Tools for Thought

Just as a full voice mail box can’t accept new messages, a person preoccupied with too many thoughts can’t accept new ones. For many people, an excessive workload is anything beyond what they can hold in their immediate memory. That excess is experienced as stress, causing them to either overreact to all the things they [...]

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Idleness often stems more from a lack of clarity than a lack of willpower. Taking action on a vague intention always seems to take more effort than a clearly stated task. It’s best to have the task clearly stated, either to another person, on paper or on a computer, than to have it “understood” strictly [...]

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I like to rave about the David Allen Notetaker Wallet the same way David Allen himself likes to rave about Brother labelers. I can’t think of any “gadget” for GTD that’s been anywhere near as useful. Once you’re used to capturing anything that has your attention immediately, not having anything to capture with is panic-inducing. [...]

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Cloud-based apps aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but they’re convenient for anyone juggling work between multiple computers. If you have a task, but aren’t sure if you’re going to get it done at home, at work, or on the go, web-based task lists are ideal. They’re inherently cross-platform, making them idea for those who have [...]

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If there’s one distinguishing concept between GTD and other productivity systems that use a To Do list, it’s the deliberate split between defining a successful outcome and the very next action step toward accomplishing it. To Do lists tend not to make the distinction, which can mean the difference between the item being perceived as [...]

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An aspect of GTD that some find disappointing is the lack of a hard, fast rule for prioritizing tasks. There’s no “most important task,” no “ABC” code, no 2 x 2 matrix; only the advice to “trust your heart” or “follow your intuition.” It seems ironic, given GTD’s thoroughly systematic approach to collecting, tracking and [...]

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Shopping lists seem intuitive enough. It’s not common for people to include the items they need to pick up at the grocery store in their To Do list. Keeping a separate shopping list prevents having to sort through related procurement tasks — “Get lettuce” (or just “Lettuce”) — and unrelated tasks like “Replace washer in [...]

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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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