READY FOR ANYTHING
52 Productivity Principles For Work & Life
Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life – the second book of David Allen, famous productivity guru.
Here you’ll find two parts of review. Each of them describes one major area of productivity, according to Ready For Everything.
Part II
The Second Major Area of Productive Behavior: Focus
1. For greater clarity, shift your focus to a higher plane
When things get tight or unexpected problems arise, that’s actually a great opportunity to reassess what you should be doing. To do this in practice, you have to remove yourself from your present stresses by:
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Accepting your present realities.
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Refocusing on what your goals are.
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Decide and take the next physical move forward.
The sooner you get moving again, the better. There’s nothing to be gained by commiserating over bad breaks, so get back into action. Remind yourself the old battles count for nothing.
2. To start seeing patterns, visualize the outcome first
The human brain is actually very good at recognizing patterns. To harness this ability, visualize the outcome you desire first, in as much detail as possible. This will trigger your mind to start recognizing and noting the habits, competencies and methods which will be required to achieve that goal in reality.
Mentally draw the blueprint by visualizing your outcome and then let your mind fill in the blanks on how to go about realizing that objective. Things might not happen exactly as planned, but you’ll be amazed at what you do ultimately end up accomplishing.
3. Do what’s most important, not what’s easiest
Always prioritize your tasks in a good system which makes sense to you. Your time should be allocated to doing what’s most important for the achievement of your goals – rather than what’s most recent, loudest or in-your-face.
To do this in practice, you’ll need to develop your own task reminder and rating system. This will probably need to be more sophisticated than Post-it notes on your computer screen or phone slips left on your desk. The steps are simple:
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Centralize all your tasks in one consistent location.
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Set priorities in the context of what’s most and least important.
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Make deliberate choices good about what to do next.
4. Your energy will always follow your thoughts
As a reminder system, many people leave items they have to take with them by the front door. That way, they are reminded of those items when they go to leave. The same principle applies to what you think about. To work towards your goals, leave reminders in places where you’ll take notice of them frequently.
To achieve this, find something that suits your work style. For example, you might write down your long-term goals and affirmations on 3x5 index cards you carry with you or have displayed in prominent positions around your house. Consistently channel your thoughts and your actions will follow in the same direction.
When you first start thinking about a long-term goal, it will be difficult because you won’t be able to visualize all the details. As you continue to think about the same goal again and again, it will become easier and easier until your mind delivers a plan to achieve what you’re thinking about. Consciously and deliberately focus your thinking in this way, and you’ll be pointing your mental energy towards your goals. That will activate your thinking even more, enhancing your opportunities to find ways to deliver what’s required.
5. The clearer your thinking, the better you will perform
To enhance your creative instincts, clarify the purpose of why you are doing whatever you’re doing. Take an inventory of all your major assets and procedures. You’ll probably find many of them relate to historical needs rather than present requirements. Clear them out. Write down a purpose for each, and dispose of any that have outlived their usefulness. The more specific and unambiguous you are about your long-term goals, the easier it becomes to unleash your creativity. Clear away the clutter and move forward.
6. Aim to be the best at whatever you do
If you’re absolutely committed to doing your very best at whatever you do rather than attempting to just be good enough to get by, you’ll find previously untapped reservoirs of creativity and intelligence will open up to you. This will be refreshing but a little scary because you’ll have to leave behind your self-doubts and commit to excellence. Those who are attempting to excel in everything they attempt, however, experience incredible exhilaration and energy. This, in turn, will be highly motivational and satisfying. It all starts with a commitment to excellence.
7. To get different results in life, change your focus
How fast can you get back to a “ready” state of mind when unexpected events have occurred? Professionals get into the habit of refocusing in this way all the time, so they can be centered and balanced moving forward rather than mulling over past misfortunes. To achieve more with your life, you need to develop the ability to get back to “ready” quickly and frequently.
