Quotes from David Allen

Your Mind Doesn't Have a Mind of Its Own At least a portion of your mind is really kind of stupid, in an interesting way. If it had any innate intelligence and logic, it would remind you of the things you needed to do only when you could do something about them.

More goals may not be necessary for you now—you need comfort with the ones you've already put in motion, and the confidence that you can execute elegantly on any new ones.

You can fool everyone else, but you can't fool your own mind.

Which of you are doing only what you were hired to do?

every decision you make, little or big, diminishes a limited amount of your brain power. Deciding to "not decide" about an e-mail or anything else is another one of those decisions, which drains your psychological fuel tank.

have discovered that one of the major reasons many people haven't had a lot of success with getting organized is simply that they have tried to do all five steps at one time.

A renegotiated agreement is not a broken one.

When I habitually applied the tenets of this program it saved my life . . . when I faithfully applied them, it changed my life.

you don't manage priorities—you have them.

In knowledge work … the task is not given; it has to be determined. 'What are the expected results from this work?' is

Distinguishing actionable from nonactionable things is the first key success factor in this arena. Second is determining what your potential use of the information is, and therefore where and how it should be stored. Once these are addressed, you have total freedom to manage and organize as much or as little reference material as you want.

Talk does not cook rice. —Chinese proverb

Your mind goes through five steps to accomplish virtually any task: 1  |  Defining purpose and principles 2 | Outcome visioning 3 | Brainstorming 4 | Organizing 5 | Identifying next actions

the three requirements to make the capturing phase work: 1  |  Every open loop must be in your capture system and out of your head. 2  |  You must have as few capturing buckets as you can get by with. 3 | You must empty them regularly.

how they might be articulated into productive shape.

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, of our projects and our lives.

Complete the projects you begin, fulfill the commitments you have made, live up to your promises—then both your subconscious and conscious selves can have success, which leads to a feeling of fulfillment, worthiness and oneness.

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.

Ask yourself, "When do I need to see what, in what form, to get it off my mind?" You build a system for function, not just to have a system.

Too much information creates the same result as too little:

More formal and structured meetings also tend to skip over at least one critical issue, such as why the project is being done in the first place.

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 ad hoc.

The real challenge is to make good communication a handy and well-used tool. Then you are likely to pick it up and use it without thinking. —MAX DEPREE

Time is that quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn't seem to be working.