Name: Ready for Anything
Rating: 3.7 (68 reviews)
Author: David Allen

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Learn how to make space in your life for creative and rewarding projects.

Will you ever find the time and energy to work on the projects you love? Or will you have to resign yourself to the fact that the demands of everyday living will always get in the way of having a creative and fulfilling life?

Based on management consultant David Allen’s popular productivity newsletter, Ready For Anything covers a lot of ground, providing insight into the causes of many time- and productivity-management issues. While much of this is a gloss on Allen’s best-selling Getting Things Done, Ready For Anything also sets out to answer an important question: How can you make time and space in your life for creative, meaningful work?

The following blinks will offer a few answers to that question. In them, you’ll find out:

why memorizing a shopping list can limit your creativity
why it’s good advice to feed your dog before planning a major art gallery heist
why it’s sometimes good to expect something bad to happen
why micro-managing your working life might actually be an obstacle to doing the work itself
and how it’s possible for you to write a magnum opus, even though you only seem to have a few moments to yourself each day.

Key idea 1 of 9

Having too many things on your mind will hamper your creativity.

Unlike those tasks that don't demand much from your brain – like filling out forms, writing a shopping list or responding to a routine email – creative work requires lots of “mental horsepower.”

Why is this?

First, creative work is a mental balancing act. At any one time, a creative act requires that you keep in mind – and evaluate – many different considerations simultaneously.

For example, when a screenwriter is in the process of writing a script, she has to reckon with many different things. She must come up with a convincing story and a compelling narrative. She will need to invent effective visual metaphors for the characters' emotional states – like, using heavy rainfall to symbolize sadness. She'll have to ensure that the script doesn't require too many different shooting locations, as that will increase production costs. And she'll also have to do a lot of background research, especially if her story is set in an ancient era, or something similar.

Balancing all of these factors simultaneously requires a lot of mental effort. Moreover, that effort depends on us having a kind of mental “storage space.” However, for most of us, this space is at a premium.

All of the information that will be relevant in the short- to mid-term is stored in what we'll call a kind of psychic RAM. The information that we store there ranges from the subtotal of a bill that you're calculating to the fact that you need to buy milk. Crucially, creative thought also depends on this psychic RAM.

Unfortunately, though, the capacity of psychic RAM is limited. Attempting to keep in mind a lot of information at once will result in your RAM becoming too full to process any new ideas. Which means, of course, that your creativity will suffer.

If we cannot be creative while our heads are filled with mundane details, memos, facts and so on, then it follows that we must find a way to clear our minds of such information.

Key idea 2 of 9

To maximize your creativity, don't keep all your promising ideas and plans in your head.

As we've seen, storing too much information in your psychic RAM will hinder your creativity. But there are also other reasons to stop trying to store all your ideas in your head.

First, if you don't set down an idea when it comes to you, it may very well be unavailable when you need it.

Unlock the full key idea

Key idea 3 of 9

Being aware of your job, goals and current tasks will enable you to make good decisions about the work to come.

Imagine that you get the opportunity you've been waiting for: the chance to shoot a documentary. Then reality kicks in – unfortunately,your plate is rather full with teaching Media Science at a university.

How do you decide whether you can fit making that film into your schedule?

Unlock the full key idea

Key idea 4 of 9

The best plans prepare for difficulties and interruptions ahead of time.

No matter your area of work, every project you plan will involve its own set of risks and difficulties, such as bad weather, or an investor who pulls out, and so on. However, it is often possible to prepare for things that might go awry.

In fact, the best time to deal with potential obstacles is while a project is still in the planning stages, and not when it's already underway. During this time, there are many opportunities to prepare for things that may go wrong.

Unlock the full key idea

Key idea 5 of 9

The right kind of organization will help you to get things done – and do creative work.

At first glance, it may seem that productivity-management rules and routines simply aren't conducive to creative work – but they actually are.

If your work is well-organized, you can achieve more in less time. For example, if you make many to-do lists, but never really organize the tasks correctly, you'll end up overwhelmed: just imagine how you'll feel when confronted with a desk plastered with various forms and files.

Unlock the full key idea

Key idea 6 of 9

Putting too much effort into organizing your life can keep you from getting things done or being creative.

As we've seen, getting organized can be extremely beneficial. However, managing every aspect of your life down to the smallest detail can be counterproductive. While being organized is certainly necessary, it's also crucial that you remain flexible.

Why?

Unlock the full key idea

Key idea 7 of 9

To reach your long-term goals, translate them into short-term action steps.

Imagine an English teacher who has created many interesting characters and has a great idea for an intriguing story. However, the act of transforming these ideas into a novel seems like far too ambitious a project, given that there's just too little time: too many lessons to plan, students to teach and assignments to correct.

Sound familiar?

Unlock the full key idea

Key idea 8 of 9

If a team isn't getting things done, improving team communication may help.

So far, we've learned how to make our individual lives more efficient. Now, in this final blink, we'll see how to increase efficiency when working as part of a team.

Ideally, a team should be far more productive than a group of isolated employees. Sometimes, however, teams fail to cooperate productively. That’s when it might help to be on the lookout for communication problems.

Unlock the full key idea

Key idea 9 of 9

Final Summary

The key message in this book:

If you want to be more creative and productive in your personal or professional life, then you have to prepare yourself. This involves using techniques to free up your “psychic RAM” as well as developing the mental flexibility to effectively shift your focus to wherever it’s needed at any given time.

Unlock the full key idea

Ready for Anything summary