Ready for Anything by David Allen

Summary

I was expecting more from the author of Getting Things Done (GTD). If you have read Getting Things Done and liked it, you will probably like this book. If you only have the time for one of his books, read Getting Things Done.

To my disappointment, Ready for Anything doesn’t present anything new.

As far as I understood, his newsletters were edited into a book. I was not impressed. Maybe the most useful part of the book is a short summary of his Getting Things Done system at the end of the book.

Popular Highlights

I was reading the book on Kindle. Popular highlights is an interesting Kindle feature. It’s interesting to see what other people thought was important. Since this book has only ten popular highlights, I’ll comment on all of them.

…one’s ability to be productive was directly proportional to one’s ability to relax. (Introduction, page xix, 213 highlighters.)

The older I get, the more I understand how important it is, not only to spend time not working, but to spend time resting.

An old Asian proverb says, “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.” (Chapter 1, page 4, 127 highlighters.)

Similar to “If you want peace, prepare for war.” In the context of productivity, this can be paraphrased into: the more organized you are, the more time and energy you will have to deal with unexpected circumstances.

Stress comes from unkept agreements with yourself. You can relieve that stress only by canceling the agreement, keeping the agreement, or renegotiating it. But you can’t renegotiate agreements with yourself that you forgot you made. Because psychic RAM has no sense of past or future, things filed there push on you to be done all the time. They must be made conscious, and kept so, to alleviate the pressure. (Chapter 2, page 6, 113 highlighters.)

One of the most important practices of GTD is putting anything that is on your mind into a trusted system. You can use any technology for that, but for start, paper is enough. When you get everything you need or want to do on paper, you can reason about it.

Concentration is the key to power, in physics and in life, and cooperation is the lubricant for the efficient flow of that energy. (Chapter 3, page 10, 144 highlighters.)

It is more important than ever to be able to concentrate on one thing for long periods of time. It’s a skill that’s becoming more and more rare.

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials. —Lin Yutang (Chapter 3, page 11, 206 highlighters.)

You can never do everything you want to do. Having clarity on what you have to do and what you want to do gives you the choice not to do things.

What are your current tasks? These are the physical actions you need to take right now about all your commitments and responsibilities: phone calls, e-mails, conversations, errands, brainstorming ideas, and so on. Typically a person on any day will have between a hundred and two hundred of these to do. (Chapter 4, page 13, 114 highlighters.)

Some days, it seems to me that I have between one thousand and two thousand tasks to do.

It’s possible to own too much. A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure. —Lee Segall (Chapter 5, page 15, 175 highlighters.)

According to Wikipedia’s Segal’s law article, this is misattributed to Lee Segall. It’s still an interesting quote. Today, it is very easy to have too many things. From physical things to obligations.

Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up—not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you’re doing (and not doing) at any time. (Chapter 5, page 16, 188 highlighters.)

This has to be the shortest summary of GTD. Unfortunately, it can be understood only by people that have implemented GTD. For people that would need this the most, it’s too succinct to be actionable.

Success in life may have more to do with how fast you can accept and get started on the new game than with how good you got at playing any of the old ones. (Chapter 14, page 44, 185 highlighters.)

In the world that’s changing faster and faster, being able to react quickly is a superpower.

An hour of effective, precise, hard, disciplined, and integrated thinking can be worth a month of hard work. —David Kekich (Chapter 22, page 67, 145 highlighters.)

I don’t think I was ever able to work in a way that in an hour I was able to do a month’s worth of work. I agree that knowing that what you’re working on is exactly what you should be working on, doing everything you can not to be disturbed and then focusing on a single task for a long period of time multiplies the output in the long run.

Quotes

In addition to popular highlights, I wanted to comment on a few other quotes from the book.

If not controlled, work will flow to the competent man until he submerges. —Charles Boyle (Chapter 5, page 16.)

I think this is the reality of work today. Anybody can assign work to you by sending you an email message. Being able to control incoming work is more and more important. (I was not aware that Charles Boyle is a fictional character.)

If everyone deals with his or her communications within a few hours, high productivity usually occurs. (Chapter 31, page 92.)

This might be true for some jobs. For my job, nothing would happen if I replied to the vast majority of communications in about a business day. I usually check messages only after lunch. I need several hours of concentration in the morning to do my job well.

When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your purpose is draining the swamp. —George Napper (Chapter 34, page 101.)

If you don’t control your everyday obligations, it’s hard to see the bigger picture.

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: “meetings.” —Dave Barry (Chapter 35, page 103.) To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent. —Robert Copeland (Chapter 35, page 104.) A committee can make a decision that is dumber than any of its members. —David Coblitz (Chapter 35, page 105.)

I have grouped these quotes together because they talk about a similar problem. Instead of being productive, we go to meetings. Instead of doing, we communicate.

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy. —Dave Barry (Chapter 40, page 119.)

Sometimes, it’s really hard to distinguish between being brilliant and being crazy.

“Let’s create a system so you won’t have to think at all!” But it can’t be done. (Chapter 40, page 123.)

I’ve heard critics of GTD saying that GTD’s purpose is to do thinking upfront and then just “crank widgets”. I don’t think that’s correct. GTD is a very useful system, but it doesn’t replace thinking.

Some people have nothing very well organized. And some people have nothing, very well organized. —Unknown (Chapter 40, page 123.)

A trap of any system, including GTD, is that you could spend so much time organizing, there’s no time left for doing. This is the best quote of the book. I think about it frequently.

If everything’s under control, you’re going too slow. —Mario Andretti (Chapter 40, page 123.)

The purpose of GTD is not to have absolutely everything organized, all the time. You should review your system at least once a week and get things organized enough.

Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried. —Henry David Thoreau For fast-acting relief, try slowing down. —Lily Tomlin When you least feel like slowing down may be the most critical time to do it. (Chapter 47, page 140.)

I’m not sure I would understand or appreciate this when I was younger. When you’re young, you want to live fast. The desire to slow down matures with age.

When you’re in an earthquake on a unicycle, juggling chain saws, the only way to survive is to tack down everything you can tack down, so you can deal with what you can’t. —Stephen Chakwin (Chapter 51, page 150.)

This is a perfect quote to end a productivity book. Life does sometimes feel like juggling chainsaws on a unicycle during an earthquake. There is a way to deal with that situation. Simplify.