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.

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.

one of the best self-improvement books ever

Very useful and well presented ideas.

Many Ideas, Little Overlap

This book provides some decent reminders of the "Getting Things Done" concepts, which I earnestly like. However, the presentation on this audio edition is not easy to follow. I felt like I was playing 52 card pickup where the author's ideas were like a bunch of cards scattered on the flour (i.e., some of the ideas were interesting, many were not, but what was lacking was any real sense of flow or continuity). Further, David Allen's voice and presentation leave something to be desired. I think this program could have benefited from a professional actor/speakers delivery.

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."

MindNumbingly Repetitive

I have read a few of his books which I thought had some good tips qnd guidance. This is the most bizzarre blast of unrelated irrelevant quotes and requotes that I have ever heard. It would be better implemented as a quote of the day toilet paper roll. "Rule your mind or it will Rule you" Horace. "The mundane is not a substitutefor the sublime, its a secret passage to it" David Allen. If you feel quotes like these will lead you to productivity, then this book is for you.

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.

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.

Not Getting Things Done

What disappointed you about Ready for Anything?

This book is no way on the same level as the previous book, Getting Things Done. This seems to be a collection of blog posts from David Allen compiled into a book. Waste of time.

Waste if you’ve read getting things done

Waste of time if you’ve ready getting things done already. Nothing new at all just rambling on

Missing chapter

I would like to give 5 stars. I love everything David Allen has ever written, and I’ve read everything of his I could get my hands on since 2008.

But, I have the kindle edition of this book as well, and it contains a chapter “3. Knowing your commitments creates better choices of new ones” which seems to be entirely missing from this audible version. It jumps from chapter 2 “you can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing” to chapter 4 “getting to where you’re going requires knowing where you are”. This is a big bummer to me because that chapter was what Re-ignored my interest in this book in the first place.