Setting Deadlines Quotes

The moment you put a deadline on your dream, it becomes a goal.

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more willpower or drive, but because they know productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.

Idiot - A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

This is what I do know: A lie, however well-intended, can't prepare you for reality or change the world... To tell the truth is to provide armament against a world too full of cruelties to be defeated with simple falsehoods... It seems to me we owe the world--more, we owe ourselves--the exchange of comfort for the chance that maybe the truth can do what people always say it can. The truth may, given the opportunity, set us free.

You have to set the time frame for accomplishing your goal. If you don’t, it may take forever to reach your destination and you may get tired and change your focus. Consequently, to help you obtain and keep the sense of urgency that will help you stay focused, you have to set a deadline by which the goal has to be achieved.

I knew I was putting you under immense pressure when I rejected your work the other day. I set an impossible deadline - yet you have met it with work that I can only call outstanding. As your teacher, I had to push you to your limits so that you could recognize your own true potential.

The deadline is set and they think I am their pet.

The truth may set you free. It won't fill your fuel tank.

Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He'd had faith in that - abracadabra! But eventually the deadlines set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing - the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.

Deadlines give us the sense that we are really on our way and that we will achieve the goal – soon!

Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.

Polly was a writer of many deadlines. There were the ignorable deadlines, the not-to-be-taken-too-seriously deadlines: the deadlines-before-the-deadlines deadlines, and finally, the no-kidding-around deadlines. She set these various dates, she'd told him, to fool herself.

It was 9:30 P.M., just an hour from deadline for the second edition. Woodward began typing: A $25,000 cashier's check, apparently earmarked for the campaign chest of President Nixon, was deposited in April in the bank account of Bernard L. Barker, one of the five men arrested at the break-in and alleged bugging attempt at Democratic National Committee headquarters here June 17. The last page of copy was passed to Sussman just at the deadline. Sussman set his pen and pipe down on his desk and turned to Woodward. 'We've never had a story like this,' he said. 'Just never.' -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

For a business to strengthen its position on the market, its managers should become skillful at helping their subordinates to set and achieve specific and measurable goals with realistic deadlines and clear expectations. Managers should also mentor employees through challenges, helping them grow and develop new skills.

Kate Spade

I'm not putting any deadlines on myself," Mart says with dignity, setting a heaped plate in front of Cal. "Not to suit you or anyone else. Now: get your laughing-tackle round that.

Good follow-up is just as important as the meeting itself. The great master of follow-up was Alfred Sloan, the most effective business executive I have ever known. Sloan, who headed General Motors from the 1920s until the 1950s, spent most of his six working days a week in meetings—three days a week in formal committee meetings with a set membership, the other three days in ad hoc meetings with individual GM executives or with a small group of executives. At the beginning of a formal meeting, Sloan announced the meeting’s purpose. He then listened. He never took notes and he rarely spoke except to clarify a confusing point. At the end he summed up, thanked the participants, and left. Then he immediately wrote a short memo addressed to one attendee of the meeting. In that note, he summarized the discussion and its conclusions and spelled out any work assignment decided upon in the meeting (including a decision to hold another meeting on the subject or to study an issue). He specified the deadline and the executive who was to be accountable for the assignment. He sent a copy of the memo to everyone who’d been present at the meeting. It was through these memos—each a small masterpiece—that Sloan made himself into an outstandingly effective executive.

somewhere deep inside you realize that the dream has taken a hit. It hasn’t died, of course. But it has been dialed back—calibrated to the reality of deadlines, budgets, and limited resources. A similar process can happen for individuals who set out to create something, whether a book, a record album, or even a comedy routine. It’s easy to “settle.” At this very moment, you face a decision.

There can be no question that Musk has mastered the art of getting the most out of his employees. Interview three dozen SpaceX engineers and each one of them will have picked up on a managerial nuance that Musk has used to get people to meet his deadlines. One example from Brogan: Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.” And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn’t have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The ideal SpaceX employee is someone like Steve Davis, the director of advanced projects at SpaceX. “He’s been working sixteen hours a day every day for years,” Brogan said. “He gets more done than eleven people working together.

Set deadlines, and make them short. Parkinson’s Law states that your tasks will expand to take up the amount of time allotted for them. Shorten your personal deadlines and be amazed at how you complete all your tasks, regardless!

