💥BLAST! - a newsletter
Getting things done, now
Productivity for this era BLAST header

Hello lovely email friends. I’ve got a couple of quite interesting projects going on at the moment; I’m looking forward to telling you about them soon. But for now, doing things has got me thinking about getting things done.

  • 👺 Resisting the rise of facial recognition: Growing use of surveillance technology has prompted calls for bans and stricter regulation.

  • 🚐 Van life: Durham couple’s six years on the road (and counting): The idea of packing up your possessions to live life on the open road has its appeal, but the practicalities put people off. Six years ago, after one nearly died and both were diagnosed with depression, this couple swapped their careers and a permanent home for motoring through the mountains, valleys and coastlines of Europe. Hint hint.

  • 🎨 Blend is multiplayer doodling. If someone else is visiting, you’ll be paired up to draw together.

  • 🌳 A Japanese Forestry Technique Prunes Upper Branches to Create a Tree Platform for More Sustainable Harvests: Originating in Kyoto, daisugi is a 14th-century forestry technique that offers an efficient and sustainable approach. The method involves pruning the branches of Kitayama cedar so that the remaining shoots grow straight upward from a platform. Rather than harvesting the entire tree for lumber, loggers can fell just the upper portions, leaving the base and root structure intact.

  • 🚓 Italian Police Use Lamborghini to Transport Kidney 300 Miles in Two Hours: If the Italian State Police didn’t have a Lamborghini Huracan, I’d be both surprised and disappointed. That they put it to good use is delightfully proposterous.

  • 🎭 The Muppets: Sex and Violence: I had forgotten that The Muppet Show was shot at Elstree. I did not know there was a time when it’s attempted title was The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence; or that Muppet sketches had one of two endings, as Jim Henson described: “Either one creature ate the other, or both of them blew up!”

  • 🔥 Why Burnout Should be a Topic at Your Next Board Meeting, and What to Do About It: Working remotely, we have reduced meeting length by about 15% and increased our workweek by an extra ten hours. This productivity boost might seem universally positive, but there’s a catch: employee burnout. Sheltering-in-place, managing schooling, healthcare for elderly family members are just a few things that have become more difficult. Working longer hours while managing these stressors may compound the exhaustion.

  • 🎄 The Christmas Review is an Instagram account offering reviews of festive foodstuffs. You need this.

Getting things done, now

Nearly twenty years ago, productivity consultant David Allen published a new time-management method in his bestselling book Getting Things Done. The systematic method was wildly popular, and Allen was hailed an oracle of organisation. On top of his book sales, Allen was invited into every kind of organisation to preach its core themes of discipline and focus.

The geekier you are, I’ll wager the more likely it is you have found Allen’s method appealing. But some of GTD’s greatest advocates have moved away from using it. For some, this style of time management becomes more about perfecting their implementation of the system rather than actually achieving anything.

There are several factors impacting many people’s own sense of productivity that the GTD approach doesn’t completely address. Chief among which: most of us do not enjoy the autonomy to overhaul the structure of our work obligations. Our own productivity is bound to that of a broader group. Further, the environment in which we’re currently trying to be productive is so very different from the GTD era.

While not compiled into a tidy tome, there are plenty of good contemporary productivity habits that are applicable now while avoiding the rabbit-hole of constantly refining some kind of system. Here are my favourites:

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