From David Allen’s Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life (p. 96):
When you have to focus on your system, you are detouring energy that could be used to create and produce with your system.
The objective of system installation, change, or enhancement is to get “system” off your mind again as soon as possible.
The better your systems, the more you don’t know you have them. The less attention you pay to them, the more functional they probably are. The only time you will notice them is when they don’t work or when you have to be too conscious about your use of them. You want to be working, doing, thinking, creating, and dealing with things — not focused on how you’re doing them.
You want to enjoy driving your car in the countryside without thinking about how to shift gears or work the climate control.
Creating smoothly running silent systems is often the greatest improvement opportunity for enhanced productivity.
Nine out of ten times, people have workflow systems that don’t work, because they are too much work.
Most of the organizing gear and software sold in the last twenty-five years makes sense conceptually but doesn’t function as fast as what people are trying to coordinate. When the amount of what has to be managed increases in speed and volume, a system will start to fall apart if its design is flawed or the habits of the operator are not grooved on “automatic.”