Sunday, November 20, 2011

Ready for Anything by David Allen

at Amazon.com
I'm a fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done approach to personal productivity and while I haven't drunk all the bathwater I have implemented (to my benefit) many of the ideas his two books, GTD and Making it All Work. Therefore, I figured Ready for Anything would be a nice addition to my bookshelf.

I was wrong.

Each of the 52 principles referred to in the subtitle are a 2-4 page micro essay that's more motivational than instructional or reinforcing. I get the impression that it be a good introduction to Allen's principles for reading on an airplane or somewhere else where your time may be limited. It took me a long, long time to get as far into the book as I did.

I couldn't finish the book.

So even though I'm still a fan of the GTD approach to productivity, I can't really recommend Ready for Anything.


2 comments:

Jeff Waters said...

Brother from another mother, I couldn't finish it either. Still love GTD, though!

John said...

Which one of us should be more concerned?

GTD is good because it gives me a framework for managing my work and an incremental implementation seems to be a good way to get it in place.

My current problem with my GTD implementation (in Outlook) is task reminders that ring constantly like wind chimes. I did come up with a way to fix that which involves something similar to the weekly review.