Monday, February 14, 2011

GTD Areas Of Focus – The Black Belt Levels

In the last post I talked about The Basic Three Step Black Belt Training Program. Today I wanted to talk about the belt system I’m going to use to help you move in the direction of being a master of your life. A martial arts student starts his training as a white belt and as his training progresses; he advances through a system of colored belts. We’ll do the same here but our “belts” will be our GTD Areas of Focus.

You and I will, as beginning students, start with a “white belt”. What we’ll do then is work through each of our areas of focus in getting things done and begin mastering them one by one.

Here’s my current list of GTD Areas of Focus. Remember these are broad areas of focus and we’ll be putting more specific projects inside each as we move along.


  1. Red – Productivity (GTD, Getting Things Done)

  2. Yellow – Physical Health (Exercise, Diet)

  3. Blue – Image (Grooming, Appearance, Wardrobe)

  4. Green – Financial

  5. Orange – Work/Career/Business

  6. Purple – Mental Health (Emotional)

  7. Pink – Relationship/Home/Family/Friends

  8. Gray – Spiritual/Contribution/Character

  9. Black – Fun/Adventure/Travel/Learning


As you can see I’ve established a 9 belt system advancing to black belt. This is my initial belt system. I might fine tune it as we go along but for now this is our working list.

We’ll be starting with the red belt which stands for setting up our GTD system. While you can start anywhere and work to master your life, I suggest that you start with either productivity or physical health. I’ll be starting with GTD because it will help us clear our mind and clear the decks of all our outstanding obligations. Once we clear our head completely, we’ll have better clarity in the higher levels.

OK. The next step is to start working on our red belt. I’ll start doing that in the next post. I hope you’ll join me.

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Michael Kuhn

Black Belt Project: Build Mental Strength

2 comments

I like the idea of a belt color system. I prefer the old coloring system in Karate: White, Brown, and Black.
White is for SELF, Brown is for OTHERS, Black is for SPIRIT. I established these three levels according to the Sufi teaching on how to deal with anything and everything. The principles behind this teaching are really simple and direct me on how to analyze, deal with, and finalize any item that gets into my GTD system. Here are the principles:
1. SELF: Don't trust it!
2. OTHERS: Deal with them without your SELF.
3. SPIRIT: Deal with it without the OTHERS.
Rather simple but quite efficient and keeps me right on track with the 3000K feet Level at all-times in all aspects of my life.

Thanks for the opportunity to share this...

Thanks for the input Adam. It's great to see a like-minded individual stop by and classifying their life into a system of belts like the martial arts.


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