Tag: “Perspective”

GTD is not more than the combined use of three work models that David Allen defined as a result of years and years of coaching others to become more efficient in their jobs and in their lives.

The term “lean” first appeared in the 1990 book The Machine That Changed the World, by James Womack and Daniel Jones, from a thorough study by MIT on the automobile industry. That term was coined to define the manufacturing process in Toyota, which tried to create the largest possible value with minimal resources, as opposed to the management behavior of other major producers such as General Motors, in which wasting resources was pretty common.

One of the main bad habits in the field of personal productivity is the assignation of subjective priorities to our daily tasks and projects; a problem that stretches back to the traditional management systems.

Perfection can kill your intention to implement changes and make things that lead you to a better situation. Many of my blog readers tell me how hard it is to apply GTD for them. They become desperate for not reaching the levels David Allen describe in his book. My answer is always the same: just start to implement it, then refine the details slowly but steadily. Find something you can improve in each stage of the process, small changes that do not involve too much difficulty. If you are able to chain these little improvements, the return obtained will be spectacular. Here are some suggestions to get you started:

I am afraid the Someday/Maybe list is doomed to become a bottomless pit where we accumulate our creativity and pending projects. All the stuff that we cannot process right now, are immediately set as something that we will do someday, so this list becomes a huge queue of wishes. It is for this reason that the Someday/Maybe list cannot be treated as a manageable foreground list, like Next Actions, but we should work to structure it so as not to lose confidence on it and avoid turning it into a storeroom for our activity.