READY FOR ANYTHING by David Allen

• MAXIMUM PRODUCTIVITY is making something happen—furniture, freeways, or fun—with as little effort as possible.
• Improving productivity has a lot to do with dealing more effectively with the hindrances, barriers, and distractions that show up in our way—anything that opposes or weakens our forward motion.
• I discovered that people didn’t need more discipline as such—they needed a disciplined approach. They didn’t need to work harder—they needed to define their work better at multiple levels of detail and stay focused on all of them simultaneously.
• There are times when individuals (and groups) will get the most leverage out of completing old stuff and clearing the decks (Part I). Other times a focus on the right focus is the primary key (Part II). Still other situations will call for structures and systems as most important for growth (Part III). And others will require simply letting go of trying to get it perfect and just get going (Part IV). All these aspects are important, but often one specifically will be the trigger point for busting through into a next level of productivity.
• A change in behavior leads to a change in action and in results.
• It’s most often the small things, done consistently in strategic places, that make the most difference.
• Sometimes the biggest gain in productive energy will come from cleaning the cobwebs, dealing with old business, and clearing the decks—cutting loose debris that’s impeding forward motion.
• The degree to which you haven’t done that is the degree to which you are enduring unnecessary stress.
• Get your ubiquitous capture tool in place and functioning as a standard life accessory.
• Stress comes from unkept agreements with yourself. You can relieve that stress only by canceling the agreement, keeping the agreement, or renegotiating it.
• If you try to make something too simple, it will make everything seem more complex and difficult.
• Managing yourself is simple, but not simplistic.
• Give yourself the freedom to do one thing at a time.
• Concentration is the key to power, in physics and in life, and cooperation is the lubricant for the efficient flow of that energy.
• A map is not functional until you know where you are on it. Locating yourself in space and time provides a reference for motion: how much is required and in what direction.
• In order to know what activities are more important than others, you must have a reference point for what you want to maintain, accomplish, or experience—you must know what your work is.
• Many people have a vague sense that they want to do or be something in the future—something different. But without a reality-based reference point of where they in fact are on all levels of life, they’re like the Flying Dutchman, doomed to drift. But clarifying and managing what’s in front of you to deal with right now, with even a small degree of completion, will open up natural inspiration and creativity for what’s to come—without any further effort on your part.
• “It’s not one thing but five things all wrapped together: People keep stuff in their head. They don’t decide what they need to do about stuff they know they need to do something about. They don’t organize action reminders and support materials in functional categories. They don’t maintain and review a complete and objective inventory of their commitments. Then they waste energy and burn out, allowing their busyness to be driven by what’s latest and loudest, hoping it’s the right thing to do but never feeling the relief that it is.”
• Most people keep stuff only in their head, which short-circuits the process to begin with. Plenty of people write lots of things down, but they don’t decide the next actions on them. And even when people actually think about the actions required (before it’s in crisis mode), they don’t organize the reminders so that they’ll be seen when they are in the contexts where the action is possible. And even most of those people who do get these lists together in a burst of inspired productivity let their systems quickly become out of date and inconsistent. As a consequence, without the care and feeding of their thinking tools, life and work become reactive responses instead of clearly directed action choices.
• “Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up—not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you’re doing (and not doing) at any time.”
• “Focus on positive outcomes and continually take the next action on the most important thing.” But who doesn’t know that? Consistent implementation of that principle, fully integrating every aspect of our life, is the biggest challenge—and not so simple.
• Learning to respond effectively and efficiently to everything that has hooked your attention is masterful behavior.
• Maintaining a complete, current, and reviewable inventory of all the open loops, no matter how big or small they are, is a prerequisite for setting trustworthy priorities.
• ONE OF THE MOST effective ways to spark a dynamic vision is to clean your garage.
• Keeping uncaptured, unclarified, and unprocessed things in our minds creates unnecessary stress.
• A core principle in our personal-productivity methodology confronts this issue head-on: Write it all down, think about it all, decide what needs to be done about it all, and manage the options of it all in a consistently reviewed external system.
• Naming your stuff gives you power over it.
• The greatest power we have to affect our world is always at our fingertips: our ability to change how we see things.
• Often a focus on the focus is the key to unlock the next level of gain.
• So, in order to achieve clarity and be fully and positively engaged in what you’re doing, you must (1) know the goal or outcome you’re intending and (2) decide and take the next physical move to propel you in that direction.
• Success in life may have more to do with how fast you can accept and get started on the new game than with how good you got at playing any of the old ones.
• You see the outcome first, and then you are unconsciously made conscious of information.
• Outcome thinking and the willingness to visualize something’s being true before it’s physically present is a master skill that we all could probably develop to a much greater degree.
• We tend to recall items stored in our mind based on criteria of latest (most recent in time) and loudest (emotionally), which is hardly the most effective file-retrieval system.
• The value of purposeful focus has been a core element of my learning, teaching, coaching, and management consulting for decades. If we don’t know why we’re doing something, our activities lack meaning, clarity, and direction. If we do know the purpose—for a meeting, a brochure, or a company—then we have a criterion for decision making and success in those endeavors, plus the motivation to creatively circumvent obstacles in getting there.
