David Allen on Focus Quotes

"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. Ch. 8"

"When you "have to get organized," you're probably not appropriately invested yet in what you need to get organized for."

"[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. Ch. 11"

"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 ... Ch. 11"

"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. Ch. 1"

"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. Ch. 7"

"What people call an "Interruption" is simply new input inappropriately managed. 19 June 2009"

"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. Ch. 1"

"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. Ch. 1"

"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. Ch. 11"

"The goal is to get projects and situations off your mind, but not to lose any potentially useful ideas. Ch. 3"