Written In The Stars

Written In The Stars

    I bet you get asked this all the time: Sound familiar? It should – most people have been asked this at the end of a Teams or Zoom call in the hope that they’ll click on the stars and share their feelings about audio and video quality. Now,...
Next (Trans)Action

Next (Trans)Action

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?

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

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??

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...
No News is Good News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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 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...