“Ready for Anything – 52 Principles for an Increased Productivity” by David Allen

Hey AIESEC Estonia!

I’m Philippe, LCP from Belgium, and I would like to tell you about a book that helped me a lot in this crazy-busy AIESEC life…

Surely you know a lot more about your own life than I do… but if there’s one thing that I might know about it, it’s this: busy as all AIESECers, you are often spend the whole day running around and doing things you needed to do for this or that person, buying things you need for meetings or maybe filling out applications for Belgian conferences (Hint: we have great TtT’s!). Then, at night, you come home and say “aah damn, I forgot to send that mail!” and you absolutely needed to do that, so you need to open your laptop and start… again!

Having a short-term memory, it happened to me all the time, UNTIL I read this book called “Ready for Anything – 52 Principles for an Increased Productivity” by David Allen, who also wrote “Getting Things Done”. 

Honestly, I never read ALL 52 principles, because I wouldn’t remember them anyways, but it did teach me a few things that have been very useful up till now: 

• Keep a list of everything: write down all of the things that are in your mind, doesn’t matter if you need to do it now, later, maybe someday or yesterday! 
• The author himself had a list of 137 things to do… impossible it may seem, but at least he KNEW what he had to do, because it was written and he could always remind himself. In the same time, this list gives your mind a great freedom of thought and creativity: instead of constantly trying to remember what you had to do, you can use your mind now freely to think about how to change, create, design, do… which is far more productive! Plus, it allows you to make up more free time to relax your mind, go for a walk in the parc… don’t worry, everything is written down…
• Keep this list in an easily accessible, preferably digital way, always within your reach. Use a gadget, palmtop, cell phone, or just a small book in your pocket, but make sure you can reach it whenever you need it!
• Don’t fool yourself: if you think of something now, you probably won’t remember it in 1 hour… write it down immediately or you will lose it.

 All of this, and much more, allows you to understand how to design a working style that enables you to use your mind in a much more productive and effective way!

It helps you to become better, at (almost) everything you do. I sincerely hope your LC invests in this, and other books, for its members to read about this type of topics, so that in term, you and your LC can benefit from increased productivity.

 AIESECly yours,

Philippe Verschorren
President
Local Committee of AIESEC VUB

Brussels, Belgium
www.aiesecvub.be