Holacracy obsoletes the habit of making commitments about when you will deliver a particular project or action. In tactical meetings, for example, we capture next-actions, but do not attach deadline commitments to them. Why? As much as the practice of setting deadlines is generally recommended in today’s business world, allow me to offer a contrary view: committing to deadlines has important downsides, and using them obscures a more dynamic, reality-based approach.

She really talks to you, doesn't she?" She asked. "it's not just you talking to her. She talks BACK." "hel, half the time she starts it." I said, half-defensively. "I know it's weird." "Well, yes, it's weird. Technically, I think it's insane. But who am I to judge?" Maggie shrugged. "I live in a house most people view as the setting of a horror movie waiting to happen, with an army of security ninjas and a couple dozen epileptic dogs for company. I don't think I'm qualified to pass judgement on 'weird'.

I never expect appreciation. I always set a deadline for the things I have to do to be a successful person, when I complete them, I give myself a piece of candy, a glass of tea and some free time to enjoy- that is how I honor my hardworking and appreciate my struggles.

In the meantime, seemingly miraculously, the sun rises each day and sets each evening. The globe does not stop spinning, and there are spelling tests to prepare for, swim team carpools to drive, math homework; there are dinners to be made and, afterward, dishes to wash. There is work—articles to be written before inflexible deadlines.

Narrow down who your ideal customer is. Narrow until you can narrow no more. Define exactly what pain point you are solving for them, and how much they will pay you to solve it. Set a hard deadline and focus fully on building a solution, then charge for it. Repeat the process until you’ve found a product that works, then scale a business around it.

One of Musk’s management tactics, then as later, was to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it. He did that in the fall of 1999 by announcing, in what one engineer called “a dick move,” that X.com would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend. In the weeks leading up to that, Musk prowled the office each day, including Thanksgiving, in

Cultivate gratitude. Carve out an hour a day for solitude. Begin and end the day with prayer, meditation, reflection. Keep it simple. Keep your house picked up. Don’t overschedule. Strive for realistic deadlines. Never make a promise you can’t keep. Allow an extra half hour for everything you do. Create quiet surroundings at home and at work. Go to bed at nine o’clock twice a week. Always carry something interesting to read. Breathe—deeply and often. Move—walk, dance, run, find a sport you enjoy. Drink pure spring water. Lots of it. Eat only when hungry. If it’s not delicious, don’t eat it. Be instead of do. Set aside one day a week for rest and renewal. Laugh more often. Luxuriate in your senses. Always opt for comfort. If you don’t love it, live without it. Let Mother Nature nurture. Don’t answer the telephone during dinner. Stop trying to please everybody. Start pleasing yourself. Stay away from negative people. Don’t squander precious resources: time, creative energy, emotion. Nurture friendships. Don’t be afraid of your passion. Approach problems as challenges. Honor your aspirations. Set achievable goals. Surrender expectations.

Out on the Savannah, our physiological responses were perfectly suited to deal with stressors (run from the big animals with big teeth). These days we can’t just run from what drives up our anxiety and stress; mortgages, money problems, looking hot, relationships and deadlines. Evolution did not set us up to suffer Jurassic Park levels of stress, day in day out; that’s the bitch of living at today’s pace. Psychological

I’ve sat at the piano for hours already, looking for lyrics and melodies, but everything sounds the same and I feel as uninspired as ever. Does it mean I’m finished? A more sobering thought: if I’m finished, would I miss it? But the truth is, I’ve been here before. Many times. We all have. So how do we find the faith to press on? Remember. Remember, Hebrew children, who you once were in Egypt. Remember the altars set up along the way to remind yourselves that you made the journey and God rescued you from sword and famine, from chariots and pestilence, that once you were there, but now you are here. It happened. Our memories are fallible, residing in that most complex and mysterious organ in the human body (and therefore the known universe), capable of being suppressed, manipulated, altered, but also profoundly powerful and able to transport a person to a place fifty years ago all because of a whiff of your grandfather’s cologne or an old book or the salty air. As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me. Remember with every sip of wine that we shared this meal, you and I. Remember. So I look at the last album, the last book, and am forced to admit that I didn’t know anymore then than I do now. Every song is an Ebenezer stone, evidence of God’s faithfulness. I just need to remember. Trust is crucial. So is self-forgetfulness and risk and a measure of audacity. And now that I think about it, there’s also wonder, insight, familiarity with Scripture, passion, a good night’s sleep, breakfast (preferably an egg sandwich), an encouraging voice, diligence, patience. I need silence. Privacy. Time—that’s what I need: more time. But first I need a vacation, because I’ve been really grinding away at this other stuff and my mental cache is full. A deadline would be great. I work best with deadlines, and maybe some bills piling up. Some new guitar strings would help, and a nice candle. And that’s all I need, in the words of Steve Martin’s The Jerk. This is the truth: all I really need is a guitar, some paper, and discipline. If only I would apply myself.

