I think that there is a huge unseen component in life skills where in addition to knowing about a skill, you need to recognize a situation where the skill might apply, remember about the skill, figure out if the skill is really appropriate given what's going on, know exactly how you should apply the skill in that given situation and so on. There isn't really an algorithm you can follow without also constantly reflecting on what is actually going on, and I think that in what basically looks like another instance of Moravec's paradox, the big difficult part is actually in the unconscious situation awareness and the things you can write in a book like GTD and give to people are a tiny offshoot on that.
No solid evidence for this except for the observation that there don't seem to be self-helpy systems for general awesomeness that actually do consistently make people who stick with them more awesome.
recognize a situation where the skill might apply, remember about the skill
OK, what if you were to, say, at the end of each day brainstorm situations during the day when skill X could have been useful in order to get better at recognizing them?
There isn't really an algorithm you can follow without also constantly reflecting on what is actually going on
Could meditation be useful for this?
As per a recent comment this thread is meant to voice contrarian opinions, that is anything this community tends not to agree with. Thus I ask you to post your contrarian views and upvote anything you do not agree with based on personal beliefs. Spam and trolling still needs to be downvoted.