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.