One of our clients e-mailed me recently asking “Aren’t you having any time off?”. The answer to this question is, yes, 98% of the time I’m spending in Canada is holiday. The remainder is work. That’s about 30 minutes a day.

The single greatest benefit from applying Getting Things Done (GTD) when your whole organisation uses it is that it makes everyone more productive, and encourages everyone to find ways to become more efficient. Once this philosophy, if not the exact process, is institutionalised, handling business becomes much easier. Without GTD, procrastination is easy, but the secret to GTD is that not procrastinating is even easier. If a task takes less than 2 minutes to deal with when it first appears, do it now.

Correspondingly, it takes me 30 minutes each day to do the following:

• Follow up on urgent business
• Keep an eye on all client activities
• Catch up with all the important events happening in our industry
• Consider where our business should go next, depending on these events

I can do this because we have the right tools to support our business. It’s taken us a long time to find these tools and apply them appropriately, but the effort has been worth it.

It shouldn’t even take me this long, but I’m on an internet connection roughly 100 times slower than my connection at work. I reckon I could cut this down to 10 minutes with a broadband connection. Two words: everything online.