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In my last job I was surrounded by these toxic people. Having just finished university I found my social life in flux and ended up befriending a couple of people from work. Initially I was happy to have them as friends, but then their toxic personalities began to surface. They’d go for days without talking to me then re-appear and act as though they were my best friends whenever they had problems in their life. They’d come to my home to chat, but would merely eat all my food and leave. I finally came to the decision to cut them out of my life, something I’m glad I did. Share your own stories in the comments! Below is my three stage strategy for dealing with these sorts of people. It’s a blunt strategy but for your sanity and happiness I believe it’s one that needs to be taken.

• Make them aware
  Have a word with them, write a letter or make a phonecall. Let them know that you are not happy with their actions (or otherwise) towards you. It could be that they are oblivious to their behavior, and if they are good people they will adjust it accordingly. At the very least you may be able to understand why they are being the way they are and that you tried to be proactive in dealing with the problem. Unfortunately most of the time there is just a clash of expectations, personalities or understanding of what is expected, that leads to relationships becoming toxic and no amount of moaning will fix it. If that’s the case you need to move to stage two.
• Match them
  As I previously mentioned, toxic relationships are most often caused by a contrast in expectations and personalities. If you consider somebody a great friend and they view you just as a casual mate, it’s understandable that you will have problems dealing with the amount of time and attention they give you. As a result you have to accept the situation and match the amount of energy and attitude they put into the relationship. If your problem with somebody is their timekeeping, don’t waste energy worrying about meeting them on time. If they don’t care whether you are left on your own in a restaurant, then you shouldn’t worry about doing the same to them. All relationships should have balance and equal give-and-take between the two parties.
• Cut them out completely
  If matching their attitudes towards the relationship doesn’t work, then you are best off just cutting them out of your life as much as possible. While it’s not practical to go so far as to move house and get a new job just to avoid someone, don’t think that simply cutting down time with them or not giving them as much attention will resolve the situation. A toxic person will remain toxic irregardless. It’s often hard to do but make a clear, bold resolution to cut all connections. Delete their email address, remove their phone number, rip them out of your address book. Remember, your happiness is paramount. Don’t let self-obsessed or negative people ruin it.

Check out my free new ebook, Clutter 101: The Definitive Guide To De-cluttering Your Life

There is a lot of value in making change in life and so learning to do things differently is worthwhile for improving your own life and the life of others around you. Habits make up a good portion of our behavior and so there are many things we do that become habitual and there is a lot of value in learning to change some of those habits and overcome the bad ones. These are my tips and methods to do that.

Tackle one at a time
The best way to begin to overcome your bad habits is to tackle one at a time. Habits are incredibly difficult to break so you need to focus on one at a time and see it through. If you look to change too many at once, you will find yourself making no lasting change on any of them as you get overwhelmed by an inability to focus. To prevent this, it’s useful to make lists of all the habits you want to change, but put that list aside and just focus on ONE. Put all your effort at it! Allow yourself enough time to not only make a dent in breaking a habit but time to prove you’ve eliminated it altogether. It obviously depends on your habit but I recommend about two months to focus on a single habit. Measure yourself against it weekly and see how you are doing even after you seem to have broken it. A habit can easily come back even after it seems you’ve gotten over it, if you do not strengthen the fact and absolutely convince yourself that it is gone.

Often stress is a trigger for a habit to surface and since stress is going to be a lot more difficult to eliminate in order to avoid a habit, that is why I recommend needing a few months. You need a decent time frame to ensure you go through normal living with its ups and downs and stress to test you and your habit. If you can do this for a couple months, especially during some stressful times, and your habit doesn’t resurface, then you will likely be over that habit forever!

Pleasure and pain
I’ve written about using pleasure and pain before in my goal setting articles and it works in a similar way with habits. You need to understand the reasoning that motivates you to break and overcome a habit. Examine all the things about your habit that give you pleasure and all the things that give you pain. Then, look at how changing your habit will change the pleasure and pain. What pleasures will it give once it’s broken and what pain will it cause if you continue to have your habit? You want to heavily outweigh any reasons to hold onto that habit and pay attention to all the things you want to have happen in overcoming it. What pain and pleasure does it cause to others and can you use those thoughts to motivate you as well?

Related to this is to use any leverage you can to overcome your habit. That can be the help of others, daily reminders, rewards and punishment systems, anything you can think of. Keep that leverage accessible and make it available at the times and locations where your habit is most likely to come back or happen. Think of the reasons why the habit is a habit in the first place. What makes it so easy that it has become habitual? How does that hold you back and what is holding you back from breaking it? These are points of leverage as well if you get rid of those things that are holding you back from breaking it! These may be physical things, mental thoughts or attitudes and even other people. Surround yourself with the leverage points that are likely going to help you break the habit instead of continue having it.

