Do you ever get the sense that you don’t have time to deal with the secondary things, because you have to deal with so many consistently demanding fires and crises? Well, guess where most of those fires and crises come from? Correct — from secondary things that were ignored because of all the fires and [...]

Without knowing where you are on the map, you won’t know whether to turn left or right going out the door, no matter how clear your goal.  It’s a real challenge to acknowledge consciously the total inventory of what you’ve created in your work and your life.
— David Allen, Ready for Anything

One of the best ways to procrastinate and deflate real motivation is to create big goals that are interpreted as “long term.”  As soon as we set these goals or identify these kinds of projects, we tend to feel smug and self-congratulatory and pseudocomplete about them, just because we’ve committed to them, and our drive [...]