Productivity Tips: 10 Clever Ideas For Getting Things Done is an updated and expanded collection of the first ten posts in my popular productivity tips series and is now available to all. For full information please view its dedicated page.

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt know how keen I am about the whole idea of breaking your work down into tiny chunks of activity (or next actions if you’re a GTD fan). I do it so often in fact that any little project I have I will look at how it can be broken down. When I decorated my bedroom recently, I did one wall per day. That might sound obtuse and on the surface a little counter-productive, but what’s the alternative? Several hours one weekend doing a big, laborious chore.

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As I mentioned on Monday, I’m currently reading a book called Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth? which discusses what living well actually means (basically, not the consumerist pursuit of material things that we’re used to) and how we do not have to damage the planet in order to achieve it. It’s well worth a read, but it brings up the question of what a good life really is. All the contributing authors in the book have their own take, what’s yours?

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Last week I took a book out of my local library on a whim that was called Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth? and, so far at least, I’ve found it to contain some very intriguing ideas. In a nutshell, the book is a collection of writings from a diverse mix of people about climate change. What really got my attention though was about how this was tied into the whole idea of living a good life, dismissing common notions on what that actually means and, in particular, providing an often vicious indictment of how the pursuit of our current ad-driven consumer/hedonistic notion of what a good life is, is damaging not only to the planet but ourselves.

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I’ve always wondered how best to describe GTD to people. I’ve found that once you get through the hyping up and the fancy wording that David Allen increasingly uses when discussing his methodology, it’s a fairly straightforward system (though of course, understanding it and being able to use it on a regular basis are two entirely different things). However, that doesn’t really help me when somebody comes along and asks what the hell it’s all about.

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David Allen claims he falls off the wagon all the time. He loses control and goes loopy (maybe) on a regular basis. His co-workers at his company also fall off the wagon and have regular in-house training just to get back on board. Twitter is full of people falling off the wagon. I used to fall off the wagon regularly too. Used to…

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