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taken from "You can do anything - but not everything." interview of David Allen from http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/34/allen.html

Most people make the opposite choice. They feel such a sense of responsibility to their job and to their colleagues that they become even more harried ...

Which is utterly self-defeating. Your sense of "responsibility" is a function of your response ability. I learned that in karate. Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax. The power of a karate punch comes from speed, not muscle. And a tense muscle is a slow muscle.

In other words, you can't do things faster until you learn how to slow down. How do you slow down? It's all about the dynamic of detachment. You have to back off and be quiet. Retreat from the task at hand, so that you can gain a new perspective on what you're doing. If you get too wrapped up in all of the stuff coming at you, you lose your ability to respond appropriately and effectively. If your inbox and your outbox are completely full, or if people are screaming at you, then it's difficult to back off and think about things at a different level.

Have you ever felt as though time disappeared? Say, when you're really into a good movie? Or when you're busy doing something that you love, and the morning just flies by? From my spiritual practices, I know that when you get to some levels of existence, space and time seem to vanish. When I'm at those levels, I don't even think in terms of space and time anymore. When everything really lines up for me, speed is not an issue, because I have found my own rhythm. That rhythm may seem lightning fast or deathly slow, but inside me it's all the same. It's outside time.

Look at the best martial artists. They move very slowly. The faster you type, the slower it will feel to you, because you surf with your thinking. The same thing applies to reading: The faster you read, the more time will disappear, because you'll be able to feed stuff to your brain as fast as your brain can process it. That's why speed readers have better comprehension. They've trained their eyes to recognize stuff as fast as their brain can handle it.

But it's hard to leave space and time behind when you're distracted. If there's an open loop, space and time will find it. And anything waiting for a decision is an open loop. If there's a stack of papers on your desk, you have to decide on a course of action. As long as you've let that pile into your world, it's got a hold on you. What's the very next thing that you need to do? Until you decide on that, there's a gap between where you are and where you need to be -- a big black hole that will suck you in.