I've been spending time thinking about this lately, and have some to add to the list.

Reading. By reading faster while keeping comprehension up, you gain the ability to increase your input. You still need to judge the worth of the information, though.

Body language. You don't need to be an expert, but should be able to recognize when someone is happy, sad, concerned, surprised, and such.

Patterns. This sounds odd at first, but being to recognize patterns through history lets you recognize what's going on today. Playing with numerical patterns, perhaps though Sudoku or something similar, let you see other types of patterns.

I think my weakest area is in the execution. Does anyone have recommendations for building this up? I don't care for formality, so GTD is probably off the table. I just want something simple that I can make into a habit.

networking is a skill you need to make sure you have. being able to talk to people is good but you need to be able to follow up on it and pursue it.

if i think of any more ill post them.

I believe you wrote about that earlier, but certainly controlling your own emotions and not action on them without thinking is valuable skill. I guess it can be trained in things such as poker game. I see a lot of potential in learning how to be good at poker. Unfortunately I'm not there yet...

Good comment.

> I think my weakest area is in the execution. Does anyone have recommendations for building this up? ... I just want something simple that I can make into a habit.

Simple, huh? Okay, I think -

1. Wake up a few hours before you have any obligations. If you have a 9-5 job, wake up at 5AM or so.

2. Write down the most important task for the day.

3. Work on that task first until it's completed. Do nothing else.

That's probably the best simple/effective mix you can get. Now, simple doesn't mean easy - it's not always easy to habituate that routine and stick with it. But I've always kicked a lot of ass when I've done it that way.

Ah yes, that's a very very good observation. Poker definitely trains your emotions. Chess too, actually - staying composed and not falling apart after a boneheaded mistake.

It would be really useful to have relevant links/how-to to read more about the topics you and the commenters mentioned. Preferably both in the quick-n-dirty way (like you suggested before to get something important done) and in the "deep" way (like reading GTD to organize yourself)
For example I was really interested in body language and I know that "how to speed read" guides are around, but if I could have someone I trust tell me about one he used that'd be better than googling it myself.

I'd say if your native language is not English you totally need to learn how to fluently speaking it
How would you do it (this might apply to other foreign languages aswell):
- start watching english voices+english subtitles movies at the beginning and once your understand only english voices
- in your city there are probably groups of people speaking english, reach out (think couchsurfing.com members, exchange students, and just people interested in the language)
- make it a point to learn a new word in the foreign language each day and use it in a sentence, even if you're alone just say the sentence out loud using the word
- go live in a foreign country doing barista (or better something in your field if the language barrier is not too high) for 3 months without living or having any contact with people of your own language, it'll work wonders :)

Great comment Paolo, and good guide to English here - thanks for that.

Re: resources, yeah, I want to make a comprehensive list of how to get them down sometime. The problem for me, actually, is that I wasn't documenting when I was learning how I did it and making notes, so I've got to go back and get feedback and try to reverse-engineer how to do it. It'll definitely be worth doing eventually.