David Allen is Wired

David Allen's books on productivity have become must reading for many executives and managers. This Wired article is a revealing look at the man behind the books. An excerpt:

He compares the person working at a desk with a person walking through the forest. There is a surfeit of things that one could possibly pay attention to, and the primary task is to pick out, from the surrounding environment, those signals that require processing. "Any email could be either a snake in the grass or a berry," he says. "Which is it?" To resolve this question by reference to one's highest purpose would be inefficient. When it comes to processing incoming signals, Allen recommends sorting by the most immediate criteria: How long will it take, what is your location, what devices do you have at hand, what other people are present? These direct, contextual cues do not demand any profound insight. Tasks can be assessed extremely rapidly and executed without friction. Where earlier gurus tried to help their followers make their deep personal commitments explicit and easily accessible to memory, Allen is selling a kind of technology-enabled forgetting.