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 [...]
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 [...]
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” [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I recently ran a course for a group of colleagues on e-mail handling. Though this is one of the classic benefits of GTD, getting to grips with e-mail, it is one I have slightly avoided teaching or coaching. For me the chief benefit of GTD is that it clarifies your thinking; as a result you [...]
One of the things David Allen says about thinking and focus, is that “it’s not about whether the information is available, it’s about whether you are available to the information”. Forget the nutty, mystical stuff where people think that imagining their dream life will cause it to appear. This is all about what you notice, [...]
I was inspired by this post at 43 folders to start thinking about meetings. I seem to be at different meetings to most people, perhaps because I have the luxury of running many of the ones I attend. Many posters complained that meetings they were attending were boring or irrelevant. I may be a bit hard-assed here, but I feel that you should then be questioning the purpose of the meeting. It [...]
Birmingham University in the UK used to have something called a “lecture cube” for gauging the speed or uptake of a lecture. It was red on two sides, white on two more and green on the remaining two.
Depending on how the students placed them on their desks, the lecturer would see a field of colour [...]
At one of my speaking engagements in a school I asked a few of them what was “on their minds too much” and was told by a student that he wanted to catch up with one of his subjects. So I asked him what he would do to achieve that and he said, “weeeel I [...]
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