In the next few weeks I will do a post covering my three favorite productivity books, why I am like them and what sort of information they can offer you. However in the meantime I would be really interested in knowing what books my readers enjoy. Getting Things Done, The Four Hour Work Week and even The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People are probably the most obvious ones (and one of them will certainly be in my list) but it would be great to read recommendations for any other, less obvious classics. So, please leave a comment listing your three favorite productivity books and, if you have time, why not explain why you like them? I look forward to all your suggestions. Who knows, if the response is good I might be able to compile a league table of the most popular productivity books out there.

Some months back I asked my readers whether they thought personal development could and should be taught at schools. The response was largely positive, with most of you agreeing that even though children at a school age wouldn’t necessarily get it, it would still introduce some valuable topics and ideas for them to think about. As Mike King commented, school generally only provides basic knowledge and understanding (to function in a work environment), it doesn’t necessarily help with preparing them for life and its other challenges.

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Last week was a special week dedicated to my productivity tips series. In case you missed it I covered how to deal with obstacles in your path, define what ‘done’ actually means, reward yourself when you get things done and make time to relax and recharge. I hope you enjoyed the change of focus. I will be doing more of these in the future to break up the normal routine. However for this week I’m putting the emphasis on you! What are your productivity tips? They can be small or large, simple or complex, minor or life-changing. Whatever tip you have, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it with us in the comments! I hope to collate answers from other productivity bloggers too and will post a massive compilation of everyones answers in the next few weeks. Now, over to you…

There are enough bloggers (including yours truly) who write about personal productivity but what is it really all about? Last week I came across the alternative productivity manifesto at The Growing Life which introduced some very interesting ideas. One of those was how productivity is an industrial era economics term. How come then, are we applying it to ourselves? What can we really learn from our ratio of output per hour?

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When I did a critique of GTD a few weeks back and asked my readers to contribute their thoughts, many of you complained about the complexity of the system itself and/or the difficulties in implementing it into their workflow. There are a number of examples out there of how GTD has been simplified (Zen To Done being a prime one). However do such approaches really simplify the system or do they actually just strip chunks out of it? Are there parts of the GTD workflow that can be pruned or is it already lean and trim? Please share your thoughts! I look forward to incorporating them into a future post where I will take a deep look into simplifying GTD and whether it really can be done without losing the fundamental building blocks that make it so effective. Over to you!