Commit change in writing
It’s easy to say that you want to change a habit. However, if you write down a commitment to change it, you are far more likely to actually make it happen. Take that one step further and put a date to it and share it with someone close who can help watch and recognize the habit. Just that initial step of committing to change it is more than most people take and is often enough to begin the process that leads to overcoming the habit. Don’t skip this as it is a crucial starting point to commit yourself and provide some self motivation to tackle your habits. Make your commitment visible to remind yourself and re-read it regularly as you are working to overcome the habit.

Be drastic
Let’s face it, some habits are really difficult to beat. They lean on the edge of addiction and take serious effort and willpower to eliminate. One of the hardest things about breaking a habit is that even if you can hold yourself back from it for a short time, it’s easy to fall back into bad habits after just a single mishap. So, you need to be ruthless and you should never allow yourself any exceptions. Reducing the frequency of a habit doesn’t really do anything dramatic as you still have the habit. The whole point of this article is to overcome and break those habits. After all, a habit you want to overcome and eliminate is just a behavior you don’t want to be doing so you haven’t accomplished anything if you are still doing that behavior. Don’t allow yourself or anyone else to fool you into just reducing a habit! Instead, be drastic and work to eliminate it completely.

Taking that drastic step to eliminate a habit needs some action, as does almost all change. Identify the influences and temptations available to you that trigger that habit and do everything you can to eliminate them. Not having the influences and temptations around you that trigger the habit is very effective in helping to overcome it. Ask for other people’s help to watch for these and bear with you as you limit things that might even effect them. Most people will gladly help you if your habit has some inconvenience towards them (smoking, for example).

Replace the habit
People are beings of habit. That makes breaking them especially difficult. We like to do things over and over and most of the time we avoid change and prefer to be comfortable in doing repetitive tasks in our lives. This is true with habits as well and is exactly why habits form with little effort and are hard to break. However, you can also use that to your advantage in overcoming specific habits since you can spend your time purposefully replacing one habit with another. You can develop a new habit with a behavior anytime a trigger for a bad habit occurs. Repeating this over and over will train your mind to have this new habit set in, one which you specifically planned for and allow to be in place of an old undesirable habit. This is a sure way to prevent the old habit from cropping back up unexpectedly because you will develop the new habit to be in its place anytime the trigger occurs.

Progress counts
Lastly, remembering that habits are very difficult to change (as is any behavior). Pay close attention to any progress you’ve made. While you don’t want to stop at simply reducing the frequency of a habit, do take note of and celebrate each time you overcome the temptation of a habit and avoid that behavior, even if you’ve not eliminated it from your lifestyle yet. Ask others to pay attention to your habits and ask for feedback to find out how they think you are doing with it. Measure and recognize any progress you’ve made knowing that you can continue to build on that and overcome the habit bit by bit. Don’t give up on it and make sure you see it through. If you don’t completely change a habit, keep working at it or else it will just start to reoccur. Don’t move on and start tackling another habit until you are confident that the previous one is completely overcome.

Check out my free new ebook, Clutter 101: The Definitive Guide To De-cluttering Your Life

• Do Less, Not More And Start Enjoying Yourself!
• How To Get Organized For A Big Move
• 9 Tips For Becoming A Better Listener
• Are You Productivity-Inclined Or Simplicity-Inclined?
• 6 Tactics For Staying Sane When You Are Unemployed
• The Vertical Map Is Dead! How To Really Plan For The Future
• An Alternative To Top-Down, Bottom-Up Planning

Check out my free new ebook, Clutter 101: The Definitive Guide To De-cluttering Your Life

I hope this will prove as successful as my collection of productivity blogs. If you want to appear on this list leave a comment with your Twitter profile URL. To make sure this doesn’t succumb to spam and opportunist types please also provide a link to your blog, site, community that you are a member of, etc. Regardless of whether you are into productivity (business or otherwise), self-help, personal, financial and career growth or any other buzzword that falls into the vast category of personal development I hope you join this list! I’ve added my profile to get the ball rolling and will be updating the list as the comments come in.

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Check out my free new ebook, Clutter 101: The Definitive Guide To De-cluttering Your Life

It’s with this in mind that I felt I needed to expand on the topic. The occasional blog post simply wasn’t enough, however. The next logical step was an ebook. Today, I am making the results available and it is called Clutter 101: The Definitive Guide To De-cluttering Your Life. For the first five days it will be exclusively available to RSS subscribers (check out the link at the bottom of the feed). You can subscribe now if you haven’t already. You will be able to check the book out via the site from Friday.

UPDATE: The book is now available.

