Book Summary: Ready For Anything
David Allen’s second book, Ready for Anything is about helping you make space for the projects that come your way. It is the follow up to his highly successful first book Getting Things Done.
Related Book Summaries:
Getting Things Done – David Allen – Book Summary
7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey – Book Summary
Quotes:
Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.
You can do anything but not everything.
Ready For Anything Book Summary Notes:
- Learn to make space in your life for creative and rewarding projects. Can you find the time and energy to make room for the projects you want to do or will you simply let life get in the way.
- Having to much on your mind will limit your creativity. Creative work requires far more mental resources than simply memorising facts.
- If you let to-do lists crowd your brain they will take up the room other ideas need to flourish. We need to develop a way of capturing this info and getting it outside of our heads.
- Capture good ideas when they first occur, don’t hope they’ll stick around till later.
- Your brain is horrible at not just storing this info but also at sorting it when the time comes to use it.
- Writing down our ideas as they occur gets them out of our minds and also allows us a way to look back and evaluate them later.
- In life it pays to be aware of your current job, goals and commitments. This allows you the ability to more accurately assess new opportunities as they come in, especially if your time poor.
- Having your current responsibilities available also allows you to prioritise where you should spend your time.
- The best plans factor in difficulties and problems ahead of time.
- Organisation is important for helping you get things done. Organisation allows you to get more done in less time and generally work more efficiently.
- Being unorganised can also lead to serious bouts of procrastination which can put a dent in your productivity.
- When building a productivity system, keep it simple. While any system is better than no system, a complex overly elaborate system will limit your willingness to use it in the long run.
