Tag: “Perspective”

Steven Pressfield in his book "Do The Work says that the process of doing any creative work, whether it is writing a book, composing a song, preparing a trip, developing a product or creating a company, basically consists of two stages: Acting and reflecting.

Although we are in an era in which we have tools that make us productive enough to reduce a good part of our work and allow us to dedicate ourselves to more important things (including those things that have nothing to do with our work, such as leisure, family, or friends), we insist on changing the social rules so that spending most of our time working will always continue to be the normal thing to do.

You are working on an activity that you are stuck on, or that you don’t feel like continuing to work on because you don’t have the right mindset at the moment, or you simply don’t have the energy to continue working on it. There are two things you can do: rest or switch tasks.

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.