While I am busy with the internship, I am also enjoying time to redevelop two general skills, with the help of two books.

The first skill is organizing myself: As mentioned in a previous post, I am using GTD, Getting Things Done, by David Allen.

Pros: Fantastic book, loaded with common sense and a lot of experience on how to organize your life to Get Things Done. It contains a very useful framework to understand the day-to-day processes of the “information economy”. And the system for organizing with .txt files that I use, requires minimal maintenance.

Cons: If right after implementing, you end up with a list of actions of around 150-ish lines, quite likely if you have a busy life, you might get stressed and/or anxious and stop doing it. I got the reaction, but I know how to manage it after reading “The Now Habit”, the excellent book by Neil Fiore about procrastination. Everybody procrastinates in some areas of their lives. Everybody.

To sum up the book, eye opening experience with a radical impact on my stress free productivity, assuming you know how to manage your reaction to a 150 next action list.

The second skill is running : I have been an on-off runner, due to chronical pain and tendinitis in my Achilles tendon. Guess what? It can be due to poor running form. I probably have quite a few bad running habits. But I am not alone: Statistics show that 65% of runners in the USA stop running in any year due to injury! So the promise of the book to get back, enjoy running and “Run injury-free for the rest of your life” is incredibly appealing. I am still starting with the book, so I have no final impression about it.

So that is some of the fundamental relearning that I am engaged with at the moment. At some point in life, it is important to relearn things, drop bad habits, strip of the superfluous and get back to the fundamentals.