The key to achieving your objective is to frame it properly before you begin. Do you know the ‘SMART method’?” “No, I—” “You need to make sure that your objective is S for Specific (you have to avoid it being vague) and M for Measurable—in this case, for example, success would be losing ten pounds. Then there’s A for Attainable, defined as being achievable, thanks to a series of short steps; it mustn’t be an ‘unreachable star.’ R for Realistic: to keep you motivated, your objective has to make sense in relation to your personality and your possibilities. And, finally, T for Timely: you need to set yourself a deadline.

■    All negotiations are defined by a network of subterranean desires and needs. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the surface. Once you know that the Haitian kidnappers just want party money, you will be miles better prepared.         ■    Splitting the difference is wearing one black and one brown shoe, so don’t compromise. Meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides.         ■    Approaching deadlines entice people to rush the negotiating process and do impulsive things that are against their best interests.         ■    The F-word—“Fair”—is an emotional term people usually exploit to put the other side on the defensive and gain concessions. When your counterpart drops the F-bomb, don’t get suckered into a concession. Instead, ask them to explain how you’re mistreating them.         ■    You can bend your counterpart’s reality by anchoring his starting point. Before you make an offer, emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be. When you get to numbers, set an extreme anchor to make your “real” offer seem reasonable, or use a range to seem less aggressive. The real value of anything depends on what vantage point you’re looking at it from.         ■    People will take more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Make sure your counterpart sees that there is something to lose by inaction.

Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels. He loved talking to audiences. He liked writing screenplays. He liked being at the cutting edge of technology and inventing and explaining with an enthusiasm that was uniquely his own. Douglas’s ability to miss deadlines became legendary. (“I love deadlines,” he said once. “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”) He died in May 2001—too young. His death surprised us all, and left a huge, Douglas Adams–sized hole in the world. We had lost both the man (tall, affable, smiling gently at a world that baffled and delighted him) and the mind.

This may be the time to address a problem that afflicts even experienced researchers and at some point will probably afflict you. As you shuffle through hundreds of notes and a dozen lines of thought, you start feeling that you’re not just spinning your wheels but spiraling down into a black hole of confusion, paralyzed by what seems to be an increasingly complex and ultimately unmanageable task. The bad news is that there’s no sure way to avoid such moments. The good news is that most of us have them and they usually pass. Yours will too if you keep moving along, following your plan, taking on small and manageable tasks instead of trying to confront the complexity of the whole project. It’s another reason to start early, to break a big project into its smallest steps, and to set achievable deadlines,

As this example suggests, it is rarely possible—or even particularly fruitful—to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question in most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half ? The answer must balance several things. First, the results should be hard to achieve—they should require “stretching,” to use the current buzzword. But also, they should be within reach. To aim at results that cannot be achieved—or that can be only under the most unlikely circumstances—is not being ambitious; it is being foolish. Second, the results should be meaningful. They should make a difference. Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable. From this will come a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set. RESPONSIBILITY

Also as in natural settings, in workplaces without well-defined processes, energy minimization becomes prioritized. This is fundamental human nature: if there’s no structure surrounding how hard efforts are coordinated, we default to our instinct to not expend any more energy than is necessary. Most of us are guilty of acting on this instinct when given a chance. An email arrives that informally represents a new responsibility for you to manage; because there’s no formal process in place to assign the work or track its progress, you seek instead the easiest way to get the responsibility off your plate—even if just temporarily—so you send a quick reply asking for an ambiguous clarification. Thus unfolds a game of obligation hot potato, as messages bounce around, each temporarily shifting responsibility from one inbox to another, until a deadline or irate boss finally stops the music, leading to a last-minute scramble to churn out a barely acceptable result. This, too, is obviously a terribly inefficient way to get work done.

Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other: We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land. We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo. We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home? We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance. We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in. We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness. We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together. We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments. We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life. In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education. Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not. We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion. We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together. Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.

All negotiations are defined by a network of subterranean desires and needs. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the surface. Once you know that the Haitian kidnappers just want party money, you will be miles better prepared. ■​Splitting the difference is wearing one black and one brown shoe, so don’t compromise. Meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides. ■​Approaching deadlines entice people to rush the negotiating process and do impulsive things that are against their best interests. ■​The F-word—“Fair”—is an emotional term people usually exploit to put the other side on the defensive and gain concessions. When your counterpart drops the F-bomb, don’t get suckered into a concession. Instead, ask them to explain how you’re mistreating them. ■​You can bend your counterpart’s reality by anchoring his starting point. Before you make an offer, emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be. When you get to numbers, set an extreme anchor to make your “real” offer seem reasonable, or use a range to seem less aggressive. The real value of anything depends on what vantage point you’re looking at it from. ■​People will take more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Make sure your counterpart sees that there is something to lose by inaction.

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading

It was as if we had made something very simple incredibly complicated. Here were these bodies, ready to reproduce, controlled against reproduction, then stimulated for an eventual reproduction that was put on ice. My friends who wanted to prolong their fertility did so, now that they were in their thirties and professionally successful, because circumstances in their lives had not lined up as planned. They had excelled at their jobs. They had nice apartments and enough money to comfortably start a family, but they lacked a domestic companion who would provide the necessary genetic material, lifelong support, and love. They wanted to be the parents they had grown up under, but love couldn't be engineered, and ovaries could. Hanging over all of this was an idea of choice, an arbitrary linking of goals and outcomes, which reduced structural, economic and technological change to individual decision. "The right to choose"―the right to birth control and abortion services―is different from the idea of choice I mean here. I mean that the baby question justified a fiction that one had to conform one's life to a uniform box by a certain deadline. If the choice were only to have a baby or not, then anybody who wanted a baby and was physically able would simply have one (as many people did), but what I saw with my friends was that it wasn’t actually about the choice of having a baby but of setting up a nuclear family, which unfortunately could not, unlike making a baby, happen more or less by fiat.

His Burden Is Light Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke fits perfectly, and the burden I give you is light.” Matthew 11:28-30 What heavy burden is weighing you down and causing a heaviness and weariness in your spirit? Is it the need to take care of an elderly parent? a seemingly impossible deadline at work? juggling overwhelming responsibilities of a job plus parenting a houseful of kids? the burden of chronic illness? a difficult relationship with someone you love? financial struggles? Whatever your “heavy burden” might be, Jesus invites you, just as he did the crowds he was teaching: Come to me. Give me the heavy load you’re carrying. And in exchange, I will give you rest. Whenever I read these verses from Matthew, I breathe a sigh of relief. Jesus knows the challenges and deadlines we face and the weariness of mind or body we feel. He understands the stress, tasks, and responsibilities that are weighing us down. As we lay all that concerns us before him, his purpose replaces our agenda, and his lightness and rest replace our burden. LORD, thank you for your offer to carry my burdens for me. I give them all to you and I gladly receive your rest! I place myself under your yoke to learn from you. Teach me your wisdom that is humble and pure, and help me to walk in the ways you set before me. Thank you for your mercy and love that invite me to live my life resting and trusting in you!   WHEN HE SAYS TO YOUR DISTURBED, DISTRACTED, RESTLESS SOUL OR MIND, “COME UNTO ME,” HE IS SAYING, COME OUT OF THE STRIFE AND DOUBT AND STRUGGLE OF WHAT IS AT THE MOMENT WHERE YOU STAND, INTO THAT WHICH WAS AND IS AND IS TO BE—THE ETERNAL, THE ESSENTIAL, THE ABSOLUTE. Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)    

In any creative endeavor, there is a long list of features and effects that you want to include to nudge it toward greatness—a very long list. At some point, though, you realize it is impossible to do everything on the list. So you set a deadline, which then forces a priority-based reordering of the list, followed by the difficult discussion of what, on this list, is absolutely necessary—or if the project is even feasible at all. You don’t want to have this discussion too soon, because at the outset, you don’t know what you are doing. If you wait too long, however, you run out of time or resources.

