Organize IT

On Monday I talked about how we can cut back on the amount of food that we waste. The simplest way to do that is to just not have as much on your plate. We often prepare more food than we can actually eat, and it got me thinking about other areas of life where the same situation applies. When I clean my teeth, do I really need to put that much toothpaste on my brush? A pea sized amount has turned out to be quite sufficient. When I wash my hands do I really need to use that much hand wash? I’ve found because it foams up so well it goes a long way.

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This month it emerged that in the UK, a staggering eight billion pounds worth of food goes to waste, which equates to 6.7 million tonnes or a third of our total purchases. Those are scary stats that are echoed in many other countries around the world. This effects us two ways. Firstly, with food prices rising dramatically at the moment, it’s a very good idea to start looking at whether we can be more efficient with what we eat, thus wasting less and saving money. Secondly, all that wasted food typically ends up on landfills thus producing the greenhouse gas methane, on top of all the damage the excess packaging and transporting causes. It’s with all this in mind that I’ve compiled an introductory list of habits you can develop in your life that will help you to stop wasting food so as to save money and be environmentally friendly.

Organize IT recap for 25th April 2008.

• Organize IT can now be found on Alltop under the lifehacks category. Thanks for including me guys! If you have problems with too many RSS feeds this site is a good way of distilling them down. One quick glance through the lifehacks page (or indeed under any category that interests you) and you can pick out top posts you like the sound of.
• Tim Ferris, famous for the Four Hour Work Week, has some great advice about public speaking from Al Gore’s chief speech writer. If you have any doubt about your presentation consider what your point is and whether your speech explains why it matters.

When I did a critique of GTD a few weeks back and asked my readers to contribute their thoughts, many of you complained about the complexity of the system itself and/or the difficulties in implementing it into their workflow. There are a number of examples out there of how GTD has been simplified (Zen To Done being a prime one). However do such approaches really simplify the system or do they actually just strip chunks out of it? Are there parts of the GTD workflow that can be pruned or is it already lean and trim? Please share your thoughts! I look forward to incorporating them into a future post where I will take a deep look into simplifying GTD and whether it really can be done without losing the fundamental building blocks that make it so effective. Over to you!

Welcome to the third of my ongoing series of posts looking at habits you can implement that will bring about definitive improvements in your life. For the third habit I will look at the next action. It is one of the simplest but most effective pieces of advice that came out of Getting Things Done. It’s such a simple but useful concept in fact, that it transcends the narrow office based productivity framework of David Allen’s system and is an invaluable mindset in day-to-day life.