Welcome to the end of the first week in January, the week where more New Year’s resolutions are broken than any other. According a study conducted in 2002, 25% of New Year’s resolutions are broken in the first week alone. The good news is that the very act of resolving to do something increases the likelihood of succes – that same study found that, after 6 months, those who set resolution were 10 times more likely to stick to their resolution than the non setters (46% versus 4%). That’s great news for many of my friends, who have publicly committed on their blogs to New Year’s resolution and goals. Over and over I see many of the same themes:
- New Year’s resolutions to get in shape
- New Year’s resolutions to eat better
- New Year’s resolutions to give up smoking
I have no doubt many of them will be successful. I’ve already discussed the importance of writing down goals, and absolutely believe that increases the likelihood of success. Having the support and social pressure from friends is another kick in the right direction. There’s one thing that has been missing from the discussions I’ve seen online however - how to balance these new resolutions with our prior commitments.
Her email closed with – “are there any books you like? what should I read?”
“Easy question” I thought to myself, as my fingers flew to the keyboard and I rattled off 10 books, then 20. I could have gone on, but I stopped.
I took a step back, and realized that my reader didn’t need yet another long lists of books – there are plenty of those online, and if you want an endless list of reading material, check out this list of all the self improvement products at Amazon (1,140 at last count).
No – she was asking for my help, to sort through it all. The more items I gave her, the less helpful I would be. A better approach would be to give her a list that provided the best value – a list of the best personal development books, and the shorter better. This was a much more difficult problem.
After a lot of thought, I cut it down from twenty to the six four three most effective personal development books I have read. While the Pareto principle may not always hold in other situation, in this case a handful of the books I’ve read are responsible for most of my achievements and personal development. These books are the ones most worth your time to build a solid foundation for overall personal development and personal productivity.
What is metawork? Metawork, executed properly, is work done to make sure you can effectively do your work.
Sometimes we THINK we’re working, when really all we’re doing is preparing for work we intend to do someday – work we may never get around to doing. Learning better ways of doing different tasks, testing out different software or tools to do those tasks – but not doing those tasks themselves
Are you guilty of using metawork as an excuse to avoid real work?
