Making It All Work

The Organizing Categories

The art of mastering work flow, by collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing, and doing, provides the component of control. The Natural Planning Model and the Horizons of Focus both supply perspective.

The popularity of GTD to a large extent has been due to the hunger in the expanding cadres of upper-level performers, in life and work, for a system that really works to reduce friction and increase flow. GTD provides sufficient structure to contain the complexity, although with an organic kind of flexibility that can maintain stability amid an inf

The critical factor is how comfortable you are that you can get current quickly and completely, whenever you decide to. That’s why GTD has made such comfort possible—not that you should work more intensely or more quickly, but that you know you could, successfully, if the situation demanded it.

If I asked you, “What would have to be true about a situation for you not to really care where you worked or what you were doing?” what would your answers be? Whatever they were, they would represent what you consider the core values about your work and work style.

Thought is useful when it motivates action and a hindrance when it substitutes for action. —Bill Raeder Nothing is more revealing than movement. —Martha Graham

Usually things remain disorganized when people don’t confront their meaning. To actually decide what you’re going to do with or about something demands that you deal with how you relate to its content, your agreements about it, and how it fits into the rest of your world.

Being organized simply means that where things are suits what they mean to you.

he observed that I had “uncovered the heuristic” for the success his company valued in its culture but hadn’t really known how to teach. It just modeled and expected those behaviors, such as not starting meetings without a clear objective, not allowing discussions to end without clarifying the next actions, who would be responsible for them, and so

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.