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...
Three Fastest Strategies to Reduce Overwhelm

Three Fastest Strategies to Reduce Overwhelm

Feeling overwhelmed, with too much to do and not enough time? Do you feel like you have too much information coming at you from all directions, and too much to think about? Here are the three fastest strategies to reduce overwhelm, with guidance on how you can manage...
Love Film, Hate Scrolling

Love Film, Hate Scrolling

The other day I was searching my email archives for some old correspondence and a blast from the past appeared in the search results; Lovefilm was a UK DVD rental service, subsequently gobbled up by Amazon, whereby you chose your movie on their website and a couple of...
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...
Your Email Inbox Is All About You

Your Email Inbox Is All About You

Growing up on the US-Mexico border, a feature of my childhood friends’ birthday parties was the piñata. For those unfamiliar, it is a colourful papier-mâché figure, ranging from a traditional donkey to a popular cartoon character, stuffed to the crêpe-paper...
GTD and ‘Orienting Maps’

GTD and ‘Orienting Maps’

Do you have a set of useful reminders to help you focus on the right things, in the right place, and at the right time? This week I talk about how GTD’s ‘orienting maps’ can help you reach your desired outcomes with greater...
Don’t Kiss the Frog

Don’t Kiss the Frog

Christina Wallace found love on the internet quicker than most by recognising that online dating was good at expanding her dating pool, but not good for spotting chemistry, intelligence, charm, politics, marital status, creditworthiness, hygiene and anger issues. She...
Working Standards: Where Do You Want to Go Today?

Working Standards: Where Do You Want to Go Today?

In the second blog in this series, we looked at how you might get a sense of what the current reality around working standards is in your team or organisation. If that exercise – of uncovering current standards – highlighted the need for change, what to do...
Working Standards: an Approach to Transformation

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....
Permission to stare out the window

Permission to stare out the window

“Honey, I just realised – nothing is going to try to kill me out here.” My wife and I were ambling along one of England’s many public footpaths through gentle countryside. I agree it may sound like an unusual observation. But having come from...
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...
Capturing for the Win (Podcast)

Capturing for the Win (Podcast)

In this episode Todd and Robert talk about the first and one of the most fundamental steps in the GTD process: capturing what has your attention effectively, often, and well. Click to play this episode Subscribe to the Podcast
A penny for your thoughts

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

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...
Tackling the bigger questions

Tackling the bigger questions

Expat life is full of discoveries. I am particularly fond of the British phrase, “I’ll have a think about that.” It implies deliberation, as though one intends to set aside dedicated time, perhaps by a fire with a long clay pipe, to give...
We’ve got a bleeder!

We’ve got a bleeder!

Blood and fire are two inputs that make their priorities clear: drop everything! And call an ambulance or find a fire extinguisher, because nothing matters more. In the course of teaching GTD, people regularly ask about effective prioritisation, and what they are...
Top 5 Ways to Improve Your GTD Practice in 2016

Top 5 Ways to Improve Your GTD Practice in 2016

So the decorations are back in storage, the leftover turkey is a memory, and we’re back at it in the office.  Here in the UK, winter seems finally to have arrived after a very warm autumn, but hey, the days are getting longer now and soon spring will be beckoning. As...
Who is throwing your ball?

Who is throwing your ball?

  I’m a big fan of dogs. Love ’em. I’m not convinced that there is anything of unconditional love in the response of “Man’s Best Friend” (there is the small matter of MBF having identified a light touch for free food…),...

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...

Lists? What lists? Oh, those lists….

  Years ago, when I was only a GTD baby, I remember one of the GTD grown-ups saying something like: “Anyone can do the inbox thing. It is what happens once the inbox is empty that is what really counts.” As someone who – at that point – was not yet consistently...