Stress-free productivity does exist

Stress is generated due to certain restrictions and demands that act upon us. Restrictions prevent us to do what we desire and demands request strongly our effort and focus into something. In particular, stress occurs when we deal with a restriction or demand of which outcome we perceive to be both important and uncertain.

It seems kind of paradoxical, but it often happens that, in our pursuit of an enhanced quality of life, we are assuming new responsibilities that can be a source of stress if finally we take on more than we can handle. The same happens at work. To grow, promote and improve, we have to—in almost all cases—acquire more responsibilities.

The Weekly Review is a key activity for GTD to work. The aim is to get a clean, clear, current and complete system, so you can firmly rely on it. You have to empty your mind again and ensure everything that happened in the past week is properly collected, processed and organized. More specifically, you must do the following:

Until a couple of years, I never gave due emphasis to personal productivity. It’s true that I’ve always tried to be as productive as possible in my professional life, but I didn’t care about being a disaster in my personal life. I guess it was because I found an economic profit in the first case and no benefit at all in the latter.

In GTD, a project is quite a different concept from what we are used to in the business world. Put simply, a project is anything we want to do that requires more than one action step. It’s therefore a mechanism to remember that, when we finish that first action step, there will still be something more to do.