Quotes from David Allen

Horizontal control maintains coherence across all the activities in which you are involved.

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

The traditional approaches to time management and personal organization were useful in their time. They provided helpful reference points for a workforce that was just emerging from an industrial assembly-line modality into a new kind of work that included choices about what to do and discretion about when to do it.

Vertical control, in contrast, manages thinking, development, and coordination of individual topics and projects.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. —CHARLES DARWIN

Many years ago Alfred North Whitehead cogently observed, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Taking the inventory of your current work at all levels will automatically produce greater focus, alignment, and sense of priorities.

When change is required, there must be trust that the initiatives for that change will be dealt with appropriately.

Creating "ABC" priority codes and daily "to-do" lists were key techniques developed to help people sort through their choices in some meaningful way.

To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect. —Peter F.

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

The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. —Ayn Rand

It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.

Since the publication of my first two books, Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything, I've had the opportunity to engage

If you had the freedom to decide what to do, you also had the responsibility to make good choices, given your priorities. What

Doing nothing is not only a waste of energy—it often promotes decay and unnecessary complexity and stress.

While Horizon 5 (purpose and principles) is obviously the most important context within which to set priorities, experience has shown me that when we understand and implement all the levels of work in which we are engaged, especially the Ground and Horizon 1 levels, we gain greater freedom and resources to do the bigger work that we're all about. If your boat is sinking, you really don't care in which direction it's pointed!

If you limit your choices to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise. —ROBERT FRITZ

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. —Will Rogers

you can decide what, specifically, something means to you and what you intend to do about it, if anything; if you can use a placeholder as a reminder of what you need to attend to;

We need ways to validate and support our thinking, no matter how informal.

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

When you assess something as a problem instead of as something to simply be accepted as the way things are, you are assuming there is a potential resolution.

Getting Things Done is not some new technology or invention—it simply makes explicit the principles at work within what we all do implicitly. But with that awareness, you can then leverage those principles consciously to create more elegant results.