Greg Wilson is planning an airplane-less trip which takes 12 hours, a big part of it by train. He’s trying to go a year without flying—when I calculated my carbon load in the spring, I discovered that it accounted for 85% of my impact
The most recent long trip I took was from Utrecht (the Netherlands) to Birmingham (UK) for europython 2009. If possible I make such strips by train. I’ll be honest to admit that carbon load is not the number one reason: I simply enjoy trains and train travel. And with the channel tunnel, the UK is within easy reach.
The point I want to stress: long train trips are valuable time. I’m still reaping the benefit of both the inbound and outbound journey: I spend most of the time clarifying my goals. I do that now and again and I brought my previous lists with me. It was two or three years ago I last thought about it, so it was high time. And with hours of uninterrupted thinking time in those trains, I finished it all.
For those that don’t know about it: GTD suggests to do your thinking on several levels:
The “life goal” till “1-2 year goals” levels is what I did in the train. Plus the areas of focus for July-September. Those focus areas is what I keep next to my GTD project list at the start of the three month period:
This seems to hold up quite nicely! It filters the list of projects to a more manageable level. And it ensures some internal accountability.
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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