Given that the whole issue of clutter is such a deep one and it was my first attempt at writing an ebook, I felt it unfair to charge for it when I will inevitably continue to expand and improve on it. So, yes, it’s completely free! It’s been an interesting experiment going from writing comparatively short articles on this blog, to trying to write something with much more depth. I hope you like the results. If you do enjoy the book and find it helpful, I would be grateful of any donation, however.

Check out my free new ebook, Clutter 101: The Definitive Guide To De-cluttering Your Life

I can now deal with so many more unpleasant projects that I would otherwise procrastinate on because when I break it down all those hurdles seem less significant. I recently decorated my hallway. I’d put it off because I didn’t want to waste my entire weekend doing it. However by breaking it down and doing one wall per day suddenly decorating didn’t become a long, laborious job.

A similar example is my maintenance of this blog. Normally it would take me a couple of hours to do if I were to do it in one go. However, by breaking it down into relevant actions (editing comments, updating posts, altering the theme, networking) and spreading them out over the entire week it’s much more appealing.

Another benefit of a next action is that because the workload involved tends to be smaller it’s much easier to focus on it and get it done before boredom and procrastination kicks in. It also allows you to manage your time better. It’s harder to fit a two hour project into your schedule than it is to fit in a fifteen next action. You can juggle and plan your workload more and be smarter with it.

Below are the three key parts that make up an effective next action.

• The verb
  Verbs usually express action, which as you can imagine is especially important for something called a next action. For instance, you can read a magazine, write a report or phone a colleague. Imagine what happens when you take that verb out. Suddenly you have a magazine and no idea of what you are doing with it. Are you reading it or recycling it? Then there is that report. Are you writing, printing or planning it? Think of the possible verbs you can use (call, email, collect, find, meet, research, post….) and you will see all the actions you can do.
• The detail
  The next action needs to be clear and precise so that when you read it you know what is expected. It’s one thing to have a verb expressing what action is involved, but you need to be very clear on how and where that action is being applied. Imagine that you make a note to ring your business partner. That’s great until the time comes to make the call and you look back at that note. What are you ringing him about? Is it a casual call or a serious discussion? Do you have necessary paperwork to hand?
• The end result
  How do you know when you have finished a task? It might seem obvious most of the time because after all, when you’re done, you’re done. It’s that simple, surely? However, take an example of cleaning a bedroom. How do you determine when you have cleaned the room enough to tick it off as complete? Where is the line drawn? When you aren’t clear on this you will often find yourself doing only half a job or doing too much because you are simply not clear in your head when to stop. It’s worth noting that time limits and deadlines can also sometimes serve to define the end result. For instance, when I am writing, my next action can either be to do a certain amount of pages or it can be to write for a number of hours.

Check out my free new ebook, Clutter 101: The Definitive Guide To De-cluttering Your Life

Inboxes
Have just enough inboxes to capture all that stuff coming into your life. For instance, do you really need to have four or five email and voicemail inboxes? The more boxes you have the more spread out and confused it all becomes, and the harder it gets to process and review everything. How long before you start failing to empty them all consistently?

Contexts
When you only have a few dozen next actions it’s not necessary to split them up with a bunch of contexts. However, if you have hundreds of tasks to work on it’s exactly what you need. For instance, you don’t want to be working through a huge list looking for all the actions you can do while sat at the phone. Don’t be forced into breaking down everything into contexts for the sake of it, use them when they would actually be useful. If you only have a few phonecalls to make it’s not really necessary to distinguish them from the rest of your list with a @calls context.

Ubiquitous capture
Again, have as many tools to capture thoughts, notes and other stuff as you need and no more. It’s amazing how well one simple, small notepad can serve you when it comes to capturing ideas. Remember, when you get home or into your office you have to process everything you have taken down. If that’s a chore you won’t do it. A fancy personal organizer may look cool but if it takes forever to sort your way through it, it is failing at its purpose.

Tools
Speaking of fancy tools, clever software, Moleskines and Filofaxes may be great and it can be fun to play around with them but it causes more complications than results. Though I may upset a lot of hi-fi fans here, to really simplify things make what tools you use not an issue. Go right to the basics and get a notepad and pen.

Weekly review
The weekly review is largely regarded as the bedrock of the GTD system and rightly so. With so many different lists and the emphasis on getting stuff out of your head, it’s critical all that data is kept up to date. While any simplified GTD system would be foolish not to have a regular review in it, the actual approach to it can be greatly simplified depending on what else you simplify (for example, streamlining the someday/maybe list means it’s easier to review). Rather than having a complicated review once a week break it down and do each part throughout the week. Review your projects on Monday, your next actions on Tuesday, your inboxes on Wednesday, and so on.

