If you want to boost your productivity, it’s not enough to declare, “Now I’m going to work smarter.” You need a model to follow—or a rule of thumb to guide you.
A manageable life is about instinctively knowing what to take on and what to set aside, but very few of us have a firm hand when it comes to rejecting time-wasting or soul-depleting tasks and obligations.
To tackle your ever-expanding responsibilities, you create a to-do list. That’s a good start. The real test of your productivity, however, involves how you use your list.
When that heaping mound of work in front of you seems insurmountable, workload paralysis may set in. Your instinct: Procrastinate by surfing the Web. No, you can do better.
