It works!

The GTD method makes you more productive.
Meetings with your entrepreneur network help you develop your business.
Meditation, yoga and reiki bring you well-being and relaxation.

All these things work because you do them regularly. You repeat the same movements and methods time and again.

Practice makes perfect!

If you stop doing yoga, you become less supple. If you stop advertising your company, orders fall. It’s self-evident.

What particular thing do you do to ensure that you always achieve your objectives?

Socratic walking

I needed some exercise and was tempted to cancel my Italian class. Instead, I suggested to my teacher that we went out for a walk during the lesson. So off we set for a 5 km walk and chat in Italian. When I got home and told my husband, he asked me if it was a Socratic walk.

I looked in the Internet and discovered that during Antiquity, masters and disciples walked a great deal. Socrates taught and pondered as he walked around the marketplace, and many of Plato’s dialogues began with a fortuitous encounter in the street. Even where teaching spaces like schools are available, people still go out for walks to think about things.

According to Nietzsche, the only trustworthy truths and statements are those that come to us when we’re walking. He believed that walking creates certain thoughts, making us more open to them, and that thoughts we have while walking are more real!

You can guess what I’m about to say. Who can you go for a walk with to test these philosophers’ theories?

Contradictions

A young monk asks his bishop: “Can I smoke while I pray?” The bishop scoffs, “Of course not!”

A while later, the monk comes across another much older monk smoking while praying and says to him: “You mustn’t smoke while you’re praying. The bishop has just told me so.”

The older monk looks up, smiles and replies, “It’s funny, when I asked him if I could pray while I was smoking, he said I could pray whenever I wanted!”

“Can I listen to music while I’m working?” isn’t the same as “Can I work while I’m listening to music?” The result is the same but the viewpoint is different.

What about you? What if you look at the things you are not allowed to do from another angle?

The house with golden windows

A child was admiring the golden windows of a house on the opposite hill. They sparkled and seemed almost alive. He was attracted by the magic of the sight and begged his father to take him to find out the secret of that house.

One beautiful morning, the father took his child by the hand and they crossed the valley. When they reached the magical house, the windows were quite ordinary. The child was disappointed. “I really wanted to come here! It looked so special over here!” His father took him by the shoulders and looked deep into his eyes.

“My boy, this house, like lots of things, looks very attractive to us when we see it from a long way off. If you look closer you will see that you already have amazing things on your own doorstep. -Look!” and he turned his son towards their own house on the other side of the valley.

The child saw that it had golden windows.

What about you? Do you need to try out the extraordinary to realise that you are already experiencing magic times?

I don’t have problems

“I don’t have problems. I only have projects.” That is an interesting way of looking at what befalls us in life, according to the GTD® method by David Allen.

Damage caused by water is a real problem but you can choose either to despair about the state of your ceiling and all the work that will have to be done or you can turn it into a project.

In the problem/panic mode, a thousand things rush through your mind: call the insurance company, find the same bathroom tiles, get a painter for the ceiling, and a plumber but which one? Thoughts tumble over one another but you don’t get any further forward.

As long as your head is full of chaos you are in problem mode.

Try to visualise your new bathroom, all refurbished. Then work out what is the very first thing to do to start off the project. Call the insurance company? Do you have their number? Do you first need to look for the policy?

With the insurance policy in your hand, you call your insurer. There you are! You no longer have a problem which exists in your head, but a project which is progressing on your list of things to do!

What about you? How can your transform the problem of being confined at home into a project to start solving it?