8. Learn how to bootstrap your thinking
Always carry something with you to capture the positive thoughts that will come to you from time to time. As you mentally try and put your challenges into perspective, quite often solutions to problems with come to you out of the blue. Capture those ideas before they are replaced by different thoughts. Stimulate your thinking by carrying with you some personal affirmations and goals. You’ll be amazed at how many great ideas will come to you over the course of an average day if you only take the time and effort to encourage and then capture them.
9. Think clearly about where you need to be
To increase your personal productivity, you need to get into the habit of doing three things consistently well:
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Make decisions about what the next step is for all of the projects you’re working on.
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Write down these actions and keep a centralized list for all the projects you currently have active. (By writing everything down, you can then concentrate with a clear mind on the task at hand rather than worrying about neglecting something).
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Put reminders in places where you’ll see them at an appropriate time to encourage you to actually get into action on each project.
These are the three master skills of productivity, and yet almost everyone will admit they can and should improve significantly in these skills.
10. Trust your system
Once you’ve captured, organized, tracked and planned all your commitments, you’re then able to attack the present moment with all your energy rather than having something nagging at the back of your mind. In other words, once you have your system in place, trust it implicitly to remind you of everything you have to do. Focus on the task at hand with all your mental energy and then go on to the next task with equal fervor. This is far better than jumbled and disjointed thinking about all the elements of your life.
11. Efficiency requires certainty of direction
If you inject clarity of purpose into your life, you’ll find that you’ll have a much better perspective on the big picture issues as well. By focusing more on the reason for doing things and less on the mechanics of the tasks themselves, you also become more open to inspiration. You get a clearer sense on where everything fits in the grand scheme, rather than having your vision blurred by the actual mechanics of anything.
In essence, efficiency (which everyone strives for) only becomes possible when you have first determined how to be most effective in doing the right things.
12. To get “in the zone”, focus on one thing at a time
The hallmark of high performance is an ability to give full attention to the task at hand. This is easy when something obviously has top priority, but most situations in life are far more ambiguous than that. The real key is to have everything else in order as part of a workable system. When that occurs, your conscious mind can focus on the moment rather than dedicating part of your mental capacity to trying to remember what else you have on.
The key to getting more done can be summed up as: Achieving the appropriate amount of attention focused on the most appropriate task for the appropriate length of time and with the appropriate perspective applied. Do that consistently well and you’ll be “in the zone” for the bulk of your working career. You’ll also achieve more than you ever thought possible.
13. The real value of a goal is the change it fosters
The value of a future goal is not limited to what you will receive when you achieve it in the future. Rather, a goal changes what you perceive and how you act in the present. A good goal changes the quality and substance of the decisions you make today. It affects what you choose to feel, do and experience at this moment in time.
This is why goals have a dual nature. In one sense, a goal specifies a destination, but in another sense it also defines the quality of the journey. Set exciting goals for your own personal future and you’ll find your present activities become equally invigorating because you know where they lead. This balance between outer circumstances and inner self-dialogue is dynamic and healthy. You can take great satisfaction from your outer activities, secure in the knowledge that your inner thinking is also changing to align itself with the direction you want to head. Achieve this day-in and day-out and your life will become a succession of smaller victories leading to a great goal.
Buy or Don’t Buy?
A better title for
Ready For Anything would have been
52 Essays on the Getting Things Done Philosophy, because that’s exactly what this book is. It takes specific points from
Getting Things Done and hones in on them, explaining why they’re important and fitting them into a context of broader life. For anyone who reads it, some of the essays will seem obvious, while others will make you think just a bit. The ones that fall into each category will vary from reader to reader.
So should you read
Ready For Anything? If you’ve never read
Getting Things Done, it’s a great place to get your toes wet without jumping into the deep end of the pool. If you’ve read
Getting Things Done and enjoyed it, then it’s also a good read (though simple in a few places) because it polishes and analyzes some of the key concepts from the book.
The group that shouldn’t really buy this are the ones that read
Getting Things Done and simply didn’t like it at all - this book espouses much of the same philosophy, and if you don’t find any value at all in the philosophy, then you won’t find any value in reading
Ready For Anything.
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