Tools for Thought

Distraction. Multitasking. Attention Deficit Disorder. Information overload. These are the watchwords of the internet age. And yes, they’re very real problems. It’s so easy to become distracted, so easy for irrelevant information to trickle into our environments without vigilant gatekeeping, that it’s tempting to take blocking out all input to an extreme, turning workspaces into [...]

[Read more →]

Time for some backpedaling. For years I’ve been a proponent of studying in long, uninterrupted blocks — ideally a couple of hours at a time. Since I’ve been experimenting with segmented reading, I’m starting to doubt that longer is better — not the amount of overall time per se, but the length of uninterrupted time. [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]