On A Wing and A Prayer
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, as a more accomplished writer once put it. I was about to set off for The Caribbean, to an island I’d wanted to visit my whole life, yet I was stressed out of my mind. For the last few days, ‘the...
Working Standards: an Approach to Transformation
Imagine for a moment you work in an organisation where people no longer respond to their e-mail. One where it has become ‘normal’ to have to send messages two or three times – then pick up a phone and call people – to get a response on some issue you are working on....
FOMO, YOLO, and GTD
Being often in a hurry, millennials love to abbreviate. One of my favourites is “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read). In case you’re a millennial reading this now, here’s the “tl;dr” version of this article: if you’re afraid...
Heart surgery
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...
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...
Slowly down the Ganges
Last night I scattered my father’s ashes on the waters of the Ganges at Varanasi, the holy city to which Hindus come to die and end the cycle of death and rebirth. India had exerted an ancestral pull on my dad his whole life but he’d never managed to...
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...
Stressed at work? You’re not alone.
In our increasingly always-on, too-much-to-do, pay-attention-to-me-now world, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that stress in the workplace is on the up, but in a recent study we have some hard data to ponder. Stress was at the top of the list of health and...
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...
What about the middle bit?
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” -Robert Burns, “To a Mouse” It happens about once per seminar. During the practice session, where people are clarifying their project outcomes and next actions, a hand goes...
A wagon full of hope
I bumped into a former GTD participant earlier this week, and I could see from her body language that she wasn’t keen to see me. Initial pleasantries past, I found out why. “I’m off the wagon”, she said, sheepishly. “That’s great!” I countered. This did not seem to...
Listening to your commitments
“I’ll get right on it, boss,” the new recruit beams back at me. There’s just one problem – he doesn’t write it down. When I mention this, his face falls, as if to say, “Don’t you trust me?” Still, I am not too...
No work, no playa
A bad system will beat a good person every time. – W. Edwards Deming Tuesday was my first day back after a couple of weeks of stay-cating here in London. Doing London-y things, some of which I’ve been meaning to do since arriving 21 years ago. It was a delicious...
A penny for your thoughts
It’s a sun-filled summer afternoon and you’re strolling happily down the street when a flash of light catches your eye from pavement ahead. You instinctively tell yourself it’s probably just shiny litter but your eyes linger, widen and then sparkle with delight. Yes,...
The alarming drag of auto-nag
Like so many of us, I have a love-hate relationship with the alarm clock on my phone. I often hate how early it wakes me up, but of course love that it does so reliably. Like the bookmark, whose simple virtues I extolled in a previous article, the alarm clock is...
On bookmarks and being
“A truly good man does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone. A foolish man is always doing, yet much remains to be done.” – Lao Tse, from Tao Te Ching, Chapter 38, trans. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English I read a lot of books. To keep track of where I left...
