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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Ready for Anything

I would recommend this for anyone who has dipped their toes in the water of David Allen's methodology. It should be seen as a follow on from the Getting Things Done book/audiobook and, for me, acted as a reinforcement and "pep talk". Listened to it from start to finish on a journey and it motivated me to renew my attempts at following the approach. He refers in the book to how important it is to not get hung up on the fact that you haven't fully implemented it right away and to keep trying.

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.

The principles behind the method

This book is a collection of essays written about the principles behind David Allen's personal organization system. It's worth going into them but the listener should probably listen to his other book "Getting Things Done" before listening to this one.

Follow up to the brilliant Getting Things Done

David Allen is a productivity guru and this book moves on further with his philosophy of Getting Things Done. Each little essay is well written and they are very listenable. Putting his principles in to practice will help you gain a "mind like water" and generally unburden you from a lot of your everyday stress. Once you basically take on board the essence of GTD, you will find you have a better handle on a lot of the day to day struggle with work and with home.



If you have ever seen 43 things or 43 folders on the web, these websites all sprang from GTD and GTD is a worldwide phenomenon with a lot of avid followers. I have all three of his books and I was pleased to find this one on audio book, it suits the audio format well - i just wish that the original GTD and his third book Making It All Work were also available.

Sadly, not Getting Things Done

I am a Getting Things Done evangelist, and use the system daily. Sadly, David doesn't seem to have any more insights into productivity tips as this book didn't give me anything new.

A must read

One of those few books that really deserves to be read (listen).
Anybody interested in understanding the key elements of managing ourselves in an autonomous way cannot avoid to know what Allen is explaining here.

For the GTD practitioner

There is a lot of subtle advise and core underlying GTD techniques and ways to think about how you implement and use GTD in all areas of your life. Highly recommend once you have implemented GTD for 6 months or more.

Vague inspiration

Is there anything you would change about this book?

Give it more structure; more substance. Unexpectedly, not a single concrete system is described, suggested or explained, only rather vague general concepts and ideas.

Would you ever listen to anything by David Allen again?

Maybe

Would you be willing to try another one of David Allen’s performances?

Not for its own value - only if book came highly recommended

Was Ready for Anything worth the listening time?

Yes as it made going through traffic less boring and contained 2-3 inspirational ideas, much repeated

Motivating

This is really motivating and inspired me to be a more productive person. Change my life a little in a way.

No real insight, no scientific data

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

The book is a pseudoscientific narrative about the benefits of lists. No real data, no real insight, no discoveries to be made in it

Would you ever listen to anything by David Allen again?

No

You didn’t love this book--but did it have any redeeming qualities?

It is true that lists are very useful and that reviewing them regularly is very important. That is all you will learn with this book.