More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
There is another solution: intelligently dumbing down your brain by figuring out the next action.
Everything on your lists and in your stacks is either attractive or repulsive to you—there’s no neutral ground when it comes to your stuff.
In other words, things have morphed back into “stuff” instead of starting at the action level. There are no clear next actions here, and anyone keeping a list filled with items like this would send her brain into overload every time she looked at it.
Avoiding action decisions until the pressure of the last minute creates huge inefficiencies and unnecessary stress.
“What’s the next action?”
Because the question forces clarity, accountability, productivity, and empowerment.
what it is and who’s got it,
Talk does not cook rice.
we need to take responsibility for moving things to clarity.
The dark side of collaborative cultures is the allergy they foster to holding anyone responsible for having the ball.
Too many meetings end with a vague feeling among the players that something ought to happen, and the hope that it’s not their personal job to make it so.
Real togetherness of a group is reflected by the responsibility that all take for defining the real things to do and the specific people assigned to do them, so everyone is freed of the angst of still-undecided actions.
There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction. —John F. Kennedy
Productivity will improve only when individuals increase their operational responsiveness. And in knowledge work, that means clarifying actions on the front end instead of the back.
unless the individuals involved increase their operational responsiveness. And that requires thinking about something that lands in your world before you have to.*
Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible. —Saint Francis of Assisi
Getting things going of your own accord, before you’re forced to by external pressure and internal stress, builds a firm foundation of self-worth that will spread to every aspect of your life.
Asking yourself, “What’s the next action?” undermines the victim mentality. It presupposes that there is a possibility of change, and that there is something you can do to make it happen. That is the assumed affirmation in the behavior.
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them. —George Bernard Shaw
If it can be changed, there’s some action that will change it. If it can’t, it must be considered part of the landscape to be incorporated in strategy and tactics.
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.
When you start to make things happen, you begin to believe that you can make things happen. And that makes things happen.
Having the vague, gnawing sense that you “should” do something about your relationship with your daughter, and not actually doing anything, can be a killer.
Defining specific projects and next actions that address real quality-of-life issues is productivity at its best.
“There are only two problems in life: (1) you know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it; and/or (2) you don’t know what you want.”
We are constantly creating and fulfilling.
we create and identify with things that aren’t yet real on all the levels we experience; and when we do, we recognize how to restructure our current world to morph it into the new one, and experience an impetus to make it so.
Things that have your attention need your intention engaged.
Everything you experience as incomplete must have a reference point for “complete.”
Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes, and seeing them gratified. —Dr. Samuel Johnson
Your life and work are made up of outcomes and actions that you engage in more or less consciously.
The challenge will continually be to apply the two essential elements of this art: defining what done means and what doing looks like.
Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as in knowing what to do next. —Herbert Hoover
The challenge is to marry high-level idealistic focus to the mundane activity of life. In the end they require the same thinking.
An idealist believes that the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run. —Sydney J. Harris
The value of natural project planning is that it provides an integrated, flexible, aligned way to think through any situation.
Whereas the basic five-step process of capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting, and engaging is a coherent way to achieve stability across the whole spectrum of your life, natural planning produces relaxed, focused control in more specific areas.
Being comfortable making up visions of success, before the methods are clear, is a pheno...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Being willing to have ideas, good or bad, and to express and capture all of them without judgment is critical for fully accessing creative intelligence. Honing multiple ideas and types of information into components, sequences, and priorities aimed toward a specific outcome is a necessary mental discipline. And deciding on and taking real next...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I continually get feedback indicating that with a little implementation by a few key people, immediately things start to happen more quickly and more easily.
A vision without a task is but a dream; a task without a vision is but drudgery; a vision and a task is the hope of the world. —From a church in Sussex, England, ca. 1730
The supporting research has emerged within several frameworks and categories: Positive psychology Distributed cognition: the value of an external mind Relieving the cognitive load of incompletions Flow theory Self-leadership theory Goal-striving via implementation intentions Psychological capital (PsyCap)
Positive psychology is a vast discipline, but a sampling of its relevant aspects includes happiness, psychological well-being, flow/optimal experience, meaning, passion, purpose, authentic leadership, strengths, values, character, and virtue.
Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.
Because of the way the mind developed, it is brilliant at recognition, but terrible at recall. You can glance at today’s calendar and in the course of a few seconds get a coherent sense of the day and its contents and contexts. But you’d have a terrible time trying to recall the contents of the next fourteen days on your calendar merely from memory.
Daniel Levitin in his book The Organized Mind.*
