Inbox Zero Or Zeroing Inboxes?

Inbox Zero Or Zeroing Inboxes?

est. reading time: 6:45 mins Part of our training as GTD® trainers is to help our delegates get to zero and experience firsthand what it is like to have no more backlog. What seemed to me to be the most exciting part of the training often appeared to the delegates to...
How To Speed Clean Your Inbox After Vacation

How To Speed Clean Your Inbox After Vacation

Mike Stenberg, Head of Digital Marketing at Siemens AG, is a long-term personal user of GTD®, and has implemented it on several teams that he has led or consulted for. Returning from vacation to find an email inbox with hundreds of unread emails is...
Superhuman?

Superhuman?

When we started the business 10 years ago, ‘inbox zero’ was a bit of a holy grail for our clients. If we let slip in conversation that we had a means of attaining and sustaining that standard, ears pricked up all Spock-like. A decade later, most still like the sound...
Don’t Blame Them, it’s Your Fault!

Don’t Blame Them, it’s Your Fault!

How easy it is to feel smug, you’re up and running with GTD®. You’re completing a Weekly Review®, your ‘ins’ are at zero, your lists are in order, higher horizons aligned and you’re looking through your ‘waiting for’ list to see who you can chase to prove your system...
Don’t Flag Your Pigeons

Don’t Flag Your Pigeons

Those of us who work with our email inboxes regularly ‘at zero’ are aware of the many benefits this brings. It is therefore a surprise, when trying to encourage others to do the same, that their first response is often along the lines of “I don’t care that I have...
The solace of the full inbox

The solace of the full inbox

If you’ve been to one of our seminars or had a bit of our coaching, you’ve no doubt heard us talk about ways of working that allow you to deal with email backlog. If you’ve attended one of our two-day seminars and implemented the new ways of working in your email, you...
The clashing of email cultures

The clashing of email cultures

We don’t usually see delegates bursting with frustration in our GTD seminars but in one of my former lives it was a sign that a workshop was hitting the mark. That life involved readying business-people for international assignments and the card game ‘Barnga’ was a...
To e-, Or Not to e- . . . Handling e-mail on Holiday

To e-, Or Not to e- . . . Handling e-mail on Holiday

Like much of Europe, I’m off on my summer holiday. Unlike much of Europe, I’ve had a an e-mail arrive with a question about how to handle e-mail while on holiday. What to do? The sender did a seminar a year or so ago, and since then has been working at implementing as...
To e-, Or Not to e- . . . Handling e-mail on Holiday

Inbox Zero? Pfah! So Noughties

When – in desperation – I first skimmed the book Getting Things Done back in 2004, I had a number of epiphanies. One of them was that there were people who were regularly able to empty out their e-mail inboxes. This information, in and of itself, re-defined the game I...
A Brief History of Doing Versus Drama

A Brief History of Doing Versus Drama

We have all seen the automobile ads where their makers claim to be “redefining performance” in their industry. The truth is, we speakers of English have been redefining the very word “performance” for some time, and the trajectory is somewhat...
To e-, Or Not to e- . . . Handling e-mail on Holiday

Goodbye Discipline – Hello Motivation

  One of the clients I worked with recently had quickly understood GTD as a concept and wanted to do it, but was struggling with actually doing it consistently. He finally cracked the problem when he clarified why he wanted GTD, and what it would get him if he...
KO vs TKO – both win the fight

KO vs TKO – both win the fight

Back in the winter of 1976, a low-budget boxing movie came out of nowhere to take the world by storm and win the Academy Award for best picture. You’ll have guessed by now that it was ‘Rocky’, and for this 13 year-old boy it was huge. Epic. Transformational.  I pretty...

Worth Celebrating

Last week my father had a birthday, and it’s got me thinking about celebrations. We celebrate things that represent progress, like the calendar reaching another milestone; though in my father’s case he says he would prefer not to be reminded of the number of...

The Nitty-Gritty – Clearing Out Your Inbox

One of our biggest fans complained a few weeks back. After years of positive feedback about these blogs, he took the time to let us know that he was not satisfied with one of them as he did not feel it was specific enough about what he should actually do as a result...