• I believe that every meeting in every organization should be canceled, only those that have a specific purpose should be rescheduled, and the intervals of standing meetings should be set based upon the needs of current reality instead of habit.
• There's a simple way to become indestructible: Have the intention to do your best at whatever you’re doing, right now.
• Not be the best—do your best.
• Best does not mean perfect—it simply means best. The best you can do in this moment, with whatever awareness and resources you can muster right now.
• If you want different results, a change of focus is required. Once you shift the image held in your mind, different things will automatically start to happen.
• Solutions, innovations, and success come not from greater intelligence or creativity but from what we notice because of where we point those attributes.
• The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills.
• Your point of view can change the most drastic of circumstances into the most powerful of positive experiences.
• Stuff is unactionable until we’ve decided the outcome and the next step to move toward it.
• Thinking is the very essence of, and the most difficult thing to do in, business and life.
• Clarity of purpose is necessary in order to know how to evaluate the experiences and possibilities moving my way.
• At any moment, giving full attention to the one thing at hand is a hallmark of high performance.
• A vision of a desired future allows you to focus immediately on an improved condition.
• At times, tightening up our systems is what’s needed to release new levels of output and expression.
• It’s hard to be fully creative without structure and constraint.
• hallmark of master craftspeople is their knowledge of what tool is best for what job.
• The mind is a loyal and dedicated servant, but it needs to be given the jobs it does well—not the ones that it mismanages.
• Getting everything out of your head and making decisions about what it all means to you and what you need to do to move everything forward will give a tremendous freedom to your head.
• Real systems must be solid enough to hold up in the toughest reality—when we least feel like maintaining them.
• The better your systems, the more you don’t know you have them. The less attention you pay to them, the more functional they probably are. The only time you will notice them is when they don’t work or when you have to be too conscious about your use of them.
• Creating smoothly running silent systems is often the greatest improvement opportunity for enhanced productivity.
• The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.
• There’s a form to mastering work. You collect it, process it, organize it, and review it, choosing actions based upon an interplay with what you can do at the moment and what you want to accomplish or maintain (your “job”).
• The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas.
• Frequently, the last thing in the world we are inclined to do is exactly what would most improve the situation.
• Our minds, unchecked, can create a paralyzing fog of righteous worry—we’re too smart to start.
• Every decision we make about what action to take at any time is an intuitive risk.
• Simple answers are, for the most part, too simplistic.
• Prepare for the worst, imagine the best, and shoot down the middle. “Prepare for the worst” means to tie up all the loose ends and don’t leave yourself vulnerable to the self-deflation of unclear and unrenegotiated commitments. “Imagine the best” means to keep focused on the most positive outcomes and energies you can. “Shoot down the middle” means jump.
• Positive thinking is a tricky business. Once you are consciously aware of the creative power of your imagination, focusing purely on successful pictures and outcomes seems the only way to go. But to live a life of the best, there are times you must assume the worst.
• Too many times, we don’t recognize when reality has shifted but we haven’t, in our forms and behaviors. We keep doing what we’ve been doing, but the thrill is gone.
• Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.
• You don’t have time to do any project, because you actually can’t do a project—you can do only action steps.
• One of the best ways to procrastinate and deflate real motivation is to create big goals that are interpreted as “long term.” As soon as we set those goals or identify those kinds of projects, we tend to feel smug and self-congratulatory and pseudocomplete about them, just because we’ve “committed to them,” and our drive to close the loop starts to fizzle.
• Real change occurs not with a flash in the pan but with steady engagement at some new level of interaction.
• Little stuff, unchecked, can create some of the worst problems.
• the small actions we engage in regularly are the linchpins to the major results we experience.
• The development of real knowledge requires intentional activity. If you wait to know something before you do something, likely neither will happen.
• moving. It’s much easier to respond and move quickly—even when you need to go in the opposite direction—if you’re already in motion.
• The angst arises when you let loose the reins and stop directing your own energy.
• The biggest successes come from the most failures.
• Missiles and rockets are off course most of the time they’re in the air. They get where they’re going because they continually course-correct.
• You get things done by defining “done” and deciding what “doing” would look like.
• Capture anything and everything that has your attention in leakproof external “buckets” (your in-baskets, e-mail, notebooks, voice mail, etc.) to get them out of your short-term memory.
• Process the items you have collected (decide about your collected stuff ).
• If it is actionable, decide the very next physical action, which you do (if less than two minutes), delegate (and track on waiting-for list), or defer (put on an action-reminder list or in an action folder).
• Make choices about your actions based upon what you can do (context), how much time you have, how much energy you have, and then your priorities.
• If your project needs more clarity, raise the level of your focus (e.g., move from actions back to plans, plans back to brainstorming, vision back to purpose).
• If your project needs more to be happening, lower the level of your focus (e.g., move from vision to brainstorming, from plans to actions).