Manage Your Team’s Collective Time Time management is a group endeavor. The payoff goes far beyond morale and retention. ILLUSTRATION: JAMES JOYCE by Leslie Perlow | 1461 words Most professionals approach time management the wrong way. People who fall behind at work are seen to be personally failing—just as people who give up on diet or exercise plans are seen to be lacking self-control or discipline. In response, countless time management experts focus on individual habits, much as self-help coaches do. They offer advice about such things as keeping better to-do lists, not checking e-mail incessantly, and not procrastinating. Of course, we could all do a better job managing our time. But in the modern workplace, with its emphasis on connectivity and collaboration, the real problem is not how individuals manage their own time. It’s how we manage our collective time—how we work together to get the job done. Here is where the true opportunity for productivity gains lies. Nearly a decade ago I began working with a team at the Boston Consulting Group to implement what may sound like a modest innovation: persuading each member to designate and spend one weeknight out of the office and completely unplugged from work. The intervention was aimed at improving quality of life in an industry that’s notorious for long hours and a 24/7 culture. The early returns were positive; the initiative was expanded to four teams of consultants, and then to 10. The results, which I described in a 2009 HBR article, “Making Time Off Predictable—and Required,” and in a 2012 book, Sleeping with Your Smartphone , were profound. Consultants on teams with mandatory time off had higher job satisfaction and a better work/life balance, and they felt they were learning more on the job. It’s no surprise, then, that BCG has continued to expand the program: As of this spring, it has been implemented on thousands of teams in 77 offices in 40 countries. During the five years since I first reported on this work, I have introduced similar time-based interventions at a range of companies—and I have come to appreciate the true power of those interventions. They put the ownership of how a team works into the hands of team members, who are empowered and incentivized to optimize their collective time. As a result, teams collaborate better. They streamline their work. They meet deadlines. They are more productive and efficient. Teams that set a goal of structured time off—and, crucially, meet regularly to discuss how they’ll work together to ensure that every member takes it—have more open dialogue, engage in more experimentation and innovation, and ultimately function better. CREATING “ENHANCED PRODUCTIVITY” DAYS One of the insights driving this work is the realization that many teams stick to tried-and-true processes that, although familiar, are often inefficient. Even companies that create innovative products rarely innovate when it comes to process. This realization came to the fore when I studied three teams of software engineers working for the same company in different cultural contexts. The teams had the same assignments and produced the same amount of work, but they used very different methods. One, in Shenzen, had a hub-and-spokes org chart—a project manager maintained control and assigned the work. Another, in Bangalore, was self-managed and specialized, and it assigned work according to technical expertise. The third, in Budapest, had the strongest sense of being a team; its members were the most versatile and interchangeable. Although, as noted, the end products were the same, the teams’ varying approaches yielded different results. For example, the hub-and-spokes team worked fewer hours than the others, while the most versatile team had much greater flexibility and control over its schedule. The teams were completely unaware that their counterparts elsewhere in the world were managing their work differently. My research provide

This presents a very curious phenomenon. There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines. If you haven’t identified the mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion, the unimportant becomes the important. Even if you know what’s critical, without deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks forced upon you (or invented, in the case of the entrepreneur) will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiae jumps in to replace

The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.

Don’t: Become overwhelmed by a long list of goals; focus on no more than three at a time Set yourself up to fail; create goals you can reasonably achieve Beat yourself up if you don’t meet every deadline; recognize when what you’ve done is good enough

• A – Stands for ‘Attainable’. In the example above, the blogger has set a specific goal of 14 blog posts, which is easily attainable for people who already have an experience in writing. But if he is new to the world of blogging, then he can probably start with setting a goal of writing 1 blog post per week.  • R – Stands for ‘Relevant’. The individual should take time to check the relevance of his short-term goals to the long-term picture that he has set for himself. • T – Stands for ‘Timely’. The individual should also set a deadline for his own efforts. This would effectively ensure that he would not keep working on and on for something that does not seem to have an end in sight.

One rule of thumb you should use when setting deadlines for yourself is to carefully consider how much time you expect the entire project to take and multiple that number by 1.5. For example, if you think your project is going to take 10 days to complete, plan to give yourself 15 days.

