Quotes by

“The kingdom is not an amorphous jumble of regions, but a closely organized state in which the character of one region is close to that of its neighbor. There are few sharp boundaries. Rather, the l...”

“The general disposition of the land is one of metals in the west, giving way, as you travel eastward, to a varied landscape of nonmetals, which terminates in largely inert elements at the eastern s...”

“It was a great achievement of the early chemists — with the crude experimental techniques available also with the ever-astonishing power of human reason (as potent then as now) — to discover this r...”

“First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, th...”

“Most often, the reason something is on your mind is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet:• you haven't clarified exactly what the intended outcomes is;• you haven't decide...”

“Here's how I define stuff: anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the ...”

“Before you can achieve... you'll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind... not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. ...Instead, the key ...is managing y...”

“The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized stuff—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like...”

“The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future.”

“If you're waiting to have good ideas before you have any ideas, you won't have many ideas.”

“[I]f it's just you, attempting to come up with a good idea before defining your purpose, creating a vision, and collecting lots of bad ideas is likely to give you a case of creative constipation.”

“The goal is to get projects and situations off your mind, but not to lose any potentially useful ideas.”

“[Y]ou must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like.”

“How much of this planning model do you really need..? [A]s much as you need to get the project off your mind.”

“In order to... have nothing on your mind, you've got to know where all your actionable items are located, what they are, and that they will wait. ...[I]n a few seconds, not days.”

“The organizing system merely provides placeholders for all your oprn loops and options so your mind can... make the necessary intuitive, moment-to-moment strategic decisions.”

“It's great to clear your psychic decks so you can go into the weekend ready for refreshment and recreation, with nothing on your mind.”

“Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list that you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. ...[A]s soon as ...”

“[A]nything that is held only in psychic RAM will take up either more or less attention than it actually deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it's ...”

“I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than to think of them. You want to be adding value... not simply reminding yourself they exist.”