The information that follows is the result of over three decades of discovery in the field of personal and company productivity, transformed into a single guide to maximise results and minimise energy spent.
The method is based on three main activities:
- intercepting everything that we know has to be done and organising it into a logical, reliable system outside our minds;
- making choices so that our to do list is always up to date with subsequent actions to be taken or postponed to the most appropriate time;
- curating and coordinating all the elements of the system, setting different levels for each commitment which we will need to make from time to time, both to ourselves and to others.
With the dawn of a new millennium, a new paradox has been established: quality of life in general has improved while at the same time people are more stressed, because they take on more than they can manage with the resources that they have available. In addition, our work itself no longer has clear boundaries: whereas in the past it used to be clear when a task was complete – ploughing the fields, building a car – today for many jobs the boundaries are blurred. For example, the information that could enrich the page of a blog, can continue to surface over time, meaning that the blog needs to be continually updated. As if that were not enough, new communication technologies have broken down all the barriers previously set between our working and professional lives: always being “connected” for many people means “never leaving the office”!
