‘No’ is Guaranteed
“Not my circus, not my monkeys.” Ever heard that one? It is one of my favourite linguistic imports. If you are not familiar with it, it is the very visual Polish take on staying clear of problems that are not yours to solve, and for me it captures what might be a...
Clarifying Your Commitments
In this week’s video blog, Todd Brown discusses the ‘clarifying’ questions in the Getting Things Done® (GTD®) methodology, to help you optimise your commitments in the most productive, stress-free way.
Six Ways to Preserve Your Sanity in a World With Way Too Much Choice
True story: A few months back, a well-dressed Italian woman in her early sixties walks into a local Sicilian cafe in search of a panettone for Christmas. Having surveyed a ceiling sagging under the weight of dozens of them, suspended from festive ribbons, she...
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...
Action Man becomes Strategy Director – my first 12 months’ experience of GTD
James McBrien is Managing Director of Clearwater Advisers Ltd. Clearwater specialises in showing talented individuals how to be great communicators. We show people how to be natural when under pressure. As well as running individual and group coaching programmes we...
A journey of 1000 miles begins with a tangible next action
David Griffin is a senior consultant at Cambridge based 42 Technology, which offers pragmatic engineering innovation, design and development services to clients in a range of industries. He first started with GTD in 2003, when Palm Pilot devices were no longer cool...
Watchmaking
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...
Is that yours?
Sometimes simple questions can provoke profound responses. Take, for example, the question, “Is this your project?”. Most busy professionals, once they have built a trusted GTD system to manage all their commitments, end up with upwards of fifty projects...
Getting (back?) on the wagon with GTD
“[Once you have learned GTD,] at least you have a wagon.” -David Allen It all makes sense. You want to do it. And yet, you aren’t doing it. If this sounds familiar in relation to your GTD practice, know that you are not alone. The methodology is...
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.
Chocks away
Given the electoral earthquake across the pond this week, the decision to develop a third runway at London’s Heathrow Airport somehow feels like it all happened ages ago. It was actually only a fortnight, but its origins do indeed go back years. The UK government’s...
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 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...
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...
How refined are your open loops?
It came to me, as many of my moments of inspiration do, when I was doing something completely unrelated. I was enjoying a beautiful walk in the hills with my wife last weekend, and it occurred to me: “we all have lots of things we need to do, our ‘open...
Distracted by the Duke
As he lay dying by the railway tracks the local MP for Liverpool, the Right Honourable William Huskisson, must have thought… “Dash it all… I didn’t see that coming!” On this very day in 1830, a train service was launched connecting Manchester, the greatest...
Who do you think you are?
It’s the 4th of February today. Set any new resolutions at the beginning of this month? I didn’t think so. Strange how we do that in January, but in February not so much. Still, I have to ask: how did you do? In January, I mean. Research shows that although millions...
Eating the Menu
It’s a nice place. You have been here before, and recall how much you like the food. Yet as you scan down the first page of the menu, your breath quickens and your pulse shoots up. Turning to the second page, your eyes widen; you are practically hyperventilating...
Marshall Goldsmith, the coaches’ coach, on thinking to support your GTD journey
This month I interviewed Leadership Coach, Marshall Goldsmith. Marshall has just been recognised as the world’s number one leadership thinker. He is a coach to many of the Fortune 500 CEOs and a past president. His forte is behavioural change. In the interview...How do you get started?
Back in September, I asked people to send in their favourite GTD Projects, Next Actions, and Someday/Maybe list entries. Loads of people have gotten in touch, and if that’s you then thank you very much for your support. Today I’ll focus on the Next Actions that you’ve sent in.
