Productivity is how I get things done. If I’m managing other people, I can specify how we get things done together, but I can’t extend that over their entire lives. They have to work that out for themselves.

Spoken like a man who has spent many years managing others.

New managers try to micromanage methods and details. I certainly did, and it made the first couple years painful for everyone. Experienced managers manage results and only consider details or methods when results are not being met.

There is this new web app currently in beta called Flow. Its project management app based on GTD methodologies with an emphasis on delegation. After some spending some time with it, I’ve come to two conclusions:

1. Its a beatifully designed app.
2. I question its long-term viability because it requires teams or companies to unilaterally adopt a complicated productivity system. Read  the rest of Randy’s article to better understand why this is an issue.

I prefer simple tools, like Basecamp, where people have a lot of freedom to integrate their tasks with their own ways of getting things done.

[via Randy Murray - You Are Not Responsible For Other People’s Productivity.]

We had just finished putting on our full-body suits, our BCDs, weight belts and air tanks. The waves were about 4 feet tall as we waddled out with what felt like a ton of gear on our backs. Given our experience, 4 feet is high but we noticed the waves are coming in groups of 5, [...]

It is my observation that writers of niche blogs have a fairly predictable shelf life.  Most non-news-telling bloggers that see some early successes last a good 2-3 years before they stop posting. Most of the time the value posts are made within the first 12 months and it goes downhill from there. (Side tip: whenever you discover a new blog [...]

I have a confession to make. Actually, I’m pretty sure most lovers of GTD have a similar confession, but first I need to start by expressing some assumptions about most of us who are reading this right now (and feel free to challenge any of these via comments). Most of Us… Most of us have [...]

About two years ago, I first laid my hands on a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen. I tore through it and feebly decided that I wanted to share my discoveries and ideas with the world, so this blog was born. There have definitely been ups and downs. I went from posting like [...]

Few would argue that Merlin Mann is the Godfather of GTD/productivity blogging. About a month ago he posted Four Years and followed it up with Time, Attention, and Creative Work. If you haven’t read these, please do so now… It’s good stuff. What do you think? I look at both of these posts in a [...]

As we process our stuff and determine next actions, as good GTD practitioners we do any action we’ve just defined that will take less than two minutes to complete. After doing the action, how do you handle the piece of stuff and the action that was just processed & done? Some things I’m thinking about [...]

So you’ve read through GTD for the ump-teenth time and it looks like you used it to beat back a pack of wild boar. You’ve got your all of your inputs handled and your edges are so clean you could eat off of them. I hate to pee in anybody’s punch, but that was the [...]

Hello, My name is Andy and I’m the new guy here at The Cranking Widgets Blog. While I hope to share far more valuable information in the months and years to come, I’d like to kick things off by getting some answers to the obligatory “who the heck is this guy?” out of the way. [...]

I would be willing to wager that most people, during their first office supply shopping trip after having read Getting Things Done, pick up some binder clips. This is probably because they happened across the Hipster PDA at some point during their GTD travels and thought, “man, that looks like something I could really get [...]