Secondly, there are three popular books which I would advise not to read. They are “Eat that Frog”, “7 habits of highly effective people” and “Getting Things Done—the art of stress-free productivity”. I found that all of them are 5% signal and 95% noise and their most important messages could have been summarized on 5 to 10 pages respectively.
I think Getting Things Done is awesome. I read it 3 times and it was super useful for me. I’ve created myself an (in my opinion particularly nice) GTD system in notion and I love it.
You don’t need to use GTD for the 1-2 main projects you’re working on in a particular week (though of course you still want to organize tasks and notes for those somehow), but it’s super useful for managing everything else so you have more time/energy focusing on your core projects.
Though it may take a while to set up a good system and learn to use it well. You want to tune it to fit your needs, e.g. the example “context” categories by which to structure next action lists may not fit your purposes that well.
The 5% signal seems especially surprising to me w.r.t. GTD. There’s just so much good content in the book. Of course it could be summarized further but examples are important for understanding the content. Even the basic system setup which it guides you through is quite a lot of content to implement for one productivity book, but there’s a lot more in the book which you can start to pay more attention to once you’ve established a decent system with capture, inbox processing, and weekly review habits.
The main value is the GTD organizing system, but there’s also great advice that can be applied independent of the system, e.g. the 5-step natural planning model (iirc):
Answer “Why do you want to do the project / achieve the goal?”
Answer “What is the goal of the project?”. Visualize success if possible.
Brainstorm
Organize
Decide
I guess maybe it’s not that obvious that planning in roughly such a way is good if you haven’t tried, but it’s good.
I think Getting Things Done is awesome. I read it 3 times and it was super useful for me. I’ve created myself an (in my opinion particularly nice) GTD system in notion and I love it.
You don’t need to use GTD for the 1-2 main projects you’re working on in a particular week (though of course you still want to organize tasks and notes for those somehow), but it’s super useful for managing everything else so you have more time/energy focusing on your core projects.
Though it may take a while to set up a good system and learn to use it well. You want to tune it to fit your needs, e.g. the example “context” categories by which to structure next action lists may not fit your purposes that well.
The 5% signal seems especially surprising to me w.r.t. GTD. There’s just so much good content in the book. Of course it could be summarized further but examples are important for understanding the content. Even the basic system setup which it guides you through is quite a lot of content to implement for one productivity book, but there’s a lot more in the book which you can start to pay more attention to once you’ve established a decent system with capture, inbox processing, and weekly review habits.
The main value is the GTD organizing system, but there’s also great advice that can be applied independent of the system, e.g. the 5-step natural planning model (iirc):
Answer “Why do you want to do the project / achieve the goal?”
Answer “What is the goal of the project?”. Visualize success if possible.
Brainstorm
Organize
Decide
I guess maybe it’s not that obvious that planning in roughly such a way is good if you haven’t tried, but it’s good.