Saturday, August 27, 2005
Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life
Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life
© 2003 by David Allen
Ones ability to be productive was directly proportional to ones ability to relax and need more disciplined they needed a disciplined approach. They needed support for in-focus structure and production. In less time the biggest gain in productivity will come from cleaned work – cleanliness of the business and clearing the debts. Get a ubiquitous idea-capturing tool.
If you don’t know the current inventory of your work you won’t be able to focus. Put them all in one place and you will handle many with a 2-minute task. The wisdom of life exists in the elimination of nonessentials said Lynn Utang. You typically have one hundred to two hundred tasks or have 30 to 100 projects. To hold on to incompletions creates inner frustration and anxiety. What have you avoided dealing with today? To be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life, said Louis Stevenson.
If I can just be doing something that feels as if I am working with focus I do not have to deal with the aims about all the other stuff I probably should be doing. Wow! Now I see my total work inventory in one place and I realize that I would have let myself spend time on those e-mails before anything else because that would be easiest choice to make. We tend to recall items stored in our mind based on criteria of latest and loudest which is hardly the most effective file retrieval system.
You are powerful all the time by way of your attention and intention. The question is toward what are you pointing that power. Rule your mind or it will rule you, said Horace. Put things in front of the door and action something you would like more of today. I believe that every meeting in every organization should be canceled. Only those that have a specific purpose should be rescheduled and the intervals of standing meetings should be set based upon the means of current reality instead of habit. Have an intention to do your best at whatever you are doing right now. Not be the best do your best. When you ask yourself what is the best thing you could be doing at this moment what is the answer? Your brain has a built-in mechanism for finding patterns you program because of where you put your attention. Relax, refocus, a new and vital affirmation relax, refocus how easily can you drop any thoughts you have right now and focus on wild success.
An hour of effective, precise, hard, disciplined and integrated thinking can be worth a month of hard work. Empire builders spend hour-after-hour on mental work, while others party. The ancestor of every action is a thought, said Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In the seminars I often show people all my projects (about 60) and next action to do about them (about 150) on a screen. How do you keep from being totally overwhelmed and discouraged when you constantly look at all those things to do, said someone. They really think I don’t want to have to do that. Ever stopped to think and forget to start again?
If you consciously capture, track, review and renegotiate all your commitments to yourself and others they are in a sense done. The people who think this is burdensome, have a lot of work that they just don’t want to look at it and what they resist, they are stuck with. I consistently come back to the awareness that I am not my work, because I have objectified and reviewed it. I think many people still have a hard time telling the difference.
Albert Einstein said, there are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. Robert Heinlein said progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things. But if it has only one thing as the focus with no inner distraction or conflict you would be in your zone.
At any moment giving full attention to the one thing at hand is a hallmark of high performance. While people are in either of those circumstances they are unlikely believed to be very concerned with all the other incompletions of their life and work. They will tend to be totally engrossed in what is happening here and now. Invention of the desired future allows you to focus immediately on an improved condition and matching the positive outcome forward in time provides the believed ability of the scenario and matures the consciousness.
You have got to think about big things while you are doing small things so that all the small things go in the right direction. If the success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be and what would I do, said Buckminster Fuller. Imagine yourself wildly successful five years from now. How would that be? How would you relate with the world around you? Try it today.
Want freedom, get organized. Want to be organized, get creative. When I am in visionary mode I start thinking about how I ought to finish up all the stuff I have created and how much work I have generated for myself, I get resentful and withdrawn. And when I am into doing and completing I allow the self talk to creep in that I should be doing and thinking about more important and bigger things.
The weekly review is the way I get the visionary and the doer together in a regular staff meeting and they get to work things out with cooperation and enthusiasm. Kerry Gleeson said this constant unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy. But many do not realize is that is the only way to stop thinking about how you should be thinking about what you should be thinking about. It takes one or two hours weekly the rest of your life. Most drugs buffer up temporarily from reality. Where is the bottleneck in your personal workflow? What is the oldest communication not dealt with?
I forget to focus on my friends. I forget to think about giving random presents. I forget about having fun. I forget about what constructive things I could do given my position with our office staff next week. I forget about a zillion things that would be way cool to do on a raving Saturday afternoon and yes I forget to dream. So I took reminders in my personal management system and I see them in my weekly review. Few people I know really grab the power of the basic weekly review. Do you have a list of all your projects? When could you take a half hour and create it? A boat has one skipper at a time.
