“One of the easiest ways to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments is by injecting the assumption that whatever you’re doing needs to last forever and ever. Which means that the concept has to scale from 5 people to 5,000 or from 100,000 users to 100 million. That’s a terrible way to get from those 5 people to 5,000 or reach those 100 million users.”

“Effective goals are written. Many of us daydream about the things we would like to accomplish. But before we can achieve those dreams we must pick up a pen and write down the things that we most want to achieve. Once your goal is committed to paper, it becomes concrete. When you write out a goal, you give it life. You actually see what you’re thinking. You have a target to aim for … something that takes shape and grows legs. Your goal is no longer just a dream, it has now been given a sense of reality. Writing down your goals is always the first step toward achieving them. Goals not written down fall victim to the ‘out of sight … out of mind’ phenomenon!”

“David Allen sits in his small office in a cottage behind his house in Ojai, Calif., talking business with a visitor. Suddenly he stops. “That reminds me,” he says. He scribbles the words ‘bird feed’ on a piece of blank notebook paper and tosses it into his inbox. It’s an ordinary moment in an ordinary day. But for Allen and his legion of followers, it holds the key to salvation. He has emptied his mind of a nagging task, placed it into a trusted system for processing, and casually returned to his conversation.”

“This post officially announces that my side project (originally named cause & effect and later named certitude) is over. For those of you who weren’t subjected to one of my enthusiastic rants, here was my Graham Question: Can we predict the outcome of a software development project with objective observation? …So I set out to write a piece of software that, pure and simple, would look at a software development project and show you a traffic light: a green light would mean that the project looks like it’s on track, a yellow light would mean that the project needed help, and a red light would mean that there is no hope… So how and why did I fail?”

“WhoDoes is a fresh and intuitive web-based project management system. WhoDoes is designed to assist you and your team in planning projects of different complexity, from the small project to the biggest one. With WhoDoes you can manage your activities and share information with your team, whether you are in the same office or distributed all over the World.”

“The message of Mark Hurst’s new book, Bit Literacy: In an age of infinite bits, time and attention are the scarce resources. The solution is to constantly manage your bits with the goal of reaching an ‘empty’ state. Hurst offers practical, opinionated advice on how to get to zero. Just like in his Uncle Mark’s shopping guides, he doesn’t shy away from taking a stand. It’s nice to read someone who says “do it this way” instead of being wishy-washy.”

“Unclutterer is the website for home and office organization. It’s not just for the helplessly disorganized who would lose their head if it wasn’t attached to them, and pack rats looking to put their stashes on a diet, but also for obsessive compulsive neat freaks looking to squeeze even more order into their lives. We hope we can make getting and staying organized fun and informative.”

“It’s a simple fact that you can never be productive if you take on too many commitments — you simply spread yourself too thin and will not be able to get anything done, at least not well or on time. But requests for your time are coming in all the time — through phone, email, IM or in person. To stay productive, and minimize stress, you have to learn the Gentle Art of Saying No — an art that many people have problems with.”

“Here are twelve quick tips for organizing your desk. These are things that have worked well for me. Most of them are probably applicable to others as well.”

“The Big Rocks are the major things you want to get done this week. A report, launching a new website, going to the gym, spending time with your spouse and kids, achieving your dreams. These Big Rocks get pushed back from week to week because we never have time to do them — our days fill up too quickly, and before we know it, weeks have passed and the Big Rocks are still sitting on the side, untouched.”

“Knowledge workers attend lots of meetings. We also have tons of loose bits of information that need collecting during the day. It all needs to be processed. To jog our memory, we take notes. Most of the time this is with pen and paper - unless your culture is laptop/Tablet PC friendly. Many aren’t. I use David Allen’s GTD system and now buckle it into Gmail as my sole collection bucket.”

“For procrastination, I use the timed dash method if I really need to get something done. I set a timer for 15 minutes, work solidly through that time, then set the timer for 10 minutes and take a break. I prefer, though, to have projects that are so inherently interesting that I don’t need to use external motivation like that.”

“In a productive, well-ordered life two elements must be managed: time and work. Poor time-managers fail to recognize the difference between the two elements: Work is infinite; time is finite. Therefore, you must manage your time, not your work.”

“If you’re like most people, you’ve got too much to do and not enough time to do it. The e-mail inbox is always overflowing and the list of to-dos never ends. You always feel that twinge of guilt because you’re never spending quite enough time on what you should be. What’s even more frustrating is that the more you work, the more it seems there is to do. Argh! So how do we manage the madness?”

“Erik K. Antonsson, a prof at Caltech, has a page of quotations related to design and engineering. Some samples: ‘If a major project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and its exact schedule at the beginning. And if in fact you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.’ -Joseph G. Gavin, Jr., discussing the design of the lunar module that landed NASA astronauts on the moon.”