Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

by David Allen

Upping the quality of our thinking and commitments does not diminish the quantity of potentially relevant and important stuff to manage.

Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact.

Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an “open loop,” which will be pulling on your attention if it’s not appropriately managed.

if it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. —Henri Bergson

People think a lot, but most of that thinking is of a problem, project, or situation—not about it.

you have to think about your stuff more than you realize but not as much as you’re afraid you might.

This consistent, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy. —Kerry Gleeson

Until those thoughts have been clarified and those decisions made, and the resulting data has been stored in a system that you absolutely know you will access and think about when you need to, your brain can’t give up the job.

As long as it’s still stuff, it’s not controllable.

Thought is useful when it motivates action and a hindrance when it substitutes for action. —Bill Raeder

The vast majority of people have been trying to get organized by rearranging incomplete lists of unclear things;

There is usually an inverse relationship between how much something is on your mind and how much it’s getting done.

There is no reason to ever have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.

Keep everything in your head or out of your head. If it’s in between, you won’t trust either one.

The sense of trust that nothing possibly useful will get lost will give you the freedom to have many more good ideas.

You must get it out of the container. You don’t leave it or put it back into “in”!

It is better to be wrong than to be vague. —Freeman Dyson

You can’t organize what’s incoming—you can only capture it and process it. Instead, you organize the actions you’ll need to take based on the decisions you’ve made about what needs to be done.

You don’t actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it.

What does need to be tracked is every action that has to happen at a specific time or on a specific day (enter those on your calendar); those that need to be done as soon as they can (add these to your Next Actions lists); and all those that you are waiting for others to do (put these on a Waiting For list).

if there’s something on a daily to-do list that doesn’t absolutely have to get done that day, it will dilute the emphasis on the things that truly do.

The way I look at it, the calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all.

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.