Organize IT

I’ve been a bit busy these past few weeks getting the blog updated for 2010, so I thought I’d do one big post to share with you all what’s been happening. Firstly, you may have noticed it now has a new design. Gone is the sunflower theme which had absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the blog, and in its place is something a little more fitting (well I think so anyway). I wanted to avoid spending countless hours doing my own re-design so I bought a custom theme, and then ended up spending countless hours tweaking that instead (don’t ask). Anyways, I like it and I hope you do too. Share your feedback!

A book written by a developmental molecular biologist that offers several principles for surviving and thriving at work, home and school? In Brain Rules, John Medina, brings together the volumes of research on how the brain works and uses it as a basis for presenting twelves principles on how to make the most of your grey matter. Sounds like an odd but intriguing mix right? I’ve wanted to read Brain Rules for a long while and after being repeatedly disappointed by the inability of UK bookstores to stock it, I finally bought it online. But was it worth it?

Last week I read a very intriguing post on Zen Habits covering seven productivity tips for people that hate GTD. It was a great read (it’s nice to see these sorts of productivity posts still pop up there) though it garnered a lot of interest for several remarks that were included by the author, Jonathan Mead. It certainly got me thinking about some of the points, so I’ve decided to write my own response piece. I’d be keen to hear your own take on some of the points made.

I was keen to review The Power Of Less because Leo Babauta, the author and owner of Zen Habits, started blogging about the same time as me and it’s very encouraging to see him become one of the top bloggers and now a successful author to boot. The Power Of Less provides a blueprint for what I believe personal productivity actually is (you might call it simplifying, efficiency, GTD, Zen To Done… whatever). Essentially it covers how to streamline your life by identifying the essential and eliminating the unnecessary. This is encapsulated in six key principles, including setting limits, starting small and focusing on one thing at a time.

A trigger list contains a large selection of keywords. Whenever you are doing a weekly review or just want to clear your head, the trigger list is there to do exactly as its name implies and trigger those thoughts and ideas floating around in your mind. GTD fans will understand the significance of this as it strongly encourages you to capture pretty much everything in your head into a trusted system.