Organizing your work in intermediate packets has an extraordinary effect: you become interruption-proof. Because you rarely even try to load the entire project into your mind at once, there isn’t much to lose if someone taps you on the shoulder. (Location 234)
One of the key insights of Getting Things Done, the book on personal productivity by David Allen that spawned the worldwide movement known as GTD, was that knowledge workers could instantly and massively reduce information overload just by clearly separating actionable from non-actionable information, and then giving priority to the former. (Location 715)
the average employee tenure is plummeting (to just 2.3 years for employees ages 20–34, as of a few years ago). I believe this means that the relative importance of “non-actionable information” is rising. (Location 727)
Again and again, he hammers on the critical importance of “a good general-reference file” as “one of the biggest bottlenecks in implementing an efficient personal management system.” (Location 735)
“If you don’t have a good system for storing bad ideas, you probably don’t have one for filing good ones, either.” — David Allen (Location 742)
In an economy driven by creativity and innovation, not having a personal knowledge management (PKM) system means you’re not fully leveraging what you learn. You’re not collecting your ideas and making serendipitous connections between them. You’re not offloading your best thinking onto reliable tools, freeing your conscious mind to focus on creating novel value. (Location 744)
Allen goes on to lay out many of the qualities such a reference system should have: “You will resist the whole process of capturing information if your reference systems are not fast, functional, and fun.” “The great thing about external brainstorming is that in addition to capturing your original ideas, it can…continually reflect them back to you .” “There must be zero resistance to using the systems we have.” “…the ease of capturing and storing has generated a write-only syndrome: all they’re doing is capturing information — not actually accessing and using it intelligently.” “We need to have a way to overview our mass of collected information with some form of effective categorization.” (Location 748)
Creating a system of personal knowledge management is a design problem. And like all design problems, it must balance and trade off multiple priorities against each other: the balance between order and serendipity; between being goal-directed and allowing our thinking to lead us to unexpected places; between supporting our existing viewpoints and challenging us with new ones. (Location 767)
You can create the right placeholder for any type of potentially meaningful data.” (Location 785)
It requires looking for ways to do less, not assuming doing more is always better. It requires self-awareness and self-acceptance, seeing our limiting beliefs as opportunities for explosive growth, if we have the courage to face them. (Location 788)
The ancient Greeks called it ecstasis — “stepping beyond oneself.” It featured prominently in their (in)famous nine-day ritual known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. Pop psychology refers to it simply as “flow.” (Location 810)
We learn faster when we pay attention and see the world for what it truly is, not for what it should have been. (Location 1660)