GTD has universal appeal because there is no agenda it tries to promote, other than providing the best and easiest ways to return a sense of control and perspective to your life, in case you’ve slipped behind in either of them.

In order to relieve the pressure of broken self-agreements, you must know that: • You have captured, clarified, and organized your commitments, at all horizons, and • You will consciously engage with them as often as you need to.

The potential double meaning of “making it all work” is also a clue to the message of this book. What if we considered everything we did as “work” instead of restricting that term to what we do for money or to what we do that’s hard?

Discussions about principles can be extremely useful if conducted at the beginning of an enterprise or project, especially if the people involved are not familiar with one another, or when it would make sense for the mode of operating together to be clarified. Such conversations are also helpful to communicate the expectations and standards of the

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

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.

Nature, one of the most complex environments we can experience, is actually relaxing to us, because our minds love infinite complexity and variation.

We start this process with a client by merely surveying his physical environment—what’s on, in, under, and around their desk? What’s on the shelves, in the cabinets, in the drawers, in the files, in the closets? What’s in his briefcase? What’s on the walls and bulletin boards and whiteboards? Anything that isn’t supplies, decoration, reference

It is a tricky business to know when you should set goals and objectives in order to achieve a focus, and when you would be better off dealing with the acceptance and management of your current reality so you can later step into new directions and responsibilities with greater stability and clarity. Only you will know the answer to that, and only