used his mathematical skills to analyze bombing missions in the Army Air Force’s Office of Statistical Control, and his success there led to the job at Ford. Then he went back to the military to become secretary of defense, introducing the Pentagon to elaborate new planning tools based on principles of “systems analysis” and reams of data. He seemed the very model of a modern warrior until his plans for the Vietnam War turned out so badly. While he sat in the Pentagon plotting the demise of the enemy based on the casualty statistics he saw, soldiers in the jungle were discovering that they couldn’t put any faith in those statistics or plans. The Vietnam debacle gave military leaders a new respect for the need for flexibility, and that lesson was reinforced by the plans that went awry in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes, as Napoleon said, you just have to engage and improvise.
So how exactly does a modern general plan for the future? That question was put to a group of them recently by a psychologist who had been invited to give a talk at the Pentagon about managing time and resources. To warm up the elite group of generals, he asked them all to write a summary of their approach to managing their affairs. To keep it short, he instructed each to do this in twenty-five words or less. The exercise stumped most of them. None of the distinguished men in uniform could come up with anything.
The only general who managed a response was the lone woman in the room. She had already had a distinguished career, having worked her way up through the ranks and been wounded in combat in Iraq. Her summary of her approach was as follows: “First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three on down.”
The other generals might have objected to her approach, arguing that everyone has more than two goals, and that some projects—like, say, D-day—require more than two steps. But this general was on to something. Hers was a simple version of a strategy for reconciling the long-term with the short-term, the fussy with the fuzzy. She was aiming, as we will see, for a mind like water.
Drew Carey’s Dream In-Box
One day in Hollywood, when faced with the usual dispiriting sight of his desk, Drew Carey had a fantasy. He looked at the mounds of paper and thought: What would David Allen do? Or, more precisely: What if I could get David Allen to come here and deal with this stuff?
Until that point, Carey was a fairly typical victim of information overload, if a celebrity can ever be called typical. He’d starred in his own hit sitcom, run improv-comedy shows on television, written a bestselling memoir, hosted game shows, led philanthropic and political causes, owned a soccer team—but none of those challenges was as daunting as his in-box or to-do list. Even with an assistant, he couldn’t keep up with the phone calls to return, the scripts to read, the meetings to juggle, the charity dinners to emcee, the dozens of e-mails every day requiring an immediate answer. The desk of his home office was littered with unpaid bills, unanswered letters, unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises.
“I have self-control in some ways, but not in others,” Carey says. “It depends on what’s at stake. I just got so fed up with the mess in my office. I had boxes of paperwork and a desk I couldn’t get through. Both sides of my computer were piled up with crap and old mail. You know, it was at a point where I couldn’t think. I always felt out of control. I always knew I had stuff to do. You can’t read a book and enjoy yourself because in the back of your mind you feel like, I should go through those e-mails I have. You’re never really at rest.”
Carey had picked up a copy of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, yet the subtitle’s bliss continued to elude him. “I was reading the book and doing some of the stuff in it, but not all of it. I was so
So how exactly does a modern general plan for the future? That question was put to a group of them recently by a psychologist who had been invited to give a talk at the Pentagon about managing time and resources. To warm up the elite group of generals, he asked them all to write a summary of their approach to managing their affairs. To keep it short, he instructed each to do this in twenty-five words or less. The exercise stumped most of them. None of the distinguished men in uniform could come up with anything.
The only general who managed a response was the lone woman in the room. She had already had a distinguished career, having worked her way up through the ranks and been wounded in combat in Iraq. Her summary of her approach was as follows: “First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three on down.”
The other generals might have objected to her approach, arguing that everyone has more than two goals, and that some projects—like, say, D-day—require more than two steps. But this general was on to something. Hers was a simple version of a strategy for reconciling the long-term with the short-term, the fussy with the fuzzy. She was aiming, as we will see, for a mind like water.
Drew Carey’s Dream In-Box
One day in Hollywood, when faced with the usual dispiriting sight of his desk, Drew Carey had a fantasy. He looked at the mounds of paper and thought: What would David Allen do? Or, more precisely: What if I could get David Allen to come here and deal with this stuff?
Until that point, Carey was a fairly typical victim of information overload, if a celebrity can ever be called typical. He’d starred in his own hit sitcom, run improv-comedy shows on television, written a bestselling memoir, hosted game shows, led philanthropic and political causes, owned a soccer team—but none of those challenges was as daunting as his in-box or to-do list. Even with an assistant, he couldn’t keep up with the phone calls to return, the scripts to read, the meetings to juggle, the charity dinners to emcee, the dozens of e-mails every day requiring an immediate answer. The desk of his home office was littered with unpaid bills, unanswered letters, unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises.
“I have self-control in some ways, but not in others,” Carey says. “It depends on what’s at stake. I just got so fed up with the mess in my office. I had boxes of paperwork and a desk I couldn’t get through. Both sides of my computer were piled up with crap and old mail. You know, it was at a point where I couldn’t think. I always felt out of control. I always knew I had stuff to do. You can’t read a book and enjoy yourself because in the back of your mind you feel like, I should go through those e-mails I have. You’re never really at rest.”
Carey had picked up a copy of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, yet the subtitle’s bliss continued to elude him. “I was reading the book and doing some of the stuff in it, but not all of it. I was so
Similar Books
