Comment by alexilliamson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexilliamson | Hacker News Reader

"The Silk Roads: A New History of the World" By Peter Frankopan. This book tackles essentially all of human history, tying together the world's major cultural shifts with the socioeconomic forces that brought them to pass. For readers who have implicitly come to believe that the center of the world has always been Western Europe (I had), this book will greatly shift your perspective (Eastward). I've never learned so much from a book, and damn is it entertainingly written.

"Getting Things Done" by David Allen. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with bits and pieces of GTD methodology, but I encourage you to check out the full text. There are a lot of great ideas in there there that I didn't find reading online about GTD. I have been a serious GTD user for more than a year now, and I feel amazingly more in control of my life. Everything I've done in that time - from planning my wedding, to projects at work, to completely organizing my house - has gone smoother than I can remember projects going ever before.

I would strongly recommend people read both GTD and The life changing magic of tidying up by Marie kondo and, and this is the important bit, draw parallels between them. This is a pedagogical technique that takes knowledge out of the domain of specificity and into general applicability. In this case, it will help point you to the general move David Allen and Marie kondo are trying to point at and allow you to apply it fluidly.

Which one of the both would you recommend starting with?

I'm thinking about getting the GTD book now that you've mentioned it.

Any chance you could give a TLDR?

It's not a really long read, and it's worth reading it cover to cover, even if you don't follow its advice to the letter.

That said, essentially:

Keep a daily list of all the next actions you want to accomplish, separated by context (e.g., at work, at home, at grocery store)

Break down large projects into next actions. Identify the next thing you need to do to move it forward.

Review your projects and next actions weekly (or more often) to make sure you're not missing anything.

There's other stuff too, but mostly GTD recommends that you write everything down and review it often. Your lists are a way to offload the stuff in your head, so that you can focus on what's right in front of you and not have that nagging feeling that there's something you forgot to do or something more important you should be doing.

It definitely changed the way I approach my day at work, and I feel like I'm able to accomplish a lot more without feeling exhausted at the end of the week.

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