Ready for Anything

52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life

By: David Allen

Narrated by: David Allen

Length: 3 hrs and 6 mins

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.

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.

Useful and to the point

It's probably helpful to first listen to Allen's other title, "Getting Things Done," which puts this in context, but "Ready for Anything" is excellent. Allen explores workflow management principles that go beyond simply being more organized and therefore more productive -- he applies these principles to personal/professional effectiveness.

"Being VS Doing, is that the question"?

I am a GTD / David Allen fan so I had to listen to this, and it was also great. This book is more philosophical (than his 2 other books), and he lets us as listeners in to his value system a fare bit. Which I resonated with.
My favorite part was about the subject of the seeming problem of: BEING VS DOING. Which I have personally been wrestling with for some time. With me implementing GTD and hearing what he says in this book, that issue has been mostly solved. A Great read/ listen!
Oliver

Advertising for his previous book

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

The whole book is geared toward convincing you to apply his system that is described in his previous book. I did not learn anything new from this one.

Would you recommend Ready for Anything to your friends? Why or why not?

no. I would recommend to just go ahead and buy his "getting things done" book. This one won't add anything to your productivity.

Relevant to most humans

While this book assumes familiarity with David Allen's productivity principles which may limit the audience, the themes inside are relevant to most people. Who doesn't want to get more done with the limited time we are given on this planet?

If you like GTD

this is a good reinforcement. If you don't like GTD, you haven't tried it long enough!

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.

(Almost) free coaching session

"Ready for Anything" in audio form is the ideal addition for paper version "Getting Things Done". First read "Getting Things Done" and then find additional motivation by listening "Ready for Anything". You will not find anything new here, but it will strengthen your actions toward cleaning up your life.

A belief system that is behind the GTD approach

While the original GTD-book was dedicated to give a detailed description of the technology, this book will enable you to feel and see what is behind scenes of the model. I especially like the conception of this book as a list of principles followed by interesting explanations.

If you like me and you want to know the underlying principles of GTD approach, you'll like this book. Also, this book was read by the author and this is great!

I love this book. Makes GTD much clearer.

Recommended strongly for anyone attempting to use Getting Things Done by David Allen to spend all their time doing and all their headspace coming up with ideas or enacting them (recommended 2015 addition over the original). A functional GTD system enhanced with these clarifying points makes getting work and life items completed feel more like a video game than a hassle.