GTD :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

Scott Allen has scored an interview with Tim Ferriss, author of the best-selling The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.

You can listen to the recorded interview online or download it. And/or you can read the five page transcript which Scott has helpfully provided.

Even if you’ve read the book, I’m sure you’ll pick up a new angle or two. I did.

And if you haven’t yet read the book, this interview provides the background of how the book came to be written. It also provides a lot of insightful comment and and an outline of the strategies which are set out in greater detail in the book.

I liked particularly what Ferriss had to say about designing what you will do with the time you free up and recognizing that the actual money cost might not be as high as you might have expected:

When you actually create time, the question of what to do becomes much more interesting and much more important than what you have and it’s surprisingly less expensive than people realize. But most people never calculated it.

As he says, sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, nice as that is, “gets boring very quickly”.

The book is not about not working. It’s about designing the life each of us wants and then setting in train a systematic way to achieve that.

We may in fact finish up working harder. What I get from it is that the idea is to be able to enjoy what we do and be where we want to be, when we want to – and some strategies to achieve that.

My friend and colleague Bill Vick is very keen on David Allen’s contemporary classic on business/life hacks, Getting Things Done, or to use the full title, “Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity”, also known by the acronym GTD.

Some time ago I purchased the book and made a start on applying the system, but I have to admit it is still on my list of things to do! GTD aficionados will see the irony (or should that be shame?) of that statement.

Be that as it may, Bill Vick has kindly sent me today a link to a very helpful and – given my procrastination on the subject – challenging post on how to apply the GTD principles and system to blogging.

In GTD for Blogging: the Art of Stress-Free Blogging, Leo Babauta shows, step by step, how to apply the GTD approach and system to making blogging a more pleasurable and efficient process.

The steps are straightforward enough and for an already organized person will perhaps be a breeze to implement. Not being myself the most organized person in the world, I can see that some of the required action could represent a serious challenge for me to do consistently and thoroughly. At the same time, I can also see how getting some of the more routine tasks done more systematically could free my mind up for the more creative aspects of blogging.

The post has plenty of practical advice, such as:

One of the problems with the way people implement GTD is that they spend too much time fiddling with the system and their tools. You’re a busy person — you don’t have time to do all that. Pick a tool, and stick with it. Now spend your time actually writing your posts, and responding to comments, and making your blog better.

Even if it did not make the blog measurably better, making the blogger’s tasks, and life, more stress-free, sounds to me like a good goal or two to have.

One thing the post does not seem to address explicitly, as is picked up in one of the comments, is the process of reading feeds from other blogs. I suspect that is an oversight and could be folded into the process outlined in the post. But it is an important point. Anyone who wants to be a successful blogger needs to commit serious time to reading other blogs and commenting on them: using feeds to do that is going to be much more effective in the “getting things done” scheme of things than going to the blogs one by one.

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