Britt Gage

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of [lightning] to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.” 

— Chuck Close, artist

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think — because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it — finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they... See more

“With technology advancing so much, and humans needing to learn how to collaborate with technology to get their work done, the skillset we need more and more to collaborate are the power skills,”

You see, task management (what GTD teaches) is a meta-skill – a skill that enhances your ability to learn and apply other skills.

Meta-skills are not specific to any particular subject or field but are broadly applicable across various domains. For example, emotional intelligence, communication, critical thinking, self-regulation, and... See more

Set aside time for experiments . Straightforward calculus suggests that doing what you’re already good at has the best payoff. But you won’t encounter nearly as many opportunities if you never learn anything new. Setting aside time for hobbies you’re bad at, books you know nothing about or skills you’ve never practiced may seem wasteful, but it’s

... See more

Finding a more useful umwelt

Add up all the senses you use and the things you notice: that’s your umwelt.

It’s pretty obvious that your dog has a different one than you do. They see fewer colors and smell far more intelligently. Sea slugs see a much wider range of colors, and bats can sense vibrations.

Among humans, we each have our own umwelt.... See more

The tools that are available to each of us are so powerful, so varied and so complex that even the free ones are ignored or misunderstood. We’re too busy doing work to get much done.

And so we end up with the convenient and sexy tools (like the smartphone you might be reading this on) and fail to do the few hours or days of training we might need to... See more