When you most need to plan is usually when you think you do not have time for plan. The appropriate use of an ad hoc five-minute window is to take a short action to prevent a future annoyance can be as elegant as executive task as walking away from a chaotic morning’s in-basket to think about how to move forward on your strategic objectives. What is the best thing to do right now at this moment? I am still working on how to get best answer to that question. What can I do at this moment? Your actions will probably spring from avoidance rather than engagement.
Find out what is stressing you and deal with it now if you want to be truly effective on levels at once. Being relaxed and capable of focusing on what is at hands and when it is at hand without over or under reacting is the master skill. It is the context for accepting the greatest power. To the mind that is still the whole universe surrenders said Lao Tzu. Most people actually have a lot of thinking going on about a lot of stuff in their life and work -- stuff that is basically unproductive to stressing.
When have you recently felt the freest? When have you felt most effective? What is causing most background noise in your life? Chill a bit and allow yourself to play your bigger game. Chinese proverb said muddy water let stand will clear. We often uncover projects and goals that have been labeled long-term things like restructure the department create a strategic task force. When I ask what is the next action on that more often than not they have not figured one out. Either a project is open and you look to close as soon as possible or it is not. When you are 10% behind you feel like crap. On the other hand if you can manage to get 10% ahead you are on top of the world. It is about instigating those behaviors on the front end instead of the back and taking charge of the mundane aspects of life and work as they show up. Little stuff unchecked can create some of the worst problems. It is the thing that separates the winners from the losers, the men from the boys and very often the living from the dead. They have a consistent internal forward momentum. It is not lip served or merely conceptual desire to improve but rather a real deep seated movement toward some improved future state for themselves or at least for things they feel responsible for.
Hal Boyle said, what makes a river so restful to people is that it does not have any doubt, it is sure where it is going, and it does not want to go anywhere else. What is your desired outcome and what is your next action?
The following are the five phases workflow mastery. Collect. Capture anything in the leak proof bucket. Have a few of these collectors as you can and enter them regularly. If actionable you either do it if it is less than two minutes delegate or defer. Organize. Group the results in projects calendar next actions waiting for. Review calendar and action list daily. Customize a weekly review do make choices about your actions based upon what you can do, how much time you have, how much energy you have and your priorities. Be flexible by maintaining the total life action reminder system. Create a regular focus on your priority. Gather all scraps of loose papers. Process your notes. Empty your head. Review action list.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670032506
© 2003 by David Allen
Ones ability to be productive was directly proportional to ones ability to relax and need more disciplined they needed a disciplined approach. They needed support for in-focus structure and production. In less time the biggest gain in productivity will come from cleaned work – cleanliness of the business and clearing the debts. Get a ubiquitous idea-capturing tool.
If you don’t know the current inventory of your work you won’t be able to focus. Put them all in one place and you will handle many with a 2-minute task. The wisdom of life exists in the elimination of nonessentials said Lynn Utang. You typically have one hundred to two hundred tasks or have 30 to 100 projects. To hold on to incompletions creates inner frustration and anxiety. What have you avoided dealing with today? To be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life, said Louis Stevenson.
If I can just be doing something that feels as if I am working with focus I do not have to deal with the aims about all the other stuff I probably should be doing. Wow! Now I see my total work inventory in one place and I realize that I would have let myself spend time on those e-mails before anything else because that would be easiest choice to make. We tend to recall items stored in our mind based on criteria of latest and loudest which is hardly the most effective file retrieval system.
You are powerful all the time by way of your attention and intention. The question is toward what are you pointing that power. Rule your mind or it will rule you, said Horace. Put things in front of the door and action something you would like more of today. I believe that every meeting in every organization should be canceled. Only those that have a specific purpose should be rescheduled and the intervals of standing meetings should be set based upon the means of current reality instead of habit. Have an intention to do your best at whatever you are doing right now. Not be the best do your best. When you ask yourself what is the best thing you could be doing at this moment what is the answer? Your brain has a built-in mechanism for finding patterns you program because of where you put your attention. Relax, refocus, a new and vital affirmation relax, refocus how easily can you drop any thoughts you have right now and focus on wild success.
An hour of effective, precise, hard, disciplined and integrated thinking can be worth a month of hard work. Empire builders spend hour-after-hour on mental work, while others party. The ancestor of every action is a thought, said Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In the seminars I often show people all my projects (about 60) and next action to do about them (about 150) on a screen. How do you keep from being totally overwhelmed and discouraged when you constantly look at all those things to do, said someone. They really think I don’t want to have to do that. Ever stopped to think and forget to start again?
