Guy on Time

By Guy Windsor

This short book brings together half a dozen of Guy's articles on productivity, time management, and generally getting shit done. It is short (about 12,000 words) because if you are pressed for time, do you really want a great big doorstop of a book to get through before getting on with your life?

NOTE: you can read all of these articles for free on his blog. But do you have the time to sift through all of the sword-fighting and other stuff on there to find these?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spada Press
• Release date: Mar 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201689742

Guy Windsor

Dr. Guy Windsor is a world-renowned instructor and a pioneering researcher of medieval and renaissance martial arts. He has been teaching the Art of Arms full-time since founding The School of European Swordsmanship in Helsinki, Finland, in 2001. His day job is finding and analysing historical swordsmanship treatises, figuring out the systems they represent, creating a syllabus from the treatises for his students to train with, and teaching the system to his students all over the world. Guy is the author of numerous classic books about the art of swordsmanship and has consulted on swordfighting game design and stage combat. He developed the card game, Audatia, based on Fiore dei Liberi's Art of Arms, his primary field of study. In 2018 Edinburgh University awarded him a PhD by Research Publications for his work recreating historical combat systems. When not studying medieval and renaissance swordsmanship or writing books Guy can be found in his shed woodworking or spending time with his family.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Hi,

I have published ten books, completed a PhD, conceived funded and brought to market a card game, published over 300 blog posts, as well as founded a successful martial arts school. In short, I get shit done.

One of the many ways in which I manage this is that I don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In other words, when I have a good idea, I act on it, not waiting for all 100 ducks to be in a row, the stars to align, and everything to be perfectly ready before I hit publish. Like this booklet, which is a collection of blog posts, previously published on guywindsor.net/blog and edited together.

For my full length books I have a higher standard and pay good money to good editors, but even there, there may be some typos that slip through. That’s ok. I’d rather my good book was out, than that my almost perfect book was still stuck on my hard drive. Because it will never be perfect.

This little booklet is a case in point. I’ve produced it because I think it will be useful to you. It isn’t perfect, but do you expect it to be so? Have you ever seen a perfect book?

This is not just about time management, it’s also about prioritising the things in your life that you want to spend time on. Productivity for productivity’s sake is a waste of your life. Read on, and let’s get some worthwhile shit done!

Yours,

Guy Windsor

HOW TO PLAN YOUR LIFE

FIRST PUBLISHED OCTOBER 5TH 2016

The rule of p's clearly states that Proper planning and preparation prevent piss-poor performance. I have found this to be true, so every now and then I carve out time to plan. In the short-term, that's usually ten minutes or so on a Monday morning to think about what I want to get done that week, or sketching out the structure of a new book. This kind of short term tactical planning saves a lot of time, and is really useful, but it's not what this blog post is concerned with. I've been working on long-term life planning recently, and I thought I'd share the process with you in case you find it useful.

If you had been keeping track of what I've been up to over the last couple of years (not that there's any reason why you should), you would have noticed that there have been a lot of changes. Moving to Italy for three months; ending my regular teaching at the Helsinki branch of my school; moving to the UK. Part of the root cause of all this is that I have been feeling somewhat directionless for a couple of years now, and that is not normal for me. I've been circling around the issue for a very long time, and the circles have been getting smaller and smaller. It has taken me this long to get to the state where I can actually figure out what's going on, and properly plan for the future.

It came to a head two weeks ago, in the come-down from launching two courses and a book within a couple of months. I set a goal for myself to take a full day off, and to do some long-range planning (not at the same time, obviously. Planning is work).

I make my living from being productive (as most people do, of course), and because I'm self-employed, there is a very close relationship between how much I produce and how much I get paid. Money is a store of value, and so it is very very easy to conflate this project will make money with this project is worth doing. I try to avoid