Tag: “Perspective”

One of the reasons GTD has achieved great recognition as a personal productivity system is that it doesn’t reduce our daily activity to a simple set of tasks to be marked as done. That’s oversimplified. Although being productive is about getting more done with as little effort as possible, we aren’t machines. We’re human beings, and our actions must respond to something deeper.

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, as well as a Nazi concentration camp survivor, wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he analysed man’s capacity to overcome his difficulties from a psychiatric point of view. He explains that all human beings, unlike animals, have self-awareness and the ability to act on the basis of that awareness. This means that we’re capable of responding to a stimulus in a completely different way to what our instincts suggest and even to what we have been taught.

If there’s a consistent and common theme when two people talk about time, it’s the feeling that the time we have available is not enough to do everything we would like to do, both in our personal and professional lives.

One of the most controversial points for those who are new to the GTD methodology (Getting Things Done) is the apparent absence of priorities to classify the actions to be performed every day. This happens because traditional management systems, both personal and business, were based on the arbitrary assignment of priorities to each of the projects or actions to be performed, and one expects any organizational system to allow you to classify with a letter or a number, or some form of prioritization, each of your tasks.

Chaos causes stress, and increased stress leads to reduced productivity. At times of unavoidable chaos, what can you do to stop the heightened stress levels from tarnishing your productivity?