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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Allen
Read between
February 17 - June 4, 2024
You’re never lacking in opportunities to clarify your priorities at any level. Pay attention to which horizon is calling you.
Trying to manage from the top down, when the bottom is out of control, may be the least effective approach.
Runway
The first thing to do is make sure your action lists are complete, which in itself can be quite a task.
Aside from your calendar, if you don’t have at least fifty next actions and waiting-fors, including all the agendas for people and meetings, I would be skeptical about whether you really had all of them.
10,000 Feet
Next I recommend that you make and keep a list called “Areas of Focus.”
If you’re not totally sure what your job is, it will always feel overwhelming.
The operational purpose of the “Areas of Focus” list is to ensure that you have all your projects and next actions defined, so you can manage your responsibilities appropriately.
30,000 to 50,000+ Feet
When you’re not sure where you’re going, you’ll never know when enough is enough.
For our purposes, the focus is on capturing what motivators exist for you in current reality that determine the inventory of what your work actually is, right now.
After years of working with thousands of professionals down in the trenches, I can safely say that virtually all of us could be doing more planning, more informally and more often, about our projects and our lives. And if we did, it would relieve a lot of pressure on our psyches and produce an enormous amount of creative output with minimal effort.
The real need is to capture and utilize more of the creative, proactive thinking we do—or could do.
If you have systems and habits ready to leverage your ideas, your productivity can expand exponentially.
You need to set up systems and tricks that get you to think about your projects and situations more frequently, more easily, and in more depth.
There are two types of projects, however, that deserve at least some sort of planning activity: (1) those that still have your attention even after you’ve determined their next actions, and (2) those about which potentially useful ideas and supportive detail just show up.
Brainstorming
Organizing
Setting Up Meetings
Gathering Information
Don’t lose any ideas about projects that could potentially be useful.
One of the great secrets to getting ideas and increasing your productivity is utilizing the function-follows-form phenomenon—great tools can trigger good thinking.
If you aren’t writing anything down, it’s extremely difficult to stay focused on anything for more than a few minutes, especially if you’re by yourself.
In addition to writing tools, you should always have functional pads of paper close at hand.
If you have room for them, whiteboards and/or easel pads are very functional thinking tools to use from time to time.
Even if you erase your thoughts after a few minutes, just the act of writing them down facilitates a constructive thinking process like nothing else.
A good general-reference filing system, right at hand and easy to use, is not only critical to manage the general workflow process, but highly functional for project thinking as well.
Many times, in coaching clients, I find that the mere act of creating a file for a topic into which we can organize random notes and potentially relevant materials gives them a significantly improved sense of control.
Digital Outlining
Brainstorming Applications
Project-Planning Applications
Clear the deck, create a context, and do some creative project thinking. You’ll then be way ahead of most people.
The key is to get comfortable with having and using your ideas. And to acquire the habit of focusing your energy constructively, on intended outcomes and open loops, before you have to.
When people with whom you interact notice that without fail you receive, process, and organize in an airtight manner the exchanges and agreements they have with you, they begin to trust you in a unique way.
Having too much to do is not the source of the negative feeling.
But what are all those things in your in-basket? Agreements you’ve made with yourself. Your negative feelings are simply the result of breaking those agreements—they’re the symptoms of disintegrated
self-trust.
One way to handle an incompletion in your world is to just say no!
As I get older, this option becomes my default position.
once you really understand what it means, you’ll probably make fewer agreements. I know I did. I used to make a lot of them, just to win people’s approval.
Here is the root of my problem: trying to please others.
Agreeing to do something for someone does not necessarily mean it wins their approval. In some cases it actually loses it.
Maintaining an objective inventory of your work makes it much easier to say no with integrity.
One of the best things about this whole method is that when you really take the responsibility to capture and track what’s on your mind, you’ll think twice about making commitments internally that you don’t really need or want to make.
Of course, another way to get rid of the negative feelings about your stuff is to just finish it and be able to mark it off as done.
Out of the strain of the doing, into the peace of the done.
It’s a lot easier to complete agreements when you know what they are.
It’s the catch-22 of professional development: the better you get, the better you’d better get.
A renegotiated agreement is not a broken one.
It is the act of forgiveness that opens up the only possible way to think creatively about the future at all. —Father Desmond Wilson
The fact that you can’t remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn’t mean that you’re not holding yourself liable for it.
