Essays by Gregory J. Gaynor

Everyone has dragons.

Not the kind you slay once, the kind that keep coming back. Mine have included a book I’ve circled for a decade, and whole seasons of weeks that were full yet added up to nothing. This site is twenty years of learning to face them: essays on work, knowledge, training and living well.

Read the new essaysThe Dragon's Eye

New essays

Lately, on the desk.

A fourteen-line shell script that counts stalled projects, open in a terminal
After Twenty Years of GTD, I Handed My System to an AIProductivity

After Twenty Years of GTD, I Handed My System to an AI

I ran GTD for twenty years, strictly enough to write software for it, and the weekly review still died every time life got loud. So I handed the filing to…
Your Task List Is Making You Numb. Here’s What Fixed Mine.
A terminal showing a task file, with the line "Practice getting out of bed", dated 2018, sharp among blurred lines
Your Task List Is Making You Numb. Here’s What Fixed Mine.Productivity

Your Task List Is Making You Numb. Here’s What Fixed Mine.

The Character for Busy Is a Heart Perishing
The characters 忙, busy, and 閒, leisure, painted in ink on rice paper
The Character for Busy Is a Heart PerishingProductivity

The Character for Busy Is a Heart Perishing

Get Your Garmin Data Off Their Servers
Garmin watch infront of a database
Get Your Garmin Data Off Their ServersAI

Get Your Garmin Data Off Their Servers

Greg doing tai chi in a Beijing subway station at rush hour, commuters blurred around him

Who writes this

I'm Greg.

I’ve run my life on GTD for twenty years, spent the best part of two decades in China, and I’ve been doing martial arts since I was six. These days I lead AI development for a multinational, which means the thing I did in my spare time for years, building systems that keep a life running, has somehow become the day job. This is where I write about what held up.

Tai chi at rush hour, Guomao station, Beijing, 2014.

More about me

The four sections

Pick a dragon.

Inaction

Productivity

I’ve run the same system for twenty years, long enough to watch every productivity trend arrive twice.

Forgetting

PKM

Notes are cheap. Knowing what you think is not. Plain text, Obsidian, Logseq, and what changes when an AI can read the notes you never will.

Weakness

Martial Arts

I started at six and was teaching by sixteen. This is about training, and what thirty-odd years of getting hit teaches you about everything else.

Emptiness

Living

Weeks that are full but don’t add up. The life around the work: living abroad, coming home, and hobbies that are practices rather than purchases.

The guides

The how-tos.

Most people find this site through one of these. They’re the practical end of it: set-ups, templates and cheat sheets for the tools I’ve used for years.

Obsidian

Obsidian themes
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Obsidian templates, with examples
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Setting up GTD in Obsidian
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Organising notes in Obsidian
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Obsidian plugins worth using
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Logseq

Getting started with Logseq
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Logseq markdown cheat sheet
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Logseq templates
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Syncing Logseq for free
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GTD in Logseq
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GTD and study

A guide to GTD
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Paper-based GTD
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The GTD trigger list
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Areas of focus, with examples
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The best Anki decks
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