Making It All Work by David Allen

Estimated reading time is 3-4 minutes.

Summary

I really liked Allen’s first book, Getting Things Done (GTD). I was not impressed with his second book, Ready for Anything. Making It All Work is his third book. I liked it more than Ready for Anything, but it’s not even close to Getting Things Done.

Making It All Work offers a deeper look into the GTD system, but it doesn’t offer anything new. If you liked his previous books, you will probably like this one too. If you don’t have the time to read all of his books, read only Getting Things Done.

Popular Highlights

I like commenting on popular highlights when I read a book on Kindle. It’s fascinating to be able to see what other people have highlighted. It’s like reading a heavily annotated book from a public library, but you can see only the text a lot of people highlighted.

You can’t really manage time; time just is. What you can manage is yourself — your focus and your actions. (Chapter 2, page 21, 564 highlighters.)

This might be one of the rare quotes from the book that I disagree with. I think you can manage time. I really like GTD and it’s a very useful system, but Cal Newport’s ideas on time management have elevated my productivity to a new level.

“Finish your thinking” simply means to decide what the next physical thing to do is to move them forward from where they are. This is a prime example of not putting the appropriate attention on what has your attention. You need to think about your stuff more than you think, but not as much as you’re afraid you might. (Chapter 2, page 44, 314 highlighters.)

I really like the last sentence. We can make the mistake of planning too little or too much. Sometimes, when I think about planning (a day, a week, a quarter…) it sounds like a never ending task. Yet, with some discipline, it rarely takes more than a few minutes (for a day) or a few hours (for a quarter). I think that’s time well spent.

Control without perspective is micromanagement, and perspective without control is crazy-making. (Chapter 3, page 52, 467 highlighters.)

This sounds very much like Pirelli’s “Power is Nothing Without Control” slogan.

Loss of control and perspective is the natural price you will pay for being creative and productive. The trick is not how to prevent this happening, but how to shorten the time you stay in an unsettled state. (Chapter 3, page 55, 463 highlighters.)

A house that people live in can never be perfectly clean. Especially if some of those people are kids. The trick is to minimize the time the house is in total chaos.

The definition of work I will use in this book is quite universal: anything you want to get done that’s not done yet. (Chapter 3, page 56, 443 highlighters.)

Out of context, this sounds painfully obvious. In the context, he’s talking about broadening the definition of work. If you want to take a really long and relaxing vacation, that is something that you want to do and it’s not done yet, so it’s work.

If you don’t pay attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves. (Chapter 4, page 73, 514 highlighters.)

For me, that mostly means that I can write down (in a place that I know I will see soon, like my daily planner) anything that’s on my mind that I can’t or don’t want to do at the moment. That way, whatever it was, it’s out of my mind and I can focus on what I’m doing at the moment. If I can’t write it down, my mind will try to hold it in my memory, preventing me from focusing on what I’m doing.

What’s my desired outcome? What am I committed to accomplishing or finishing about this? What’s the next action? What’s the next thing I need to do to move toward that goal? (Chapter 6, page 114, 649 highlighters.)

Half of the secret to achieving clarity in any situation is asking, “What are we trying to do here?” The other half, and at least as critical, is, “What’s the next action?” (Chapter 6, page 118, 415 highlighters.)

I remember the time I learned these simple rules for project planning: what done means, what’s the next step. The simplest thing that could possibly work. The smallest amount of thinking you could possibly do. And yet, enough to get projects done.

Being organized simply means that where things are suits what they mean to you. (Chapter 7, page 130, 449 highlighters.)

Pursuing some imaginary perfect organization is meaningless. If you have everything sufficiently under control, you are organized enough.

The best criteria to determine whether or not you’ve actually thought something through sufficiently to act upon it is how clearly you can answer these three questions:

• What has to happen first?
• What does doing look like?
• Where does it happen?

(Chapter 9, page 174, 393 highlighters.)

Recently, I finished my quarterly review. It’s a few hours of checking every inbox, context and project. After a while, my brain refuses to cooperate. Having very simple rules like these help me move things forward even when I’m overwhelmed.

Quotes

Besides popular highlights, I wanted to comment on a few quotes that I liked.

Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life (Title of the book)

It’s beyond funny how many times “the Game of Work and the Business of Life” are mentioned in the book. It is surprising and thought provoking the first few times, but it gets pretty old pretty quickly.

Nothing’s new except how frequently everything is new. (Chapter 2, page 20.)

This is probably from the GTD book, it sounds very familiar. It is still very true.

…what’s different in today’s world is that in the last three days you have probably received more change-producing, project-creating, and priority-shifting input than your parents received in a month… and for some of them, in a year.

I have to talk with my parents and people of their age. Was the pace of life so crazy when they were my age?

The Mastering Work Flow model consists of five stages:

• Collect
• Process
• Organize
• Review
• Do

(Chapter 2, page 28.)

This is a productivity haiku.

In recent years I have realized that everything I have uncovered and taught touches on some aspect of increasing control and perspective—no matter where, with whom, or under what circumstances. I have reduced the GTD practices to those two dynamics, which is a more functional way to understand and work with what I had initially called “horizontal” and “vertical.” People can’t relate to “out of horizontal” nearly as easily as they can to “out of control,” and “I’ve lost perspective” is a more familiar concept than “out of vertical.” (Chapter 2, page 32.)

I remember being confused with horizontal and vertical in the GTD book. Control and perspective are much clearer to me.

… the inability to focus appropriately can certainly reach severe levels, to a large degree most people I’ve met have some version of this condition. (Chapter 2, page 36.)

What we are all born with is a mind that wanders every chance it gets. (Chapter 2, page 37.)

I thought it was my secret superpower!

But honestly, have you ever been in a quiet room, by yourself, and still gotten distracted? Sure. (Chapter 2, page 39.)

This sounds like a quote from Murderbot. It’s also the majority of my workday that I spend alone in my office, frequently distracted.

Our mind can do certain kinds of things, in a highly creative way, that still surpass anything the most powerful computer can do. (Chapter 2, page 39.)

I hope it will stay true. But who knows. Things are changing fast.

Give it a problem or a project on which to focus, and the amount of complexity it can absorb and creativity it can produce are extraordinary. Give it two problems to think about simultaneously, and it seems to blow a fuse. (Chapter 2, page 46.)

This is very much true for me. Maybe not so much the first sentence, but the second one describes me in painful detail.

Remember that your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them. (Chapter 5, page 101.)

This got me into GTD so many decades ago.

Always keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler. (Chapter 18, page 261.)

This sounds very simple and very obvious. Yet, I frequently see people doing things in a more complicated way than they should be. I’m probably guilty of this myself, but I guess it’s harder to notice something like that on yourself.

Do you know when you need to process e-mail and when to ignore it? (Chapter 19, page 267.)

I just ignore it the vast majority of the time. It worked so far.

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