Gregory J. Gaynor

I left England for China at twenty-one and stayed in Asia for the best part of two decades: Beijing mostly, with long stretches in Thailand, Nepal, India, Laos and Cambodia. I worked in IT for a multinational, then ran a corporate-training consultancy in Beijing, managing a team of sixteen and coaching people through jobs, careers and the occasional life. Along the way I became a syndicated writer, with pieces carried by the Associated Press and published across the US and UK.

Now I’m back home in England, and I lead AI development for a multinational firm: designing the agents, prompts and data plumbing that let a business hand real work to a machine without regretting it.

I’ve run my life on GTD for twenty years, long enough to have built my own task manager in Bash, a workout planner that argues with a database, and a catalogue for my CDs. I write about what happens when a systems habit like that meets modern AI: which tools survive, which become unnecessary, and what’s left for the human to do. More than you’d think. Different from what you’d hope.

I started martial arts at six and was teaching classes by sixteen. Black belt in Taekwondo, brown in Mo Gwai Kune. I’ve trained with Shaolin monks, boxed through Muay Thai gyms in Thailand, and these days I practise Yang and Chen style tai chi. Most Saturday mornings you’ll find me grinding ink for Chinese brush practice before anyone else is awake.

Other things that are true: I bake, and during Covid I ran a small crumpet business that sold out most weeks and taught me more about quality control than any job has. I play Go badly and the drums slightly better. I’m slowly writing a book about the China years.

Because the problems that actually shape a life, inaction, weakness, emptiness, don’t get solved once. They get faced, regularly, or they grow. This site is my practice log, written up properly.