David Allen Quotes

Most people feel best about their work the week before they go on vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, organize, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. You do this so you can relax and be present on the beach, on the golf course, or on the slopes, with nothing else on your mind. I suggest you do this weekly instead of yearly, so you can bring this kind of “being present” to your everyday life.

Things hold your attention hostage until you give them the appropriate attention.

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

Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the “complexity” of the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds. — Thomas Sowell

I’ve discovered that the greatest challenges in defining your work are (1) to think about what you’re doing and (2) to do something about what you’re thinking.

Every now and then go away and have a little relaxation. To remain constantly at work will diminish your judgment. Go some distance away, because work will be in perspective and a lack of harmony is more readily seen. — Leonardo da Vinci

That said, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with creating a quick, informal, short list of “if I have time, I’d really like to . . .” kinds of things, picked from your Next Actions inventory.

It takes a healthy sense of self to feel OK with nothing happening in your head.

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.

It is a tricky business to know when you should set goals and objectives in order to achieve a focus, and when you would be better off dealing with the acceptance and management of your current reality so you can later step into new directions and responsibilities with greater stability and clarity. Only you will know the answer to that, and only in the moment.

The traditional approaches to time management and personal organization were useful in their time. They provided helpful reference points for a workforce that was just emerging from an industrial assembly-line modality into a new kind of work that included choices about what to do and discretion about when to do it.

Whether you know what you're doing or not, efficiency & style are your only improvement opportunities.

Эффективность системы обратно пропорциональна сосредоточенности на ней

The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender.

When "this isn't right" changes to "this isn't optimal" in your vocabulary, you've moved up the food chain.