David Allen Quotes

Making decisions when you can vs. when you have to makes for better decisions.

Thy servant kept his father's sheep, and there came a lion, and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock: [...] The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine.

Need More Clarity? If greater clarity is what you need, shift your thinking up the natural planning scale. People are often very busy (action) but nonetheless experience confusion and a lack of clear direction. They need to pull out their plan, or create one (organize). If there’s a lack of clarity at the planning level, there’s probably a need for more brainstorming to generate a sufficient inventory of ideas to create trust in the plan. If the brainstorming session gets bogged down with fuzzy thinking, the focus should shift back to the vision of the outcome, ensuring that the reticular filter in the brain will open up to deliver the best how-to thinking. If the outcome/ vision is unclear, you must return to a clean analysis of why you’re engaged in the situation in the first place (purpose).

I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. — Oliver Wendell Holmes

World-class rower Craig Lambert has described how it feels in Mind Over Water (Houghton Mifflin, 1998): Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing. . . . Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and nature. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed. Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself. Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no such thing. Aristocrats do not strive; they have already arrived. Swing is a state of arrival. The

Being organized means nothing more or less than where something is matches what it means to you.

You don't have to like your life to get it off your mind. You DO have to renegotiate your agreements w/yourself about it.

The balance you have between drive & patience may be your master key to success.

First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through.

Are you overwhelmed pulling weeds, when you really just need to replant the garden?

As Peter Drucker wrote: “In knowledge work . . . the task is not given; it has to be determined.

When you know how, any time, to get to the place where it's all sort of funny, you've mastered GTD.

Suffice it to say that something automatic and extraordinary happens in your mind when you create and focus on a clear picture of what you want.

If you're appropriately engaged w/your life, you don't need more time. If you're not, more time won't help.

A big surprise is coming toward you. How clear do you want to be about all your current commitments, when it hits?