In my weekly recap last Friday I pointed out a Lifehack.org article arguing that the current climate for hyper-productivity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Then yesterday I came across a similar post, claiming that the pursuit of productivity has ended up out of control. It seems to me that there is now an increasing shift toward simplifying our lives. Who needs to be productive when the amount of stuff you have to deal with is cut in half?

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A year ago on Organize IT you were reading:

Clutter 101: Why Do We Keep Clutter?
“Make time now and save loads later! You won’t have to dig around in the back of boxes, struggle with space whenever you buy a new item, stress about losing a bill in the masses of paperwork stuffed in drawers.”

Human Body Is Like A Battery: Recharge!
“If you ever feel tired, or even depressed and just generally don’t feel like doing anything, don’t beat yourself up over it, it’s just your body telling you to sit down, chill out and refuel.”

The 5 Benefits Of Saunas And Steam Rooms
“They cleanse the skin. The heat opens the pores allowing all the dirt and grease to come out. Sweating also helps flush out any toxins and the increased blood flow promotes the healing of any skin cuts, sun burn etc.”

Organize IT recap for 29th February 2008

• It’s interview central at the moment. Firstly Zen Habits has an exclusive interview with Stephen Covey of 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People fame. Next Web Worker Daily has an equally impressive three part discussion with David Allen, who you will no doubt know as the man behind Getting Things Done. Both links will make for fascinating reading.
• It’s all the rage in the business world nowadays to do more with less. That’s all well and good until you find yourself having to serve five impatient customers at once or trying to juggle between an handful of high priority projects at the same time. I’m seeing ripples of discontent towards this attitude at the moment and a lot is being written dismissing it. Lifehack.org has one such article worth checking out. What are your thoughts on current business trends?
• 7P Productions has a very good primer on Getting Things Done. In a recent post asking what readers disliked about GTD, many of you commented on its complexity and how difficult it was to implement it, so posts like this that distill GTD down are always very useful.

I’ve been reading, practicing and blogging about productivity, GTD and various related topics for around two years now. I wish I could remember more clearly what set me on this road, there was certainly no major epiphany or one big moment. I probably came across an interesting article on lifehacking and GTD through Digg or some similar site. It sounded intriguing and useful so I continued to read into it more. I do remember buying Getting Things Done at the airport as reading material for the flight and holiday ahead though though :)

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As promised in a recent recap, here is another update to my list of GTD and productivity sites/blogs. The list now has well over 100 links to check out and I’ve changed any old URLs as well as updating the list of dead sites. This is one of the largest collections of links for productivity sites out there right now and it can be a little unwieldy so if I’ve let any errors slip through (wrong links, mispellings, etc) please let me know. I’d also very much appreciate any support you can give in getting the list out there to people. Also, feel free to copy/paste the collection into your blogs, all I ask is that you link back to Organize IT.

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