Master Your Workday Now: Proven Strategi

The goal here is finding the work or job that refl ects your sense of purpose and that lines up with what your heart is telling you that you should do. I call this finding your life’s work.

There is in fact a mental model answer to that. It’s that we all tend to overreact to tasks when we first see them. British author Mark Forster wrote a book about this called Do It Tomorrow, in which he describes what he calls the Reactive Mind. The Reactive Mind is part of the mental model we all hold about current events. The Reactive Mind tends

So at that point you should switch to the better way of doing Defer-to-Review, where you add the concept of “extended review cycles.”

So we’ve described what sorts of tasks not to put on your Now Tasks list. All other types of tasks are candidates: all ad hoc tasks, all next steps on projects and goals, actions from e-mails, actions from meetings, and actions from phone calls. All of these should go on your tasks list. In fact, the very first and most important thing you can do t

In the Workday Mastery To-Do List, these were tasks placed on page 2. You will review these tasks weekly to see if the time has come for any of these, or if any have jumped in importance due to changing business conditions. If any do jump, you should move them to page 1, into the appropriate section.

focusing your attention most productively is your real challenge, not focusing on obstacles for long hours. For example, wouldn’t it be better to spend most of your time focused directly on achieving your positive work goals?

I add a sensory description of an outcome, so that a mental picture can emerge, one that captures the emotional impact of the new outcome.

You need to break that e-mail information-noodling habit and use other, healthier ways to get the same result. First, you can decide to no longer use frequent reading of e-mail as a way to change the pace; there are other and better ways to do that. Second, you can easily stay in the loop by checking e-mail only a few times a day; events rarely unf

Coming toward him on the belt are workday tasks and meetings that he needs to keep up with in order to “do his job.” Those things immediately in front of him are what he is working on now or that are due now; as he accomplishes these, he tosses them into his mental “ accumulated accomplishments” pile shown in Figure 4.3 and moves on to the next ite