Tools for Thought

Zero base is a GTD term for having fully processed collection buckets with no items remaining. An effective norm for getting back to zero base is every 24 to 48 hours. One of the first problems I encountered after quitting my last day job to work at home was letting my in-basket and email inbox [...]

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One of the first time management books I read was Alan Laeken’s excellent How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, which recommended the now-familiar advice of triaging tasks into A, B and C categories. Appropriately, the book had plenty of discussion on the importance of doing A tasks first, and it even [...]

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The human mind is brilliant, but also brilliantly inefficient. We often get our best ideas where we can’t implement them. The classic example is in the shower, but it happens everywhere, anytime. You’re shopping in the produce section of the supermarket, and all of a sudden, you realize you need to add an important topic [...]

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The two-minute rule was originated by business consultant Dean Acheson (no relation to the former Secretary of State), then incorporated into the Time/Design (Time/system in the US) methodology and later picked up by David Allen for GTD. Acheson, who also coined the Next Action technique, would guide his clients through an in-basket processing session by [...]

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A week and a half ago, I unsubscribed from all of my feeds in Google Reader. Looking around at my other sources of information, I resolved to process my email only once a day, refused to pick up any newspapers, and resisted the temptation to read any nonfiction for a week. I feel like I’ve [...]

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As I’ve probably said too many times, I view time management as a subset of productivity rather than being synonymous with it. People seem to have a much harder time defining specifically what action step needs to be taken next to carry a project forward than defining when to start it or how long it [...]

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If you blog in or around the Los Angeles area, I’ve just launched the Southern California Bloggers Meetup Group. I made the announcement on the Meetup site a few minutes ago, so I have no idea how many people will show up, but I don’t feel like slating the event for later just to feel [...]

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GTD addresses the concept of “work” in the broadest sense. Anything that needs to get done is considered work, whether it’s watering houseplants or editing PowerPoint presentations. If something needs to be done, but hasn’t been done yet, then it needs to be tracked externally to prevent the overhead of having the periodically or constantly [...]

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Video can make learning more efficient than written instruction, but sometimes even video is a but much. Many of the lectures and interviews I come across are recorded on video for no apparent reason — visual aides are minimal or nonexistent. It would be more convenient to have them in a portable audio format to [...]

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What GTD calls a “mind sweep” gives you permission to capture whatever’s on your mind without having to simultaneously make a decision about it. That’s a lot different than writing a to do list, where some things are clearly defined actions, some are goals and others are basically one-word notes. Unlike a to do list, [...]

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