Quotes About Organization

Instead, the key to managing all of your stuff is managing your actions.

The ability to leverage that thinking with good collection devices that are always at hand is key to increased productivity.

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.

you don't manage priorities—you have them.

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.

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.

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.

many people let themselves get sucked into the second activity—dealing with unplanned and unexpected things that show up—much too easily, and let the other two slide, to their detriment. It is often easier to get wrapped up in the urgent demands of the moment than to deal with your in-tray, e-mail, and the rest of your open loops.

merely become an everyday part of keeping one's mental and physical environment in good order.

Books to read Music to download Movies to see Gift ideas Web sites to explore Weekend trips to take Ideas—Misc. (meaning you don't know where else to put them!)

next actions will make sense for you: • "Calls" • "At Computer" • "Errands" • "Office Actions" or "At Office" (miscellaneous) • "At Home" • "Agendas" (for people and meetings) • "Read/Review

We need to transform all the "stuff" we've attracted and accumulated into a clear inventory of meaningful actions, projects, and usable information. Almost all of the to-do lists I have seen over the years (when people had them at all!)

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.

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

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