I run into a surprising number of people who explain away their lack of organization and discipline by emphasizing the importance of maintaining freedom and flexibility.  Sadly, what they desire eludes them because the truth is that the more organized and disciplined you are, the more freedom and flexibility you will have. Freedom and flexibility without organization and discipline is simply illusory.  If you do not know what you need to do and when you’re going to do it, life’s tasks become overwhelming and you’re forced to pursue moments of escape.  You avail yourself of your “freedom and flexibility”, but you cannot fully enjoy it because you are distracted by thoughts and concerns about what you may have forgotten or neglected at work or home. Contrast this with being more organized and disciplined.  With good organization, you’ll know what you need to do, when you need to do it and…

Feeling stressed, strained, worried or overwhelmed by all your tasks and responsibilities?  Read on… Anytime you do something more than once, pause to consider how a more efficient approach could save you time instead of just doing enough to complete the task now.  The key is to always calculate time savings on an annual basis and to take this approach with a lot of tasks.  Over the course of a single year, the efficiencies accumulate and have a significant impact.  This is what I call the accumulated efficiency effect. Let’s say you type a very similar two paragraph email twice a month.  It takes you four and a half minutes each time.  Whenever the occasion arises, four and half minutes never seem costly enough to put a better process in place. What if you took thirty seconds to save the text as a template?  Now you’re saving four minutes twice…