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In this episode, Tony’s in the hot seat! Helping you to get to know your regular host a little better is guest host Daryl Cook, Tony’s GTD buddy.

International Man of Mystery – where he’s from and why he’s now here in Melbourne, Aus. It involves a girl.

Kissing frogs – a bit about Tony’s work background in Sales: from IT to soft skills and training and dabbling in Psychotherapy. Lessons from psychotherapy applicable to training and group work.

Manifesto – the Gerry Maguire of sales? Tony is a fanboy of the Cluetrain and sees sales as a conversation. He talks about not having a fear of sales, and being able to having fun.

Dyslexia – candidly talks about being borderline dyslexic and how that has affected his productivity and personal development.

Teaching kids to read – one method is phonics. We mention a book Daryl leant Tony. Here’s the link to that: Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons.

Different learning methods – structure and draconian learning. School as a lock-up – social contract.

Blogging – blogging has helped with expressing his own voice. Tony has written the equivalent of four books worth of content since 2001. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

Motivation – how does anyone stay motivated? Mission Control and creating compelling occasions.

Productivity show – common threads or themes noticed during this time. Less structure and more in the moment. Procrastination. Behind this is often the perfectionist.

GTD – Getting Things Done. Compelling reason to clear the mind. Free space. Challenge is doing some of the things you’ve captured!!

Tony’s hybrid system – GTD and Mission Control. Mission Control goes a step further than GTD in terms of motivations behind tasks. More calendar-based. Brief comparison of the two methods. Show 38 with John Duckworth has ideas for weekly review. We agree that buddying works well.

Practising in front of the mirror – Tony recounts his experience of practising a script in front of a mirror and confronting his internal critic.

Dark matter – Tony’s theory of productivity. Don’t realise how much ‘things’ consume our time. All little fillers in our lives are the dark matter, that occupies most of our waking hours. There’s a little interlude at the start of this conversation about Spurs and the 1987 Cup Final. See this wikipedia article for more information.

Recommended reading – The 4-Hour Workweek. Question everything you do first, then apply GTD to the 1/5 of what’s left. Different people and different styles.

Accountability – talking with others and holding yourself to account. The coaching/buddy system works quite well. Different ways of managing the relationship and task-orientation.

Footballers favourites:

• Collection – Filofax (thin)
• Phone – Blackberry. Doesn’t use to send email. Is not addicted.
• Email – Outlook.
• RSS Reader – Sharp Reader (Windows). Starting to use Google Reader.
• Tip for the day – 1. Set compelling occasions and stick to them!; 2. No media for a day once a week; 3. Don’t put it down, put it away.
• More of - Cycling.
• Less of – Procrastinate and Sugar.
• Fave meal – Salmon, peas and new potatoes and Sushi.
• Fave Film – The Graduate.
• First single – Take Me Home Country Roads – Olivia Newton-John.
• First Album – Tubular Bells, Mike Oldfield; Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd; Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Simon and Garfunkel, Best of Simon & Garfunkel.
• First concert – Focus

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.