Stress-free productivity does exist

It comes a holiday season in which, in addition to visiting your family, eating a lot and buying many gifts, it is possible that there may be some time left to devote to the great pleasure of reading. Some time ago I recommended five books related to personal productivity from which you can learn many things. As far as I am concerned, they helped me.

You feel overwhelmed by the large number of commitments that you have to deal with in your life. You just can’t keep up. You have tried to apply all the tricks that you found on the web to get better organized and you’ve tried all the tools that promised to improve your productivity, but you haven’t achieved a significant improvement.

Larry Dossey is an American author and physician whose publications are somewhat controversial because of the importance he gives, in the field of medicine, to spiritual issues that have little to do with science. In 1982, Dossey coined the term “time sickness” to define the belief that many people have about the fact that time is always slipping away, that there is never enough of it, and that we must go faster and faster to keep up.

In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, the Heath brothers argue that if you want to change the way someone behaves (including yourself) you’ll need to appeal to both the Rider and the Elephant within that person.

Are you one of those people who estimate the time that it will take to complete each task, in order to know how many things you will get done at the end of the day, week or month? If so, how often do you check off all the tasks in your to-do list, at the end of the period? If you’re like almost people, the answer is “rarely”.