Over the years, I’ve read a lot of how to stuff. I’ve read a lot of motivational stuff. A common theme among many of these works is that most people want to achieve financial independence. But for most people, this is just a dream they will never realize because they don’t have a plan behind [...] Read more »

In my last article, I showed a snapshot of my daily review checklist and mentioned the first five sections of my checklist were for the five phases of GTD workflow. Those were, collecting, processing, organizing, doing and reviewing. I have started building out the steps I take in those areas and have expanded my checklist [...] Read more »

It’s the first of the month and time to start another thirty day challenge. If you read my post from yesterday, you know that I completed my last thirty day challenge which was to walk for three miles each day. I continued walking three miles again today and started my new thirty day challenge which [...] Read more »

It’s the last day of January and it marks the completion of my thirty day challenge which was to walk three miles each day. I’ve been doing these for nearly a year now and so I know what the next step is. But if you just completed your first thirty day challenge, you might be [...] Read more »

As I approach the end of the month, I have a few things on my mind. The first is that I am excited that I’m about to complete a thirty day challenge. This month, I’ve been walking three miles every day. The next thing I start thinking about is maintaining what I start this month [...] Read more »

This is the first month, I’ve “officially” had members doing thirty day challenges along with me. As we near the successful completion of a month of creating change in our lives, does doing a thirty day challenge for one month mean that you have mastered change in your life. And if it doesn’t, then how [...] Read more »

Over the last few days I’ve started building a daily review checklist. To get it started, I’ve been taking a close look at exactly all the steps that I take to do that and getting them down on paper. I’ve also streamlined my email a bit by setting up a bunch of filters to get [...] Read more »

OK. Yesterday, I finally got to the main concept of building mental strength. That was figuring out where to set the bar. The bar is placed at the place on your checklist that you didn’t get to on the previous day. Your goal each day is to get to the bar and to strive for [...] Read more »

Yesterday, I started to break down the email checklist I am building to illustrate how you build mental strength. I wanted to pick up where I left off in the last post and talk more about that today. Before I get into it, just a reminder, I’m of the view that before you can increase [...] Read more »

Yesterday, I talked about my folder structure inside my email account. I then made a list of those folders and put that list into my daily review checklist. While a lot of people look at their email account as an inbox, I look at each folder in my email account as an inbox. I list [...] Read more »

A couple of days ago, I started talking about the two types of mental strength. The first was the mental strength we use to remember everything and the second form of mental strength was what we use to get our tasks done. I suggested that the first way to get your mental strength up was [...] Read more »

As we are near the half way point of this month’s thirty day challenge, I wanted to start working on the next phase of the white belt master training. With several members progressing through their first official challenges, I have to stay one step ahead of everyone. The nice thing about seeing other people do [...] Read more »

If you have been stuck and started to do what I suggest and start doing thirty day challenges, then you will notice that after you do a few, you will start to create some momentum and be able to do each successive thirty day challenge a lot easier than the one before. This momentum is [...] Read more »

I wanted to let everyone know that if you use the google calendar, I’ve made the Black Belt Project google calendar available for you to subscribe to and add to your own calendar in your google account. Just visit the calendar page and click the button at the bottom of the calendar to add it [...] Read more »

I had some questions about what an avatar is, what it does and how to set it up at gravatar.com. I decided the best way to answer these questions was to do a video tutorial that answered these questions. While not required to be a member of the Black Belt Project, I think it will [...] Read more »

In the membership area today, I posted a video about how I am working on my daily review checklist. I view the checklist as the key component to a stress free life. Here’s why. Most of the time, I spend time thinking about work, even when I am not working. The reason is because I [...] Read more »

Whether you feel stuck in your current situation or are well on your way to mastering your life, an important component to getting what you want is to visualize your outcome. This visualization process doesn’t have to be an all out formal process. For me, it’s nearly enough to say what you want and take [...] Read more »

When you are first starting out with GTD, it’s easy to be a little excited that one day, you’ll have an empty inbox. I remember the first time that I found the book Getting Things Done, I really didn’t have any expectations. I found it in the bookstore and thought it seemed interesting. As I [...] Read more »

Well today marks the end of another thirty day challenge. This month’s challenge was to write an article very day. This article marks the thirtieth article I have written on this site. Over the last few months I have completed several thirty day challenges. Because of that I am starting to create some momentum. I [...] Read more »