Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life - Hardcover

Allen, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670032506 ISBN 13: 9780670032501

Verlag: Viking Pr, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The author of Getting Things Done and editor of the popular e-newsletter, Principles of Productivity presents fifty-two principles for working productively and with stability while reducing stress and enhancing creativity. 60,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Allen is president of the David Allen Company and has more than two decades' experience as a management consultant and executive coach, having worked with organizations such as Merck, the Ford Foundation, and the U.S. Navy. He has been featured in Fortune, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications.

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Introduction:Making It Easy to Take It Easy

MAXIMUM PRODUCTIVITY is making something happen=furniture, freeways, or fun=with as little effort as possible. The fact that we have 8efforte at all, though, implies that we confront resistance and impediments when we want to get anything done. Improving productivity has a lot to do with dealing more effectively with the hindrances, barriers, and distractions that show up in our way=anything that opposes or weakens our forward motion. In a totally frictionless world, everything would just appear as soon as it was imagined=there would be little need to train for greater flexibility and focus or to install better systems and approaches. In the world you and I inhabit, however, to really get what we want most effectively, we have to be ready for anything. And there are things we can all do, anytime, that make it easier to take things in stride and stay the course.

Ifve spent more than two decades exploring the best methods to achieve a more relaxed, positive, and sustainable way to live and work. And as a management consultant and productivity coach, Ifve helped thousands of professionals implement what Ifve discovered to be the best ways to work more productively and get more enjoyment from what theyfre doing. When people gain a method of achieving that kind of balance in their day-to-day endeavors, no matter whatfs going on, they have easier access to more of their intuition and creativity. They become better at processing information, managing their thoughts and feelings, focusing on results, and trusting their judgments about what to do next. They have a systematic approach in place for dealing with themselves and their work, which is far more useful than merely relying on ad hoc, reactive behaviors to bail them out of the pressures and crises of their world. When people know they have a process in place to handle any situation, they are more relaxed. When theyfre relaxed, everything improves. More gets done, with less effort, and a host of other wonderful side effects emerge that add to the outcomes of their efforts and the quality of their life.

The methods I teach came from the behaviors and the systems I discovered that worked the best to keep us at our best. Since the early 1980s, they have been tested and proven highly effective, from the ground up=for both individuals and organizations. The steps of this discovery and this process were described in my first book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Its success around the world indicated that people across a wide spectrum of cultures and careers seemed ready for this information and eager for change. They were tired of feeling overwhelmed by their jobs and the business of life. They wanted to regain lost opportunities for creative thinking and playing. They were looking for a new approach, a system that could be counted on, no matter what kind of job they had or what kind of day they were having. They wanted a structure=but a natural one that matched their complex lifestyles and created more freedom, not more constraint.

While I was uncovering and implementing the details of the what, when, and how that made up the heart of my programs, I started doing something else: I began writing about the why behind these steps. Why did they work so well? Why did they consistently help people function at a higher capacity and feel better? Was something deeper at work here? What was the foundation behind this success? There seemed to be underlying principles that wove themselves in and through the methodology=factors that held true no matter when, where, or with whom they were applied.

A person can be an excellent race-car driver without knowing anything about gravity, even though gravity is the underlying force affecting everything one does behind the wheel. To win races, the driver needs only to master the steering, the speed on the straightaways, and the technique of the turns, and to remember to keep the car under control at all times. You do your job, and gravity will do its job. Manage yourself, and the automobile will be fine. But what if driving fast isnft enough after a while? What if you want to know more about why your skills work so well and how they keep you from crashing and burning? What if you want to get closer to the secrets behind your own successes? And what if understanding those secrets leads to more tools for productivity and even greater achievements?

In 1997, I began exploring these questions by compiling a set of principles that seemed to lie at the foundation of productive behavior and writing informal essays about the implications and applications of those truths in everyday life. I started to enlarge on my core premise that onefs ability to be productive was directly proportional to onefs ability to relax. I dug further into four main areas of productive behavior:

1. Capturing and corralling all our internal and external 8open loopse to regain clarity and energy.
2. Consciously managing our focus within the multiple levels of outcomes and responsibilities to which we are committed.
3. Creating trusted structures and consistent usage of them to trigger the appropriate focus and reminders as necessary.
4. Grounding it all with flexible, forward motion at the physical-action level.

I discovered that people didnft need more discipline as such=they needed a disciplined approach. They didnft need to work harder=they needed to define their work better at multiple levels of detail and stay focused on all of them simultaneously.

Behind all this lay the 8mind like watere concept, an image Ifd come across years ago while studying karate. When you throw a pebble into a pond, what does the water do? It responds with total appropriateness to the force and mass of the rock. It does nothing more and nothing less. It doesnft overreact or underreact. It doesnft react at all. It simply interacts with whatever comes to it and then returns to its natural state. The water can do that only by design. A human being can act this way only if he or she has a conscious system in place and if that system is built on principles that can withstand chaos and stress. Those principles must be aligned with something deeper in our nature.

Two years after I began writing the essays, I decided to write and distribute a newsletter to those who were becoming familiar with my methods. My hope was to galvanize a network of practitioners and to build a community of people dedicated to doing good work, sharing their best practices, and celebrating life. Each newsletter was intended to reinforce and expand the ideas behind relaxed control and performance excellence. I wondered if people would respond.

My answer soon exceeded my expectations. Within two years, our readership had grown tenfold, from two thousand to twenty thousand subscribers. A year later it had reached thirty thousand and was still gathering momentum. People were sending out the newsletters through their own online networks. They were being e-mailed across the country and around the globe. Other folks were printing, stapling, and binding hard copies and distributing them to their friends and colleagues. Still others were posting them in elevators at work. They were showing up everywhere. Some of the essays leaned more toward practical advice, and others delved below the surface. All were developing and growing my understanding of the 8why,e and all were adding value to what had come before.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive=people seemed hungry for reinforcement of the basics, exploration of the subtleties, and the adventure of the surprises produced by some of the simplest techniques, tools, and awarenesses. These were hardly people in the Remedial Living class either=the most profound rewards from using this material have been reported by some...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Viking Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0670032506
• ISBN 13: 9780670032501
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Zeitfracht Medien GmbH; info-medien@zeitfracht.de; ; Ferdinand-Jühlke-Straße 7; Erfurt; 99095; Deutschland