Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity pdfdrive com

The Significance of Applied Outcome Thinking
What I want to emphasize now is how learning to process the details of our work
and lives with this clear and consistent system can affect others and ourselves in
significant ways we may not expect.
As I’ve said, employing next-action decision-making results in clarity,
productivity, accountability, and empowerment. Exactly the same results happen
when you hold yourself to the discipline of identifying the real results you want
and, more specifically, the projects you need to define in order to produce them.
Defining specific projects and next actions that address real quality-of-
life issues is productivity at its best.
It’s all connected. You can’t really define the right action until you know the
outcome, and your outcome is disconnected from reality if you’re not clear about
what you need to do physically to make it happen. You can get at it from either
direction, and you must, to get things done.
As an expert in whole-brain learning and good friend of mine, Steven Snyder,
put it, “There are only two problems in life: (1) you know what you want, and
you don’t know how to get it; and/or (2) you don’t know what you want.” If
that’s true (and I think it is) then there are only two solutions:
• Make it up.
• Make it happen.
This can be construed from the models of yin/yang, right brain/left brain,
creator/destroyer—or whatever equivalent works best for you. The truth is, our
energy as human beings seems to have a dualistic and teleological reality—we
create and identify with things that aren’t real yet on all the levels we
experience; and when we do, we recognize how to restructure our current world
to morph it into the new one, and experience an impetus to make it so.
We are constantly creating and fulfilling.
Things that have your attention need your 
in
tention engaged. “What does this
mean to me?” “Why is it here?” “What do I want to have be true about this?”
(“What’s the successful outcome?”) Everything you experience as incomplete
must have a reference point for “complete.”

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Life affords no higher pleasure than that of
surmounting difficulties, passing from one step
of success to another, forming new wishes and
seeing them gratified.
—Dr. Samuel Johnson
Once you’ve decided that there is something to be changed and a mold to fill,
you ask yourself, “How do I now make this happen?” and/or “What resources do
I need to allocate to make it happen?” (“What’s the next action?”).
Your life and work are made up of outcomes and actions. When your
operational behavior is grooved to organize everything that comes your way, at
all levels, based upon those dynamics, a deep alignment occurs, and wondrous
things emerge. You become highly productive. You make things up, and you
make them happen.

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