David Allen Quotes

The organizing system merely provides placeholders for all your oprn loops and options so your mind can... make the necessary intuitive, moment-to-moment strategic decisions.

In order to... have nothing on your mind, you've got to know where all your actionable items are located, what they are, and that they will wait. ...[I]n a few seconds, not days.

How much of this planning model do you really need..? [A]s much as you need to get the project off your mind.

[Y]ou must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like.

The goal is to get projects and situations off your mind, but not to lose any potentially useful ideas.

[I]f it's just you, attempting to come up with a "good idea" before defining your purpose, creating a vision, and collecting lots of bad ideas is likely to give you a case of creative constipation.

If you're waiting to have good ideas before you have any ideas, you won't have many ideas.

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.

The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff”—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload.

Before you can achieve... you'll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind... not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. ...Instead, the key ...is managing your actions. ...[T]he real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what the associated next-action steps required are.

Here's how I define "stuff": anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step.

Most often, the reason something is "on your mind" is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet:
• you haven't clarified exactly what the intended outcomes is;
• you haven't decided what the very next physical action step is;
• and/or you haven't put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust.
That's why it's on your mind.

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.

בני אבשלום בני
בני אבשלום
מי יתן מותי אני תחתיך
אבשלום בני בני

Thou comest to me with a sword, and with A spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. [...] And all this assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with the sword and spear: for the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hands.