INTERESTING ARTICLE in today's NY Times about decorator Dan Ho. Great line:

At the core of his philosophy is the belief that our relentless attention to renovation and reorganizing, to building and rebuilding, distracts us from the more demanding work of becoming better partners, caretakers and friends.

Great Lines: David Allen

WHEN DAVID ALLEN PRESENTED AT OUR CONFERENCE last week I kept a running list of what I thought were his "great lines"[1]: one-liners he'd toss out that I wanted to remember and reference. (I do this often when I hear presenters or speakers; to see great lines by information design guru Edward Tufte, go here). Here are David's:

• My stuff is just advanced common sense.
• Decision making: It gets more constipated the higher up you get.
• My definition of successful executives is those who solve more problems than they create.
• From my experience, "team" means "nobody."
• Listen folks, there are certain times when you should not be talking to key people about important things.
• GSA: The gnawing sense of anxiety.
• Dumb and happy is the place to be.
• You don't want to be so stressed? Don't care so much.
• A lot of your competitive edge is your ability to deal with surprise.
• You can only feel good about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing.
• Work is a martial art.
• Quoting Peter Drucker: “Your toughest job is defining your work.”
• Stress comes from breaking agreements with yourself.
• If you keep track of agreements, you'll make fewer.
• When you break things down to the next action step, it’s really easy to do.
• You can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing.
• Your mind doesn't have a mind.
• The biggest barrier to implementation is addiction to stress.
• If you’re not willing to do it all, don't bother doing anything.
• We start with the individual out.

1. GTD fans: I actually keep a list of great lines in the memo section of my PDA  / Outlook. It's a great way to capture lines from books, speeches, etc. that you want to remember later for inspiration, use in writing, etc.

More On Tufte

I'VE POSTED MY TUFTE NOTES below as a MindMap using the MindManager browser viewer plugin. ( If you prefer to see it full screen, click here.) Note that the hyperlinks (the little IE "e"s in the map) and the notes (the little notes icons) all work; click the hyperlinks and go to the link, hover over the notes and read the notes. To expand a topic click the little "+" next to it's bubble, and click the little "-" to shrink a topic. You can move around the map with a right-click and drag of your mouse.

 

If you're not using Internet Explorer, you won't see anything. If that's the case, you may click here for a graphic of the map (which you can't browse interactively, but which you can print - note that it's a 1.5 meg file).

For the textually inclined, I've posted them in outline form in the extended entry (via the MindManager "export to Word" function -- I didn't clean 'em up, so take em' as you find 'em). It was a great session; recommended.