The One Minute Workflow Manager

This is from the book "Ready for Anything - 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life" by David Allen.

David's answer to the question "What is the one thing we do that gets in the way of being productive ?" is as follows:

It's not one thing but five things all wrapped together:
1. People keep stuff in their head.
2. They don't decide what they need to do about stuff they know they need to do something about.
3. They don't organize action reminders and support materials in functional categories.
4. They don't maintain and review a complete and objective inventory of their commitments.
5. Then they waste energy and burn out, allowing their busyness to be driven by what's latest and loudest,hoping it's the right thing to do but never feeling the relief that it is.

And the solution:
1.Get everything out of your head.
2.Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows - not when it blows up.
3.Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories.
4.Keep your system current,complete and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you are doing.

Makes sense ... just like the quote below:

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. - Father Alfred D'Souza