David Allen Quotes

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

Wash me O Lord for my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done this evil in your sight. That you may be found just when you speak, and blameless when you judge.

Too much information creates the same result as too little:

I have discovered that one of the major reasons many people haven’t had a lot of success with “getting organized” is simply that they have tried to do all five phases at one time.

Get a purge for your brain. It will do better than for your stomach. — Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Interestingly, one of the biggest problems with most people’s personal management systems is that they blend a few actionable things with a large amount of data and material that has value but no action attached.

Changing what you want to get done takes a second. Recalibrating & getting the new thing to happen is a martial art.

The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff”—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload.

But if you don’t decide what needs to be done about your secretary’s birthday, because it’s “not that important” right now, that open loop will take up energy and prevent you from having a totally effective, clear focus on what is important.

בני אבשלום בני
בני אבשלום
מי יתן מותי אני תחתיך
אבשלום בני בני

This would be a Zen-like state of productivity, in which you deal with what’s present from a perspective that is both detached and fully engaged.

The present-ness demanded by a crisis is possible w/out crisis. Understand the keys to appropriate engagement. GTD.

Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list that you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. ...[A]s soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it... in your short-term memory... part of you... thinks that you should be doing it all the time. ...[Y]ou've created instant and automatic stress and failure ...

Not stopping to really catch up (Weekly Review, GTDers!) means trying to catch up constantly & never getting there.

Valuable thought occurred today to share. Obvious in the moment. Can't retrieve now. Didn't capture. I teach this. Damn.