My brother claims to have achieved that transformation with GTD. My personal experience is that complex rigid systems like GTD require high initial investments in effort and can be brittle. They are sort of like doing a total rewrite of a codebase. My biggest wins have come from making small incremental changes. The biggest win I ever made was getting a small filing cabinet (a banker box works, too) and putting it, a stack of manilla folders, and a marker next to my desk. Then, when I get a piece of mail or have a piece of paper, I file it in the appropriate folder, making a new one if need…
After trying GTD for about 7-8 years, I gave up. I mean, I kept using it, thinking it was working, but I'd look back and ask myself key questions: 1. How often do I stop looking at my lists, because I felt overwhelmed? 2. How often do I need to spend a large amount of time cleaning up the lists? 3. How often are things getting missed? How often am I doing things not in my GTD lists because I couldn't figure out how to put it in there? 4. How often do I tweak my GTD system to fix the above? And so on - I realized that while GTD was of some help, it was not really working. It did have…
Sounds very familiar. You've trained your whole life for working slightly hard for short periods of time and getting enough done to keep up. The only way I've seen to fight that is to do things that can't be mastered quickly: chess, playing music, sports, etc. There are also certain lines of work that would work better. You're probably never going to fit into a software developer role if you're expected to spend 1-3 week sprints delivering chunks of functioning code. You would probably excel at a top-tier customer support role where you dug into hard problems and diagnosed other people's…
JavaScript developer at Nozbe | Poland or anywhere (we're remote!) We're looking for talented programmers who are passionate about building amazing applications and are great at front-end development (all Javascript-related). It is necessary that: * You love programming and newest technologies * JavaScript, CSS3, HTML5 are your best friends * You have developed mobile web apps * You want to work from home and can be very independent * You know English very well so you can read and comment in this language * You are willing to learn and develop all the time * You have good…
It's ironic that whilst the Great Benefit of the Internet was supposed to be the elimination of gatekeepers ... I'm finding that the gatekeeping provided by traditional publishing is actually quite useful. Much of what I read is books or magazine articles. Much of that published well before the Internet age. I've been attempting to track most-salient items as well through what I call "BOTI", or best of the interval, a sort of round-robin file (think 43-folders, described in David Allen's Getting Things Done), where I keep track of the n best items I've encountered in the previous interval…
Ok, firstly. I am an Indian. What is wrong with Yoga? Answer : Wrong question! The right question is, What is wrong with our understand of Yoga? As per most people and if you ask them, they would reply Yoga means twisting, bending and turning your body in crazy ways to heal/medicinal use. Nothing would be further from the truth. Unfortunately things have come down to a level where people only give ritualistic definition of Yoga! Yoga also has many branches. To understand Yoga in its essence I would advice you to read Swami Vivekananda's complete works. I practice Yoga. Yoga is not a 2…
There is only so much you can do, or will do. The things that you're not going to be able to do will be eliminated from your list regardless of your choice(s). The question is whether you do this deliberately or incidentally with time. David Allen's Getting Things Done isn't a perfect system, and has flaws. That said, it's quite good, and is better than virtually anything else I've seen. I strongly recommend it. In an era of information abundance, what is limited is what information consumes: attention. (Thank Herbert Simon for that observation.) The other thing information consumes…
Capturing or thinking in either is an improvement over people trying to keep everything in their heads, something we're are in the USA completely not taught in public schools. There are various tools I've tried from this classic HN discussion regarding digital tools, from my infatuation over time with fancy pilot g2 pens, to Casio pdas, to palm treos to the HP Compaq TC1000 with Onenote 2003 (pen computer with electronic notebook!) to my ongoing fountain pen habit to my current desire to make the Microsoft courier concept real life by buying an expensive Lenovo Yoga 9i (why are booklet PC…
> Firstly, this is a todo app for your life. Existing tools are built around how we work as employees in a company. On the contrary, that's a very recent development. Since the 50s (and earlier) there have been commercial personal systems that are 'to do apps for your life', with this millennium's most famous being GTD aka "Getting Things Done", and last half of last century in the USA being Day-Timer (and similar tiny pre-printed planning organizer lists+calendars+journals). If you squint, most useful 'planners' end up re-implementing some form of GTD, David Allen's "Getting Things Done"…
Hello, This is the story of my life, man. You can take a look at a piece Peter Drucker (the "Father of Management") wrote, for the Harvard Business Review, titled "Managing Oneself". Here's an excerpt: """ We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a person - and especially a knowledge worker- should not take on work, jobs, and assignments. One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than…