Gtdfrk is a frequent commenter on this blog, a fellow Dutchie (I think) and a blogger that produces very useful content and resources. He’s celebrating that he has reached a 1000 subscribers on his blog (I’m one of them) and wants to go to the next level. So he started an experiment and hands out cash to other bloggers to review him.

I have to say, the cash is going to be a nice bonus, but the resources gtdfrk is presenting on his blog Getting Things Done and with his accompanying resource list The Ultimate GTD Index are excellent. His approach is more strict GTD than you’ll find here, but I suspect he’s broadening his perspective.

The site design of Getting Things Done has changed over the last couple of months. Gtdfrk has integrated his ultimate GTD index and his blog into one portal. He also added a tumblelog and a “Post Index” to the site as well.

The post index has all the posts conveniently categorized by topic. This way it’s easy to scroll through the posts and decide upon the next read. There are articles for beginners in GTD, lessons learned and for enhancing your system.

The ultimate GTD index is a great starting point for GTD users. It has the 5 most recent posts of 57 blogs about GTD, a softwarelist for both offline and online solutions and more. The major downfall of the index is that it doesn’t list my blog

There’s room for improvement on the tumble log and it can be a lot more valuable than it is right now. I see tumble logs as a reference to good reads elsewhere, but there are about 50% links back to the blog.

The about page is a bit short, so we’re not really getting a grip on who gtdfrk really is and why he’s blogging. My experiences with gtdfrk so far tell me that he speaks dutch (I know that through MyBlogLog), he’s an early riser (comments on this site) and he’s got a family (comments again).

Pay Getting Things Done a visit and if you like what you see, subscribe to his feed.

Saturday is sketchcast day. Short 5 minute videos in which I explain a concept related to the topics on my blog.

This sketchcast is about the Eisenhower matrix, also known as the time management or time leadership matrix. It’s a short 5 minute 30 second video explaining the concept and ways to use it to your advantage.

Eisenhower is not often credited for this concept, yet he is the originator of the quadrants as the people from Google Answers once checked for a curious person (it wasn’t me).

In the sketchcast I mention the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (aff) by Stephen Covey. I also wrote a series about Covey’s habits.

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did my habit change go? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my GTD system?

This is the first weekly review I do on this blog. I’ll do this every week, a rhythm inspired by David Allen’s Getting things done method.

Progress on habit change
Starting September I will be giving a report on the progress here, for August you can find the latest report here: Looking back on the third week of the Early Bird Challenge.

Blog performance
I did not manage to get an article posted everyday. Last week I had a very busy week at work, which required me to work evenings and early mornings as well. I’m still working up to the level to get posts done everyday.

Liz Strauss of Successful Blog awarded me with a SOB-badge yesterday. SOB is an acronym for Successful and Outstanding Bloggers and I’m proud of it! The badge is sitting in my sidebar as of now. What makes a SOB is defined by Liz: Click to continue »

The Pareto principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule or the Law of the vital few, states that there’s a vital minority of causes that are responsible for the majority of results. Pareto initially observed this with the distribution of wealth in Italy, but in the 1960’s Juran introduced the principle in the field of quality control in Japan, after which it became known in the business world. Richard Koch later wrote three books about the concept, applying the principle to entrepreneurship and other areas of life.

There are two distinct problems with the 80/20 rule, when people first start applying it to their life.

Problem #1: focus on effort
The rule initially inspires people to focus on efforts! Which is not really surprising, since a lot of people immediately turn the expression around and think “So 80% of my effort only gives me 20% of the results? Man, I gotta stop doing that part!”.

The focus on effort comes from the notion that our time is scarce and we want to spend that time the best way we can. The rule points out that we are “wasting” that time and that’s something people want to (re)act upon. If we only resort to stopping the effort that is not giving a lot of result, we will end up with less results.

Problem #2: you can’t change the rule
A lot of people have a hidden assumption that strengthens problem #1. The assumption: By eliminating the 80% low-result effort, we have eliminated all low-result effort and end up with only high-result effort. This is not true. Click to continue »

This post is a productivity tip for bloggers. I got inspired to writing it by reading Problogger Darren Rowse’s announcement of his 31 days to building a better blog - 2007 series. I know that a lot of my subscribers are fellow bloggers and a lot of you are interested in productivity as well. This tip is about Comment Marketing. Last week I read Yaro Starak’s ebook “Blog Profits Blueprint”. The ebook is about three elements of a blog:

• Content
  About what the pillars are for a blog, what attracts readers and converts them in subscribers.
• Marketing
  About how to tap into streams of traffic (for small blogs) and into rivers of traffic (later in the blog’s life).
• Monetization
  Well the book is about profit and the money needs to come from somewhere.

The practice of Comment Marketing
One of the items of marketing is Comment Marketing. Click to continue »