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Ready for Anything
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The great nemesis of our lives - PRODUCTIVITY! It's the kind of thing you can't live with and you can't live without - a cyclical conundrum. To quote yet another clich - what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Think about it, how do you find the time to build a personal management system that finds you more time?
Ready for Anything is a brilliantly simple tool offering suggestions on how to increase your efficiency and therefore your creativity and peace of mind. David Allen breaks it down into easily read concepts based on his observations of four main areas of productive behavior:
- Capturing and corralling all our internal and external "open loops" to regain clarity and energy.
- Consciously managing our focus within multiple levels of outcomes and responsibilities to which we are committed.
- Creating trusted structures and consistent usage of them to trigger the appropriate focus and reminders as necessary.
- Grounding it all with flexible, forward motion at the physical-action level.
David's first book, Getting Things Done, offers fundamental practices to a more efficient workflow and planning model. I'll be recommending this book to you as soon as I have accessed my own personal results for its practices. Ready for Anything takes a bit of a different approach - using foundational practices and basic mental philosophies to prepare yourself for any opportunity that arises. For me, the most inspirational concept delivered in Ready for Anything is this - "one's ability to be productive is directly proportional to one's ability to relax." Take the time to read this book and find out for yourself how to put productivity and relaxation back into your life.
The author of the business bestseller Getting Things Done inspires us to work better, not harder—right now.
In Getting Things Done, David Allen offered a breakthrough system to enhance productivityat work and in daily life. Now "the guru of personal productivity" (Fast Company) asks readers what is holding them back and shows how they can be ready for anythingwith a clear mind, a clear deck, and clear intentions.
Based on Allen's highly popular e-newsletter, Principles of Productivity, Ready for Anything offers fifty-two principles to clear your head, focus productively, create structures that work, and get in motion, including:
- Stability on one level opens creativity on another.
- You can't win a game you haven't defined.
- The value of a future goal is the present change it fosters.
With wit, motivational insights, and inspiring quotes, Ready for Anything shows readers how to make things happen with less effort, stress, and ineffectiveness, and lots more energy, creativity, and clarity. This is the perfect book for anyone wanting to work and live at their very best.
David Allen is an international author, lecturer, and founder and President of the David Allen Company, a management consulting, coaching, and training company.
In the last twenty years he has developed and implemented productivity improvement programs for over a half million professionals in hundreds of organizations worldwide, including many Fortune 500 corporations and U.S. Government agencies. He delivers public and in-house seminars, executive workflow coaching, and consulting programs that address interactive and organizational productivity and alignment issues.
Having logged thousands of hours working with individual executives and senior professionals, David has developed a revolutionary, unique and highly practical system for improving personal and organizational productivity.
He is the author of two books -the international best-selling book, Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity (Viking; 2001) and Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life (Viking; 2003). He has published numerous essays and articles in professional journals and periodicals on the topic of personal effectiveness. More than 150 of his original essays have been featured in his e-newsletter, "David Allen's Productivity Principles," with a global readership of more than 43,000 people. He is a popular keynote speaker on the topics of time and stress management, individual and team productivity, and high performance work practices.
"We continue to explore the connection between the simple and the sublime. The most powerful techniques and principles are usually the most basic - applied. But there is an art to implementation and application, and that is our frontier.
It is not hard to understand conceptually the value of outcome thinking and next-action decision-making. But installing that as the standard for processing everything in life and work, and systematizing the results so the right things happen most easily, elegantly, and efficiently - that's black belt behavior. There are always new and bigger horizons to conquer, but getting there in style - a really effective and sustainable style - is a fabulous end in itself."
ISBN: 670032506
Format: Hardcover, 192pp
Pub. Date: September 15, 2003
Publisher:Viking Press
about jeni...
Nationally-recognized author, speaker and corporate trainer, Jeni Herberger leverages 18 years experience within the design industry providing others with practical strategies on doing business better and living life fuller.
"I want to take the opportunity to share with you just a few of the books I believe hold philosophies and practices that enhance our lives. Besides that, you just can't beat a good book!"
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Jeni is a featured speaker at the 2007 How Design Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, June 10 – 13 and the In-HOWse Designer Conference in Austin, Texas, September 9 – 11.