The Bullet Points

• I'm Miles Seecharan, a UK-based coach who teaches work and life management techniques that give people freedom, focus and control.

• I have over 30 years experience of teaching, training and coaching, including over 10 years (and counting) teaching the world's most powerful productivity technique - GTD - to senior leaders and teams in some of the UK's best known companies; e.g. KPMG, Barclays, KFC, the Co-op and the Open University.

• I have a Masters in Coaching and Mentoring and qualifications in project management, human resource management, teaching and e-learning development.

• I've 'walked the walk' when it comes to managing a busy life. For the best part of 10 years (and through a pandemic) I’ve been a self-employed single Dad raising 3 kids, one of whom has ADHD and another of whom is autistic. It’s pretty full-on but it’s entirely doable and my mission in life is to show people how.

The Back Story

I've always been keen on finding the best ways to do things and optimising life in every way I could...

1984

At school I got an A5 grade once on my school report more than once, meaning 'A' for predicted grade and '5' for effort. I never really understood that at the time as I've always been very focussed on achieving success but over time I realised that while I was working hard I was never really good at showing the outward signs of effort. I had a reputation for always looking super-relaxed, and I still hear the same today. I guess people aren't seeing someone who rises early and spend most of the day super-focussed on the things I'm interested in. I just worked out the best ways of taking notes, revising, learning and memorising. Why wouldn't you? So what others called 'lazy', I just called 'smart ways of working' and, although I didn't realise it at the time, a certain kind of mission in life was obvious.

1998

I first tasted working from home in Japan in 1995 with the advent of the world wide web. It meant I could work from home in my apartment in Osaka, and I fondly remember days working in shorts and T-shirt with the summer breeze coming through the windows as I taught online English language programmes for Japanese corporates like Sony and Panasonic. Every day I'd have sushi for lunch on the banks of the Yodogawa river, a few minutes walk from my house. I was lucky. I was paid for making my students happy and generating repeat purchases of course programmes, and the company didn't care how I did it. My view of what work could be was altered forever.

2000

I didn't stay in Japan, though, and instead came back to England, 'settled down' and started working in higher education. And it got pretty full-on pretty quickly. I was commuting daily from Manchester to Sheffield, doing a full-time job in IT, continuing the Japanese teaching as a side hustle in my spare time, and trying to be a good Dad to a my growing young family. The fact that so many balls needed to constantly be juggled, combined with my natural interest in finding better ways of working made me super-receptive to the 'Getting Things Done' personal productivity methodology when it came along in 2001. And 'GTD', as it's commonly called, changed the course of my life in a BIG way.

I started to use some of the techniques it recommended and found that they made a clear difference so I kept going back for more. As I started to realise the potential of the techniques to fundamentally change people's lives I naturally started to share it with colleagues and was soon being asked to do presentations to teams at team meetings and away days. I become known as ‘the guy who tames your inbox’. This continued until the penny dropped - I would make much more of a difference to the world by teaching GTD than by managing IT so left education and have never looked back. I started working as a trainer and coach for the David Allen company, teaching GTD full-time at the very highest level to some of the world's best-known companies in the UK and around the world. I'd never been happier and more fulfilled.

2020

Then everything changed when the pandemic came along, as it did for everyone. The GTD work continued - the 1-to-1 coaching was already virtual and the group courses moved online without much fuss - but a whole new set of problems started to become obvious through the lockdowns around helping clients manage the challenges of working from home. I realised that I'd already become an expert at this over the course of the previous 20 years and started to share that expertise via coaching that focussed on flexible and hybrid working.

Looking back, it seems like it was fate - the teaching, the e-learning, the GTD, the coaching, and the working from home - all coming together to enable me to do what I do now, sharing the best ways of working and living in a world that will exhaust and overwhelm you if you let it.