Someday/maybe
The idea of having so many incompletes on a list for weeks or even months on end is unappealing. So much of GTD involves processing stuff yet that’s not really the case with those items you put on a someday/maybe list. It may be part of a weekly review but because the items on it tend to be non-urgent it’s usually the first thing to get neglected. Break the list down like you would contexts and next actions, so that you have seperate lists for music you would like to buy, films you would like to watch, etc. Then when you review it be brutal and honest about whether you really want to act on it or not.

Tickler file
David Allen suggests the 43 folders approach to a tickler file which can be really extreme for many of us. Depending on how much input you get trim back the amount of folders. You don’t necessarily have to have separate compartments for every single day of the year. There are many alternative systems you can use to get regular reminders of dates too, such as a calendar or diary. The tickler file is just a way to remind you of future events, don’t treat it as anything bigger than that.

Check out my free new ebook, Clutter 101: The Definitive Guide To De-cluttering Your Life

Rolf

Granted, GTD has had a big influence on this area of personal development but much of the negatives that have developed from it have been more down to the wrong perceptions and attitudes. For instance, while GTD is all about getting things done it was never about getting everything done all the time. Somewhere along the way that sort of thinking became the norm when judging productivity. Lifehack.org seems to be on a roll right now when it comes to looking at productivity differently.

What my post about things wrong with GTD showed is that it really is a very good system. The intention of the post was to provide an alternative viewpoint; a much needed critique that GTD seems to be lacking. Try googling for criticisms of GTD and you will see an acute lack of relevant results. Perhaps I should have taken that as a sign I would find it harder to discover fault with it than I envisaged. GTD stands up well to criticism.

But where does this put GTD on the hype cycle? Despite the work landscape and our current perception of productivity continuing to evolve, GTD is still strong and a follow-up book is in the works which will be intriguing to say the least. David Allen was even on TV recently to promote his work. That doesn’t sound like a system losing it’s hype to me.

Check out my free new ebook, Clutter 101: The Definitive Guide To De-cluttering Your Life

• GTD is David Allen’s system
  There are so many personal interpretations of GTD. Why? It’s not that it’s particularly flexible. Look at the workflow diagram, that’s GTD right there. The rest of the book doesn’t so much describe how you can implement that workflow, it’s more how David Allen implements that workflow.
• Having a mind like water
  The mind like water analogy sounds nice, but trying to achieve it causes so many people to over-complicate their systems and over-analyze their performance. It’s an idealized concept and though it’s something to aim for, too many of us focus on it as though it were the holy grail of GTD.
• It’s not the all-encompassing system we like to think
  In the book there is regular reference to executives and office workers; people who travel, have lots of meetings and receive hundreds of emails everyday. That should tell you who it’s really aimed at. For the rest of us, we have to tweak the system to suit our specific job roles or pick appropriate parts from the workflow as required. When it boils down to it, a lot of people who try implementing full GTD don’t really need to.
• The weekly review
  You have to book aside a period of time every week to recap and review your system… isn’t part of the reason we read books like GTD and Seven Habits to avoid this sort of thing? Isn’t it easier and more “GTD” to review individual aspects (as next actions) only when necessary?
• GTD is showing its age
  GTD was published in 2002. Back then the internet was just big, now it’s ubiquitous in our lives. GTD doesn’t address workers who have unlimited wi-fi availability, online tools and access to social media networks. What’s more, there is an increasing focus on creativity and thinking outside the box, as businesses struggle to stand out and innovate.
• What about the high level focus?
  GTD in its current form is very much about the low level. Minimal pages are written about the higher level area of mission statements and long term goals. It’s simply not explained in enough depth and feels so cut off from the rest of the GTD workflow. You may fill out a detailed vertical map, but it won’t have much correlation with your day-to-day system.
• What about the quality of the work?
  Patty pretty much summed it up in the comment that was posted when I asked what the readers disliked; you can be the most organized person in the world yet still produce rubbish work. However in terms of a GTD system you are brilliant.
• You can’t totally clear your mind
  GTD encourages you to get all those projects, next actions and open loops out of your mind and into a trusted system. That way it frees up your head from unnecessary remembering, tracking and stress. That’s the theory anyway. You can’t get everything out of your head. The best way to get it off your mind is to complete or resolve it, not just write it down!
• No old fashioned prioritizing
  Some people who adopt GTD end up with the attitude that they should always be doing something. This is because there is no scope for old fashioned prioritizing using scales like high, medium and low. As a result it’s difficult to balance the amount of work you do over time. The truth is stuff can be put off, there are low priority projects that can be left for later.

Check out my free new ebook, Clutter 101: The Definitive Guide To De-cluttering Your Life