Quotes About Efficiency

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

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

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.

There are no interruptions—there are only mismanaged inputs.

Funnel all potentially meaningful inputs through minimal channels, directed to you for easily accessed review and assessment about their nature.

A "Projects" list • Project support material • Calendared actions and information • "Next Actions" lists • A "Waiting For" list • Reference material • A "Someday/Maybe" list

Review whatever lists, overviews, and orientation maps you need to, as often as you need to, to get their contents off your mind. After

The quality of our workflow management is only as good as the weakest link in this five-phase chain, so all the links must be integrated and supported with consistent standards.

Having an organizational tool that allows you to easily make lists such as these, ad hoc, is quite worthwhile.

capturing all the things that might need to get done or have usefulness for you—

How much available data could be relevant to doing those projects "better"? The answer is: an infinite amount, easily accessible, or at least potentially so, through the Internet. On

Minute-to-minute and day-to-day you don't have time to think. You need to have already thought. Obviously

Getting Things Done is not simply about getting things done. It's about being appropriately engaged with your work and life.

Between the time you woke up today and now, did you think of anything you needed to do that you still haven't done? Have you had that thought more than once? Why? It's a waste of time and energy to keep thinking about something that you make no progress on. And it only adds to your anxiety about what you should be doing and aren't.

In order to deal effectively with all of that, you must first identify and collect all those things that are "ringing your bell" in some way, and then plan how to handle them.

In knowledge work . . . the task is not given; it has to be determined. 'What are the expected results from this work?' is . . . the key question in making knowledge workers productive. And it is a question that demands risky decisions. There is usually no right answer; there are choices instead. And results have to be clearly specified, if productivity is to be achieved.

The Weekly Review is the time to: Gather and process all your stuff. Review your system. Update your lists. Get clean, clear, current, and complete. You have to use your mind to get things off your mind. Most

Anyone with the need to be accountable to deal with more than what he or she can complete in the moment has the opportunity to do so more easily and elegantly than in the mind.

Esa preocupación permanente y estéril por todas las cosas que tenemos que hacer es por sí sola la mayor consumidora de tiempo y energía. —KERRY GLEESON

A task left undone remains undone in two places—at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they gnaw at your conscience. —Brahma Kumaris

the calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all.

Keep everything in your head or out of your head. If it's in between, you won't trust either one.

This constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy. —Kerry Gleeson

The big secret to efficient creative and productive thinking and action is to put the right things in your focus at the right time.