David Allen Quotes

If you're already in a mess, you're not free to make one.

Amira In training and coaching thousands of professionals, I have found that lack of time is not the major issue for them (though they themselves may think it is); the real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what the associated next-action steps required are. Clarifying things on the front end, when they first appear on the radar, rather than on the back end, after trouble has developed, allows people to reap the benefits of managing action.

You’ve got to think about the big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. — Alvin Toffler

Let our advance worrying become our advance thinking and planning. — Winston Churchill

Appropriate focus on the right stuff gives the freedom to not have to focus on anything, on a regular basis.

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.

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

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, lead me in the way everlasting.

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 more confidence you have that you can actually manifest things before you have all the knowledge and resources you might need, the more you can potentially overwhelm yourself with your own possibilities.

"You don't actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it "done." The list of projects is the compilation of finish lines we put before us, to keep our next actions moving on all tracks appropriately"

Finally (assuming that you’re really committed to the project — in this case, going out to dinner), you focus on the next action that you need to take to make the first component actually happen. “Call Café Rouge to see if it’s open, and make the reservation.

To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect. — Peter F.

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.

If you figured out why making a list reduces overwhelm & confusion, you'd keep nothing in your head the rest of your life.