Quotes About Clarity

Handle what has your attention and you'll then discover what really has your attention.

You have to use your mind to get things off your mind.

The trick is to ensure not so much that what you are doing is, for you, the right thing, all the time (how, ultimately, could you know that for sure?) but that you are firmly in the driver's seat with a functioning process for discovering and engaging with your best choice.

More often than not, it seems that people are having thoughts, though not really thinking about what they're thinking about—at least not in an effective way that resolves, advances, or manages the content.

Write all your notes and quotes on separate three-by-five-inch cards. Then, when you get ready to organize your thinking, just spread them all out on the floor, see the natural structure that emerges, and figure out what's missing.

Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because what "doing" would look like, and where it happens, hasn't been decided. In

Clarifying things on the front end, when they first appear on the radar, rather than on the back end, after trouble has developed, allows people to reap the benefits of managing action. Getting

First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear.

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

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.—Dee Hock

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.

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.

One of the most powerful skills in the world of knowledge work, and one of the most important to hone and develop, is creating clear outcomes. This is not as self-evident as it may sound. We need to constantly define (and redefine) what we're trying to accomplish on many different levels, and consistently reallocate resources toward getting these tasks completed as effectively and efficiently as possible.

It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

When you're not sure where you're going or what's really important to you, you'll never know when enough is enough.

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

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!)

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

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

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.

Being organized means nothing more or less than where something is matches what it means to you.