If you consciously capture, track, review and renegotiate all your commitments to yourself and others they are in a sense done. The people who think this is burdensome, have a lot of work that they just don’t want to look at it and what they resist, they are stuck with. I consistently come back to the awareness that I am not my work, because I have objectified and reviewed it. I think many people still have a hard time telling the difference.
Albert Einstein said, there are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. Robert Heinlein said progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things. But if it has only one thing as the focus with no inner distraction or conflict you would be in your zone.
At any moment giving full attention to the one thing at hand is a hallmark of high performance. While people are in either of those circumstances they are unlikely believed to be very concerned with all the other incompletions of their life and work. They will tend to be totally engrossed in what is happening here and now. Invention of the desired future allows you to focus immediately on an improved condition and matching the positive outcome forward in time provides the believed ability of the scenario and matures the consciousness.
You have got to think about big things while you are doing small things so that all the small things go in the right direction. If the success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be and what would I do, said Buckminster Fuller. Imagine yourself wildly successful five years from now. How would that be? How would you relate with the world around you? Try it today.
Want freedom, get organized. Want to be organized, get creative. When I am in visionary mode I start thinking about how I ought to finish up all the stuff I have created and how much work I have generated for myself, I get resentful and withdrawn. And when I am into doing and completing I allow the self talk to creep in that I should be doing and thinking about more important and bigger things.
The weekly review is the way I get the visionary and the doer together in a regular staff meeting and they get to work things out with cooperation and enthusiasm. Kerry Gleeson said this constant unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy. But many do not realize is that is the only way to stop thinking about how you should be thinking about what you should be thinking about. It takes one or two hours weekly the rest of your life. Most drugs buffer up temporarily from reality. Where is the bottleneck in your personal workflow? What is the oldest communication not dealt with?
I forget to focus on my friends. I forget to think about giving random presents. I forget about having fun. I forget about what constructive things I could do given my position with our office staff next week. I forget about a zillion things that would be way cool to do on a raving Saturday afternoon and yes I forget to dream. So I took reminders in my personal management system and I see them in my weekly review. Few people I know really grab the power of the basic weekly review. Do you have a list of all your projects? When could you take a half hour and create it? A boat has one skipper at a time.
When you most need to plan is usually when you think you do not have time for plan. The appropriate use of an ad hoc five-minute window is to take a short action to prevent a future annoyance can be as elegant as executive task as walking away from a chaotic morning’s in-basket to think about how to move forward on your strategic objectives. What is the best thing to do right now at this moment? I am still working on how to get best answer to that question. What can I do at this moment? Your actions will probably spring from avoidance rather than engagement.
Find out what is stressing you and deal with it now if you want to be truly effective on levels at once. Being relaxed and capable of focusing on what is at hands and when it is at hand without over or under reacting is the master skill. It is the context for accepting the greatest power. To the mind that is still the whole universe surrenders said Lao Tzu. Most people actually have a lot of thinking going on about a lot of stuff in their life and work -- stuff that is basically unproductive to stressing.
When have you recently felt the freest? When have you felt most effective? What is causing most background noise in your life? Chill a bit and allow yourself to play your bigger game. Chinese proverb said muddy water let stand will clear. We often uncover projects and goals that have been labeled long-term things like restructure the department create a strategic task force. When I ask what is the next action on that more often than not they have not figured one out. Either a project is open and you look to close as soon as possible or it is not. When you are 10% behind you feel like crap. On the other hand if you can manage to get 10% ahead you are on top of the world. It is about instigating those behaviors on the front end instead of the back and taking charge of the mundane aspects of life and work as they show up. Little stuff unchecked can create some of the worst problems. It is the thing that separates the winners from the losers, the men from the boys and very often the living from the dead. They have a consistent internal forward momentum. It is not lip served or merely conceptual desire to improve but rather a real deep seated movement toward some improved future state for themselves or at least for things they feel responsible for.
Hal Boyle said, what makes a river so restful to people is that it does not have any doubt, it is sure where it is going, and it does not want to go anywhere else. What is your desired outcome and what is your next action?
The following are the five phases workflow mastery. Collect. Capture anything in the leak proof bucket. Have a few of these collectors as you can and enter them regularly. If actionable you either do it if it is less than two minutes delegate or defer. Organize. Group the results in projects calendar next actions waiting for. Review calendar and action list daily. Customize a weekly review do make choices about your actions based upon what you can do, how much time you have, how much energy you have and your priorities. Be flexible by maintaining the total life action reminder system. Create a regular focus on your priority. Gather all scraps of loose papers. Process your notes. Empty your head. Review action list.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670032506
