Category: “Personal Productivity”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor known worldwide as a researcher on positive psychology, defined the concept of flow as being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

Are you being productive or just active? They’re not the same thing, but we often use—unconsciously—the concept of activity to deceive ourselves (or consciously, to fool our boss). Sometimes we need to feel busy to not have to do other important tasks that make us uncomfortable for any reason. “I keep doing things all day. So cool!”. No doubt you’re working hard; you show dedication, but dedication sometimes masks a meaningless work. Are you inventing things to avoid doing what’s important? Think carefully about it and be honest with yourself.

Productivity. A concept so simple to be defined and so difficult to be analyzed. Personally, I rather the shorter definition: doing more with less. Put that way, maybe it doesn’t look a big thing, but don’t be fooled. This powerful concept is the key to measuring the efficiency and evolution of economies and societies, and determines companies profitability and people quality of life.

In this post I will discuss some productive habits that are not strictly GTD, but that, either underlie its general approach or can be complementary and highly useful in certain circumstances. All of them are related to the perspective or vertical approach of GTD.