Top 87 Quotes & Sayings by David Allen - Page 2

Focusing on your values may provide you with meaning, but it won't simplify things.

Frankly, I'm more of a researcher, teacher,motivat or, and coach than I am an entrepreneur.

A vision of a desired future allows you to engage and identify immediately in your focus with an improved condition. It changes what you perceive and how you perform NOW. It's not about achieving something in time. It's rather about the quality of choices you are making in this moment - what you choose to perceive, feel, and do. It's about getting the most out of your experience.

You don't actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it "done.

A Keyring? Achievements? These are not WoW-specific things. They are common sense. They exist in the real world.

There's a lot of reasons why deadline-driven may actually - it's not necessarily a bad thing, it just all it does is it speeds up and makes you a little proactive about decision making.

Why do people complain that there's no time to get their work done? Because there is more work to do than the work they think they have to do.

There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.

Distracting reactions about anything undermine a clear mind about anything else.

If you’re at zero backlog, it’s a whole lot easier to change priorities.

I think positive stress is actually a good thing. It's sort of the stretch goal "Wow, let me see how much faster I can run" or "Let me see how many more ideas I can generate in five minutes."

Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, your mind thinks you should do right now. Frankly, as soon add you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do two things at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pin-pointed.

Virtually every problem that would show up in your business can be traced back to communications; somebody didn't talk to somebody about something.

You can do anything, not everything

There are no interruptions, only mismanaged inputs

Isn't it interesting that people feel best about themselves right before they go on vacation? They've cleared up all of their to-do piles, closed up transactions, renewed old promises with themselves. My most basic suggestion is that people should do that more than just once a year.

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 in the moment.

Change - even change meant to improve our lives - creates stress. We can get comfortable with our problems.

Some people have to move, physically, to "get" something. But if you're stuck in a chair, that's not your limitation - it's simply not an optimal condition for you.

If we didn't have any stress, we'd never grow and you'd probably wouldn't test your mettle and you'd probably wouldn't come up with a lot of creative stuff that people come up with by being somewhat on the edge.

The real issue is how to make appropriate choices about what to do at any point in time. The real issue is how we manage actions.

Stress such as you experience in exercise is what creates builds focus, strength, and the capability for expanded expression; and the same is true for any kind of performance.

Mosquitos ruin the safari.

People allow themselves to get distracted; I think ultimately, probably the biggest thing that gets in the way of people doing what they ought to be doing at any point in time is distraction.

Creativity and freedom are two sides of the same coin. I like the best of both worlds.

The problem is, is when your focus is created by a crisis, then the frontal lobe shuts down essentially, the frontal cortex which is your intuitive intelligence. So you get very clever and very stupid in a crisis. Also, you pump adrenalin into your body from what you - physiologically you'll crash.

Without a gut-level sense that you are ultimately in control of what's happening to you, you won't even consider the option that you could manage it better.