Getting thing done

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WELCOME TO A gold mine of insights into strategies for how to have

more energy, be more relaxed, and get a lot more accomplished

with much less effort. If you're like me, you like getting things

done and doing them well, and yet you also want to savor life in

ways that seem increasingly elusive if not downright impossible if

you're working too hard. This doesn't have to be an either-or

proposition. It is possible to be effectively doing while you are

delightfully being, in your ordinary workaday world.

I think efficiency is a good thing. Maybe what you're doing is

important, interesting, or useful; or maybe it isn't but it has to be

done anyway. In the first case you want to get as much return as

you can on your investment of time and energy. In

the second, you want to get on to other things as fast

as you can, without any nagging loose ends.

And whatever you're doing, you'd probably like to

be more relaxed, confident that whatever you're doing

at the moment is just what you need to be doing—that

having a beer with your staff after hours, gazing at your

sleeping child in his or her crib at midnight, answering

the e-mail in front of you, or spending a few informal

minutes with the potential new client after the meeting

is exactly what you ought to be doing, as you're doing it.

Teaching you how to be maximally efficient and

relaxed, whenever you need or want to be, was my main purpose

in writing this book.

I have searched for a long time, as you may have, for answers

to the questions of what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

And after twenty-plus years of developing and applying new

methods for personal and organizational productivity, alongside

years of rigorous exploration in the self-development arena, I can

attest that there is no single, once-and-for-all solution. No soft￾ware, seminar, cool personal planner, or personal mission state￾ment will simplify your workday or make your choices for you as

you move through your day, week, and life. What's more, just

when you learn how to enhance your productivity and decision￾making at one level, you'll graduate to the next accepted batch of

responsibilities and creative goals, whose new challenges will defy

the ability of any simple formula or buzzword-du-jour to get you

what you want, the way you want to get it.

But if there's no single means of perfecting personal organi￾zation and productivity, there are things we can do to facilitate

them. As I have personally matured, from year to year, I've found

deeper and more meaningful, more significant things to focus on

and be aware of and do. And I've uncovered simple processes that

we can all learn to use that will vastly improve our ability to deal

proactively and constructively with the mundane realities of the

world.