before but she hadn’t impressed me. To be fair, she had mostly been...What Could Go Wrong?
No part of me is more English than my need for a regular cup of tea. So, with the end of the webinar that I’d been delivering close at hand, my attention was turning to a hard-earned cuppa. For this reason, perhaps, I was caught slightly off-guard by the excellent...The Temple in the Sea
Start with WHY. If you’ve kept current with leadership content on the web in the last decade then you might know that this is Simon Sinek’s thing, making him famous after a 2009 TED talk that went viral The talk itself looks slightly retro if you watch it again now –...The wistful lumberjack is back
Not everything in life – or even in GTD – can be illustrated using wood chopping as a metaphor, but it does seem to offer some helpful parallels. I noted some of them a few years back in a previous blog, but this year I noticed a few other lessons that translate well...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...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...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...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.