Comments on: Time Management Guru-itis: Mark Hurst vs. David Allen and Tim Ferriss

By: Joseph

Joseph — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:34:16 +0000

Thanks Tim. Great content. I love this stuff. :)
I’ve been immersed in personal productivity and human potential work for close to 10 years now. I also lead a peer-to-peer accountability and support community called Peer Success Circles. Peer Accountability and mastermind support is I believe to be the missing ingredient in most productivity and time management systems. It’s essentially a way to meet promises and come from choice, especially done with the right context.

I agree that it’s really about balance when choosing the propers systems. David’s approach is the bottom up approach to efficiency and he does touch a little on the bigger 40K and 50K runway approaches but not enough. A person can get stuck if they start out their day doing this.
I blend all different approaches for myself and when I coach clients.

For example Tony Robbins has a very strong state-inducing Top Down approach to personal productivity in his TOYL program. It’s highly impactful and requires much invested time early on to set up and it’s worth it. It takes Steven Covey’s formula and adds a strong engaging visceral element to it.

Yes, I highly believe strongly in setting deadlines and applying Parkinson’s law and Perritto’s 80/20 rule. I know you also stress these in

There is something I call the Inside Out approach which I encourage some of my clients to take on. It involves very simply doing practices that “take the pressure off”…such as free flow list building, EFT, and various other written, spoken and physical exercises to get really clear so that they can effectively choose the appropriate next step whether it be a top down approach or bottom up approach. Cutting away detrimental foods and cleansing the body are other examples.
Message me at successcircles.com or jvny.com if you want to hear more.
I’ve streamlined my life to an amazing degree where I wake up pretty inspired daily.
Cheers,
~Joseph

By: John Marlow

John Marlow — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 10:20:17 +0000

Strategic v tactical; great way to put it. I’m afraid the Bruce Lee video has gone bye-bye, though; deletion by misadventure, no doubt.

By: Norhafidz

Norhafidz — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:40:28 +0000

I agree with the emailing stuff, I send more email and I received more, I think that just the theory right.

By: Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:56:27 +0000

Hi Christoph,

Good point. I should clarify what I mean by “high level”. It refers to strategic vs. tactical, not the intellectual sophistication. For me, the “highest” levels also reflect levels of abstraction (though not impractical; quite the opposite) and broader implications. Thus, values are higher than priorities (“Is this important?”), which are higher than projects, which are higher than tasks. 7 Habits is the highest, 4HWW is a lot of priorities (what to do) and some projects (how to do), and GTD — at least the application I usually see — is mostly project/task based.

Hope that helps,

Tim

By: Christoph Dollis

Christoph Dollis — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:03:51 +0000

4HWW is awesome, GTD is a wonderfully flexible system to manage info, and ZenToDone combines both, simplifies GTD, and contains one missing ingredient from either: Setting up of routines.

Success rituals.

I don’t see how GTD isn’t a high level system. It’s based on projects.

If the project is, “Get the fence painted,” okay, it’s not super high level.

If the project is, “Get PhD so can begin to explore my ideas on nuclear physics, get funding, and advance mankind’s ability to finally colonize the solar system,” then it’s high level.

It all depends on what the project is. Of course, we all have projects at different levels and of different topics and that’s cool.

4HWW rocks because it presents so many excellent ideas on pulling back from culturally popular but generally unrewarding time-wasters… as well as helping one to design a better vision for the future. Which, whatever system(s) one follows, is important.