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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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.

The hardest part about getting things done isn’t necessarily trying to shift through countless productivity books or implementing a fancy, hi-tech setup to manage your super-crazy life. It’s not even trying to regularly do a weekly review or capturing all the loose ends in your head. It’s often just finding the motivation…

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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.

When it comes to being productive – much like anything in life – there is no one definitive way of doing things. Approaches covered in books like Getting Things Done and The Four Hour Work Week provide a solid framework and best practise for effective and efficient productivity but they don’t cover everything. One of the biggest tips you’ve probably been taught from an early age is to plan. Plan, prepare, do your research. Only fools rush in, after all.

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If you are reading this site, you will almost certainly have a to-do list of some form. It might be jotted down on a rough sheet of paper or it may be an elaborate list of next actions stored on your computer. These lists are important because they allow you to see and track what needs doing. They stop you from forgetting stuff and allow you to get those nagging thoughts out of your head. But the benefits go on. When you have completed a task on your to-do list what do you do?

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The idea of a hard landscape is something I discovered from GTD. It is often used in relation to calendars and other time planning tools. The tasks you put them must be unchangeable, or at the very least not susceptible to your whims and moods. If you put down that you need to finish a report on Monday, you better mean it. If it comes to Monday and you decide to push it back a few days, then your calendar becomes unreliable. Your hard landscape starts to turn into a soggy, marshy one.

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