Though I didn’t spot just how messy this overlap had gotten. When I started my own business, doing something I love, it was obvious that this would happen. Starting to order my tasks into projects, timelines, priority levels, and tagging each task by work intensity, place, and person, just revealed how tangled my work and personal life had become. The ability to clear my head and enjoy what Allen calls a “relaxed sense of control”, was a true paradigm shift for me, though what it also did was reveal a clear lack of a work/life boundary, in my day to day life, including in my down time at weekends. There is a wealth of great content online on how to marry this app with the principles in the book. After all, I’d been managing just about okay so far without it. I largely followed my own intuition to make the most of this programme, sticking mainly to the ideas in David Allen’s book, but sussing it out for myself and adding complexity over time. Again, I was very lucky here, it turns out it’s exactly what I was looking for. I had to find a system to implement the GTD principles, and eventually stumbled upon the app, Todoist. That being said, that’s not specifically what I wanted to discuss here, maybe some other time.

I have found that applying the principles of GTD to my own day to day life, managing inboxes and priorities has revolutionised my productivity, and dare I even say, peace of mind. I was incredibly lucky to happen upon perhaps the most crucial book I’ve ever read Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen. At the start of this year, I made a conscious effort to reorganise my workflow and personal and work based task management.

Gtd and todoist