Getting Things Done

Quotes

1. [Y]ou must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like.

2. 

   It's great to clear your psychic decks so you can go into the weekend ready for refreshment and recreation, with nothing on your mind.

3. 

   The organizing system merely provides placeholders for all your oprn loops and options so your mind can... make the necessary intuitive, moment-to-moment strategic decisions.

4. 

   First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through.

5. 

   Here's how I define "stuff": anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step.

6. 

   Most often, the reason something is "on your mind" is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet:

   • you haven't clarified exactly what the intended outcomes is;

   • you haven't decided what the very next physical action step is;

   • and/or you haven't put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust.

   That's why it's on your mind.

7. 

   The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future.

8. 

   How much of this planning model do you really need..? [A]s much as you need to get the project off your mind.

9. 

   I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than to think of them. You want to be adding value... not simply reminding yourself they exist.

10. 

    [A]nything that is held only in "psychic RAM" will take up either more or less attention than it actually deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it's that it's not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.

11. 

    If you're waiting to have good ideas before you have any ideas, you won't have many ideas.

12. 

    Before you can achieve... you'll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind... not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. ...Instead, the key ...is managing your actions. ...[T]he real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what the associated next-action steps required are.

13. 

    Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list that you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. ...[A]s soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it... in your short-term memory... part of you... thinks that you should be doing it all the time. ...[Y]ou've created instant and automatic stress and failure ...

14. 

    In order to... have nothing on your mind, you've got to know where all your actionable items are located, what they are, and that they will wait. ...[I]n a few seconds, not days.

15. 

    [I]f it's just you, attempting to come up with a "good idea" before defining your purpose, creating a vision, and collecting lots of bad ideas is likely to give you a case of creative constipation.

16. 

    The goal is to get projects and situations off your mind, but not to lose any potentially useful ideas.

17. 

    The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff”—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload.

That’s all the quotes.

17 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more