A quick tip that will pay huge dividends in your career and life: reach out to one new person a week and ask them out to lunch, even if their job has nothing to do with yours. Tell them you want to learn about what they do and offer to tell them more about your role. Take the time to actually get to know the person—schedule your coffee or lunch or

“My clients are very busy, but are often so overwhelmed by everything they want or have to do, that it becomes difficult to recognize what the priorities are for them,” she told me. “So they just try to work on a lot and hope they make progress that way.”

The first suggestion is simple to implement: apply the heuristic of reducing whatever task list you come up with for a given day by somewhere between 25 and 50 percent. As mentioned, humans are wildly optimistic when we estimate how much time is needed to complete cognitive efforts. Blanket reduction rules, like cutting your initial task list by a