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...
“Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax.” -David Allen One of the hallmarks of true productivity is a sense of fulfilment. In a recent article, I looked at the difference between performance as in professional...
For the inveterate movie hound that I am, the streaming of movies over the internet seems a huge leap forward for our civilization. No more clicking through several hundred channels of an evening to find a speck of gold in a mountain of televisual dross; now I can tap...
OK, so you’ve adopted some GTD best practices at the office. Maybe you have a core organizational system set up on your work computer, and it serves you well when you’re at your desk. You can capture, clarify and organize the inputs in the office, whether...
Lack of productivity growth is a very hot topic in the news these days, and the source of much discussion and consternation in board rooms and among government ministers. The Conference Board, a global think-tank, reckons that global productivity fell 0.2 percent last...
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...
Those of you who have been following my blogs over the last few years may have noticed that from time to time I’ll do a bit of a deep-dive into an area of GTD thinking. This is one of those blogs. For those of you who are new to GTD, I expect this will be valuable...
Ever had an overwhelming sense that the world is coming at you so fast that you can’t keep up? The emails and instant messages are arriving faster than they’re being dealt with. The stacks of paper on your desk are growing, not shrinking. When you see the boss headed...
I’m no doctor, but here is something I’ve learned from experience: when a muscle goes into spasm and doesn’t recover properly, sometimes it gets to a point where it has been tight for so long that the brain simply stops registering the pain signals it is sending. It...
You have a safety net. Whatever acrobatic manoeuvres will be required in the working week ahead, you can leap from platform to swinging trapeze with confidence. Someone down there is going to catch you if you fall. That someone, strangely enough, is you. As I...
Have you ever stopped to think how much of your life you spend in meetings? Done well, they can be incredibly powerful, but very often they end up being inefficient and a drain. Having both attended countless meetings myself, and coached many senior executives...
We’re offering a new intermediate-level GTD seminar these days, Projects and Priorities, and I’ve run several of them over the last couple of months. It’s a day for expansive thinking; about building on the basics of GTD that enable us to stay in control of our...
“Baby Steps, get on a bus. Baby Steps, get on a bus.” -Bob Wiley (played by Bill Murray) in “What About Bob?” As a practicing poet, I often “trick myself” into creative flow. It is as if when I look at a subject directly, the...
I’ve had an idea for a service business. It’s about helping people to make sure they’re reminded about the things they need to do in their lives. It’ll work like this. You tell it what you want to be reminded about, and it will remind you. It will remind you at...
Welcome back. With a bit of a tailwind and a bit of luck, many of you are re-starting after a two-week break thanks to the miracle of seasonal holidays falling very helpfully in the middle of the week. After a slow start early in the week, digital heads are being...
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…),...
I was on a long plane flight earlier this week, about six hours in the air. While I don’t particularly relish time away from home, I do find that the time I spend on planes is some of the most productive time in my life. On a plane all of my various mobile devices are...
Growing up in the American Southwest, I have long been acquainted with a familiar parable about the young greenhorn (inexperienced rancher) attempting to brand cattle. What I never realised is how relevant the tale is to twenty-first-century knowledge work. The story...
“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” -William Morris The Japanese personal organiser Marie Kondo recommends thinking of one’s possessions as animate, and treating them with according...
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...
You’re being stalked right now. No, not by people in camouflage gear and woolly hats. It’s Busy. Busy is after you. When Busy catches you, it gets you to do things. Lots of things. (Doing things is good, though, surely?) Well, Busy has rules. You have to stay in...
Those of you who have visited our website, www.next-action.co.uk, since Friday last week will have noticed that we’ve changed, well, pretty much everything. New branding, new navigation, the lot. Now such a dramatic change wasn’t undertaken lightly,...
This week, a dive into some of the detail with a round-up of answers to frequently asked questions we are seeing on the web: Question: Can you have more than one next action going at any one time for a project, or do you suggest focusing solely on doing one thing...
I think you would be hard pressed to find someone who would argue that their brain was unimportant (and if they did, you would wonder how well it was functioning anyway). Yet on our travels we find that many people misuse their brains. They expect it to perform...