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.

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 »

Last night when I was working behind my computer I discovered a striking analogy between my working style and the way my computer handles its work. And the more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that my computer is better in productivity than I am.It started when I began a rendering job for a video file. The little gauge in the systray flashed to bright green as the CPU-load shot to 100%. Usually my computer becomes quite unresponsive at these times, so I set off to get something to drink while uttering a disgruntled “so much for multitasking”.

While pouring my drink, I was pondering the multitasking and came to realize that I liked it. Rendering is a hard task and it requires a lot of computational power. By allocating all resources to it I would get results fast, and that part I liked.

I like it better than getting results slower, but being able to continue working on other stuff at the same time. So while my computer was singletasking and I was idling, I favored that above both of us multitasking. And this was inspiration enough for another article (I seem to get my ideas during idle-times).

So let’s compare how I work and how my computer works, and let’s see what we can learn. Click to continue »

Today I stumbled upon a nice 5 minute video at TED. It’s a short introduction of a new user interface that’s being developed for the desktop on your computer. It’s called BumpTop.

In my post on backlogs a while back I confessed that I have a constant struggle with keeping my desktop tidy. BumpTop would not keep it tidy, but it still may very well be a pretty good solution for me. I use the desktop rather like an inbox for all kinds of files that need to be processed. Only the processing part is very agonizing with regular desktops, and BumpTop looks like something I do with my piles of real paper

It’s not available yet, so I put myself on the mailinglist. Here’s the video: