GTD has helped foster a culture of indiscriminately adding to your workload due to its lack of prioritizing. As a result people spend many a time doing stuff they don’t really need to do. All the tools and systems in the world won’t make life any easier if you have a huge to-do list. How do you fit in leisure time? How can you relax and recharge your batteries? How can you focus on your work and truly enjoy what you’re doing? It’s time to get out of this silly trend. It’s time we started doing less, not more. It’s time we started doing the right things, not any thing.

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In this age of instant access information, always available entertainment and bottom line obsessed business our time, energy and focus is always at a premium. It seems to be a common and accepted part of life that we need to multitask to keep on top of it all. The only problem is we aren’t actually very good at it…

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The traditional approach of prioritizing, where you assign a task a high, medium or low priority (or maybe even something more meaningless than that) is outdated and largely ineffectual in today’s workplace. In fact David Allen of Getting Things Done fame actively downplays the importance of prioritizing, claiming that each task is equally important otherwise you wouldn’t be doing them in the first place. However, this implies a “need to do-don’t need to do” attitude which, as I’ve discussed before, can be a surefire way to end up burnt out as you continuously feel compelled to do something. With the focus increasingly being on working smarter a different way of prioritizing is required that takes into account time mangement.

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Ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff swirling around in your mind? Sometimes feel lost and lacking in focus? The reason will likely be that you have amassed many unresolved thoughts in your head, and our brains simply aren’t very good at dealing with these never ending loops in our minds. Whenever I feel unclear and unfocused I like to sit down with my notepad and just get all those thoughts down on paper. It really helps to lift the mental fog! Below I’ve compiled several suggestions that I use in my life, that will help you to clear your head. Share your own tips in the comments!

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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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