David Allen Quotes

Piensa como un hombre de acción, actúa como un pensador. — Henri Bergson

I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.

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.

The beginning is half of every action.

It's hard to say no when you're not aware of everything you've said yes to.

Complaining is a sign that someone isn’t willing to risk moving on a changeable situation, or won’t consider the immutable circumstance in his or her plans.

That means as soon as you tell yourself that you might need to do something, and store it only in your head, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time. Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored only in your mind, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do them both at the same time. This produces a pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pinpointed.

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

most stress they experience comes from inappropriately managed commitments they make or accept.

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

The coolest things I do usually aren't on my lists, but because of them.

The nature of creative thinking runs counter to the nature of dealing w/its output. Ability & system to do both is freedom. GTD.

Engaging in complexity is a key to simplicity. Fear of it will haunt your inner recesses.

Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because the doing of them has not been defined.

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.