David Allen Quotes

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior. — Dee Hock

Making It All Work is about the work you have to do to know the work you have to do when the work you have to do doesn’t tell you the work you have to do.

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.

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

Resistance to deciding the next action (before we have to) stems from how it exposes the vulnerability of our intelligence.

Keys to getting things done: know what "done" means & what "doing" looks like.

Even the smallest knoll to climb, to see a little more than the machine guns firing at me, is salvation.

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

Lots of people have been making lists for years but have never found the procedure to be particularly effective.

GTD gives freedom to the right, structure to the left (brains, that is!)

Over-prepare. Then go with the flow.

The big problem is that your mind keeps
reminding you of things when you can't do
anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need to do something, and store it in your RAM, there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time.

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.

"Most people have major leaks in their collection process. Many have collected things but haven't processed or decided what action to take about them. Others make good decisions about "stuff" in the moment but lose the value of that thinking because they don't efficiently organize
the results. Still others have good systems but don't review them consistently enough to keep them functional. Finally, if any one of these links is weak, what someone is likely to choose to do at any point in time may not be the best option."

Your ability to deal w/surprise is in inverse relation to the amount of your backlog of "stuff".