• Ready for Anything

  • 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life
  • By: David Allen
  • Narrated by: David Allen
  • Length: 3 hrs and 6 mins
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (839 ratings)

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Ready for Anything  By  cover art

Ready for Anything

By: David Allen
Narrated by: David Allen
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Publisher's summary

Discover David Allen's powerful productivity principles and vastly increase your ability to work better, not harder - every day.

The "guru of personal productivity" - Fast Company - asks listeners what's holding them back and shows how all of us can be "ready for anything" - with a clear mind, a clear deck, and clear intentions.

Ready for Anything offers you ways to immediately:

  • Clear your head for creativity
  • Focus your attention
  • Create structures that work
  • Take action to get things moving

    Allen's simple yet powerful principles help us master the mental game of productivity - what he calls "managing your mind, not your time." In motivational, bite-size lessons, we learn how to bring the calm focus of the martial artist to the onslaught of choices, decisions, and new circumstances we are faced with daily. Each principle - from "speed up by slowing down" to "the value of a future goal is the present change it fosters" - encourages us to think in fresh ways and to take action in order to achieve more relaxed control, ease, and fun in all our activities.

    With wit, inspiration, and know-how, Ready for Anything shows us how to make things happen with less effort, stress, and ineffectiveness, and lots more energy, creativity, and clarity. This is the perfect audiobook for anyone wanting to work and live at his or her very best.

  • ©2003 David Allen (P)2003 Simon & Schuster Inc. All Rights Reserved. AUDIOWORKS is an imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division, Simon & Schuster, Inc.

    What listeners say about Ready for Anything

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    • Overall
      5 out of 5 stars

    Good follow-up to

    David expands on the basics that he laid out in his first book "Getting Things Done." So, if you enjoyed his first book and found his methods useful, you'll also get a lot out of "Ready for Anything." However, since this book build on the previous one. I would highly recommend listening to "Getting Things Done" first.

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    83 people found this helpful

    • Overall
      5 out of 5 stars

    Excellent follow-up

    This is a follow-up from David Allen's first book "Getting things done". I highly recommend both, but this book makes better sense if you read "Getting things done" first.

    "Getting things done" tells all the techniques to get things done. "Ready for anything" is a collection of essays about how to make sure the system works better, and thoughts about how to organize yourself and how to think about this. This is one of the audiobooks I listen to the most, as the different thoughts David Allen has about things becomes useful for me as I learn to organize my life, my stuff and my thoughts.

    My advice: Buy "Getting things done" first. Use it for a month or three, then buy this one. And re-listen to it every six months. Or when you need some advice or inspiration for your life.

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    24 people found this helpful

    • Overall
      2 out of 5 stars

    Buy

    Having loved David's above-mentioned book, I eagerly bought and listened to this, but was quickly disappointed. I found that this book contained no substantially new ideas, and focused more of getting yourself in the right state of mind, than actually doing anything to get yourself out of dis-organization. I think I will get more out of re-reading the previous title as a refresher instead. Chalk this up as a preference over being "done" versus just being "ready."

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    22 people found this helpful

    • Overall
      2 out of 5 stars

    Zen and the Art of Getting Things Done

    Getting Things Done, on the same subject, is a much more useful and practical treatment of the same themes. Ready for Anything is no more than an extended introduction, which is disappointing because GTD can get you on the right track to actually doing what RFA merely celebrates.

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    22 people found this helpful

    • Overall
      3 out of 5 stars

    Rendundant Material

    This is a good book, especially if you have not read the original "Getting Things Done." I felt there was a significant amount of overlap between the two books, and generally preferred the delivery in the original better.

    If you are new to Dave Allen, you might like "Getting Things Done" better. If you are already a follower, you might scan through the pages of the print book for content review before committing to the audio book.

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    13 people found this helpful

    • Overall
      2 out of 5 stars

    Not as good as GTD...

    I really wanted to love this book, but I found it difficult to get through. Not so much for the level of the content, but more so for the lack of focus, organization (ironic) and the deadpan delivery. There's a bunch of good advice in here - it's just not as well organized and leaves you with less of an action plan than the excellent 'GTD'. This book sounds like the dumping ground for all the extras bits and pieces that didn't fit into the first book. I'd pass on this and save your credit for something else.

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    10 people found this helpful

    • Overall
      5 out of 5 stars

    I Need Both Books and I'm Waiting for a Third!!

    I've listened to David Allen's books several times and I'll continue to buy whatever he publishes. I've read the other reviews and I agree that there is an overlap of information in the two books. That is normal and logical - text books are the same way. There are enough new ideas and/or unique ways of stating his points to motivate me again and anew! Maybe it depends on where you're starting from ~ if you get up and exercise before you go to work or you can't go to bed with dishes in your sink, then maybe one book would give you enough ideas and tactics for a great jumpstart. If you wish you had a clean glass in the house, you might want both books! :) Also, these are NOT books about housework. The examples given are all varied from the business world to family life, but I apply the principles to my own personal cross to bear!!

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    9 people found this helpful

    • Overall
      3 out of 5 stars

    Abridgements....

    Tiresome and a cheat in this case. The dead tree is so far superiour that I went ahead and purchased it as the audiofile is just not enough. You barely feel you've had your apetizer when Mr. Audible is hoping you've had an enjoyable listen. David Allen's book is worth the entire experience.

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    8 people found this helpful

    • Overall
      1 out of 5 stars

    Really bad

    I couldn't even get past the first hour of this audio book, it was overly simplistic and repetitious with a monotone delivery. The religious references really put me off, I felt like I was being preached to.

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    7 people found this helpful

    • Overall
      4 out of 5 stars

    Enjoyable listen

    Excellent insight and food for thought. This book covers virtually everything found in Getting Things Done but from a more philosophical perspective. I think it's more difficult to implement the concepts found in this book as they're presented ... but that may just be me. It also is filled with a lot of killer quotes.

    It does cover much more than Getting Things Done so I would recommend them both.

    As a side note, this book has sort of a new-age-spiritual thing about it. It was just enough to make me uncomfortable if not a little queasy.

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    6 people found this helpful