The book of the week

Ready for anything
By: David Allen
This book was written after his first two books. Which are “Getting Things Done” and “Making It All Work”, I plan on doing book reports on both of these books in the future.
This book is full of systematic approaches for everyday life that will help open up the mind so it can be more creative, productive, stress free, and quick witted. One way that David described this was, “When you throw a pebble in a pond, what does the water do? It responds with total appropriateness to force and mass of the rock. It does nothing more and nothing less. It doesn’t overreact or under react.” He goes on to say that there are four major areas of productive behavior: completion, focus, structure, and action.
1. Getting ready for the unknown. He states that there will always be some unknown event that will throw a wrench into things, and to be ready for it. How? By getting some extra reading done when waiting on a meeting to start, or making some quick phone calls. The little things will add up.
2. Why getting organized usually doesn’t work. People try to do too much at once. People will collect, process, organize, review, and do all at once. David has a systemic way of putting together a “to do list.” First, ask is it actionable? Next what’s the outcome? Then what is the next action? Then organize all the results into appropriate categories. Now review all the option of what to do.
3. When the center is the edge. What he means by this is that people will try to get too organized or not enough. Be able to concentrate on what needs to get done, and then cooperating with yourself and others are the keys to getting around this.
4. Getting to where you’re going requires knowing where you are. “A map is not functional until you know where you are on it.” In order to set goals you must first know where you are at in life, and there are six questions to ask yourself in the book that will help you define it.
5. The danger of not as important projects. When making “to do lists” people will prioritize them and that will get them in trouble. Those projects on the bottom of the list will end up coming back and biting them in the butt. When making your to do list don’t prioritize use the system from number two.
6. If it’s on your mind, it’s probably not getting done. Keeping things in your head and telling yourself that you’ll do it later will probably not help. Writing things down will help you save energy and time. Trying to remember it later will waste time and energy that you don’t have.
7. Creativity shows up when there’s space. Mention earlier, getting everything out of your head by writing it down will help you think more clearly and creativity.
8. For more clarity, look from a higher place. The game of life doesn’t always stay the same. You could be working on something, toward a goal, and it just changes on you. The way to handle this is to reestablish what the goal is, and then decide what the next move is.
9. Putting something in front if your door at night so you remember to bring it with you the next day is a great strategy. Well, you can do the same thing with your mind. Because you don’t have to worry about other things if you have them all written down, you can focus on whatever it is that needs to be focused on.
10. The cleaner the purpose, the more ways to fulfill it. By knowing what outcome you want from something, makes it easier to finish. If we don’t know why we’re doing something our objectives lack meaning. Rehabs have a goal, and that’s to get finished so they can be sold or rented. There many more goals that come with a rehab like getting the money out to move on to the next deal. Defining the goal more will help to fulfill it easier.
11. Your system has to be better than your mind for your mind to let go. If you’re questioning the system then you still will waste time and energy on it. Your systems and lists also need to be updated every so offend.
The things that I learned in this book will take weeks to implement, and I will need to refer back to it many time I’m sure. I see this helping me at work and on personal goals. Right now the most important item that I got out of this was always having something to write ideas on. It’s something that we should all do.