Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “metawork”
We’re almost done with 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. Within 6 months, over half of us will have given up.
Why? Why is it that so many resolutions are doomed from the start?
Here’s one major reason I’ve found with clients: you need to learn how to balance these new resolutions with your prior commitments.
“A good plan implemented today is better than a perfect plan implemented tomorrow.”
– George Patton
You may be familiar with this old Abraham Lincoln quote: “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”
And for many people, that kind of perspective can be a tremendous life changer.
If you’ve been going through your whole life without regard for any preparation, a little preparation will dramatically improve your productivity.
However, there is a flip side to this.
Get too consumed with planning and preparing, and you risk drowning in metawork: tasks that may make you feel productive, but in the end produce no real results without action to back it up.
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.