Archive | GTD
Of Tomatoes and Discipline
Discipline. Now that’s an old-fashioned word. It conjures up images of strict parents, being stood in the corner, being unable to do what you want; but there is another side. Any skill that takes dedication and focus is also called a “discipline”. The image there is of perfecting a movement, refining your understanding, excluding distraction. [...]
Uses of the truth
I got used last week.
But that’s ok. Here is how it happened.
At the moment I spend part of my time in an environment were there is fear and lack of candour. People feel threatened and powerless and unable to connect to each other. Such situations are anathema to me, they dampen down our fire and [...]
Why do we fall?
Thymer and Remember the Milk
I have a pretty strong distrust of anything that claims to automate your GTD process: most of them claim more attention than they relieve and become jobs in themselves. Nevertheless I do need somewhere to park my next actions at home. Work is wall-to-wall Outlook and I synch it down to my smartphone, but at home [...]
Sorting by shape
Whenever I give a Getting Things Done training course I start with a funny little exercise I developed. I spread out a pack of “e-mail” cards on the table, labeled “urgent”, “from your boss”, “from a colleague you do not like” and so on on the table. On the other side of the cards is [...]
GTD Unplugged
What goes around comes around and one of my hobby-horses has come around again. My personal approach to GTD coaching is to emphasis the mental game. It is not about having a particular set of macro’s or a specific tool. It is about how you think. For me this is very basic, but I keep [...]
Throwing away…..
I am currently coaching a particularly creative person who generates ideas continually. He needs GTD specifically because he creates stuff that he could move on, meetings he could go to, initiatives to pursue more quickly than any of the standard strategies that people use to handle their lives can cope with.
One particular kind of “stuff” [...]
GTD and the Pomodoro technique
I have been working seriously with the Pomodoro technique recently. I find it genuinely useful for achieving focus on a single extensive task. I used it to plow my way through an extensive e-learning trajectory (3 hours of material) and to focus on writing documents.
Engaging with the Pomodoro technique made me realise that GTD [...]
Burning up your will-power
I got very interested recently in experiments being done in the field of “ego depletion“. The theory proposes that humans have a limited quantity of “ego” or willpower. When you exercise self-control you use up this resource and will then be less able to persist with other tasks. In the classic experiment of this field [...]

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