One area that would truly test my patience was the senators’ focus on benchmarks, and their demands that the Iraqi Council of Representatives enact, by specific deadlines, legislation in key areas such as de-Baathification, the sharing of oil revenues, and provincial elections. This was an approach I also had recommended to Baker and Hamilton, but I had not fully understood then just how tough these actions would be for the Iraqis, precisely because they would fundamentally set the country’s political and economic course for the future. Remember, they had no experience with compromise in thousands of years of history. Indeed, politics in Iraq from time immemorial had been a kill-or-be-killed activity. I would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets or appropriations bills, not to mention deal with tough challenges like the budget deficit, Social Security, and entitlement reform. So many times I wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can’t pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who’ve been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship? The discipline required to keep my mouth shut left me exhausted at the end of every hearing.

How to Quiet Your Mind: Relax and Silence the Voice of Your Mind, Today! - A Beginner's Guide - Marc Allen Is an inner dialog always going on inside you, preventing you from getting things done, making clear decisions, and concentrating on tasks? How many times have you been faced with some task or resolved to learn some new creative skill only to set it aside for some menial activity with no deadline or value? At the end of the day, have you ever asked yourself, “Why did I do that? Why did I waste so much time?” Are you looking to stop this? In this book, you will learn about techniques to quiet this inner voice, relax, focus on the here and now, and get your mind to cooperate with what YOU want. You’ll learn very, very easy techniques that you can use starting today to quiet your inner dialogue and to relieve stress and increase focus, techniques that can improve your intellectual and creative capacities, exercises that will help you in every aspect of your outward life, and more.

The nature of the moment is familiar but bears repeating: whether or not industrialized countries begin deeply cutting our emissions this decade will determine whether we can expect the same from rapidly developing nations like China and India next decade. That, in turn, will determine whether or not humanity can stay within a collective carbon budget that will give us a decent chance of keeping warming below levels that our own governments have agreed are unacceptably dangerous. In other words, we don’t have another couple of decades to talk about the changes we want while being satisfied with the occasional incremental victory. This set of hard facts calls for strategy, clear deadlines, dogged focus—all of which are sorely missing from most progressive movements at the moment. Even more importantly, the climate moment offers an overarching narrative in which everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations for historical wrongs like slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand project of building a nontoxic, shockproof economy before it’s too late.

In the November 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reported on the special courts established around the country for the express purpose of streamlining and accelerating foreclosure actions. Presided over by retired judges who were unfamiliar with the complexities involved in the mortgage fraud, these courts were not set up “to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity.” The whole process was designed to transfer the property of ordinary citizens to the nation’s largest banks regardless of entitlement. As Taibbi wrote: The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville [Florida] judge, the Honorable A. C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes. The following month, the Washington Post reported that similar courts in Virginia were “making it easier for lenders to defend themselves when accused of giving homeowners too little warning of impending foreclosures.” Indeed, “the process moves so quickly in Virginia…that homeowners can receive less than two weeks’ notice that their house is about to be sold on the courthouse steps.” The design of the courts guaranteed that even banks with no legal foreclosure entitlement had an almost insurmountable advantage. In the very short time they were accorded, homeowners seeking to stop foreclosure had to “gather evidence, file a lawsuit and potentially post a bond with the court that could total thousands of dollars.” These arduous requirements, combined with the near-impossible deadlines, meant that many borrowers simply ran out of time when trying to fight invalid foreclosure proceedings. It

An even more extreme example of a onetime grand gesture yielding results is a story involving Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur and social media pioneer. As a popular speaker, Shankman spends much of his time flying. He eventually realized that thirty thousand feet was an ideal environment for him to focus. As he explained in a blog post, “Locked in a seat with nothing in front of me, nothing to distract me, nothing to set off my ‘Ooh! Shiny!’ DNA, I have nothing to do but be at one with my thoughts.” It was sometime after this realization that Shankman signed a book contract that gave him only two weeks to finish the entire manuscript. Meeting this deadline would require incredible concentration. To achieve this state, Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned around and flew back, once again writing the whole way—arriving back in the States only thirty hours after he first left with a completed manuscript now in hand. “The trip cost $4,000 and was worth every penny,” he explained.

In the aftermath of Antietam, Lincoln’s course would appear to have been set. Yet with the deadline approaching for his proclamation to go into effect, he held out one last gesture to the rebellious states through a special message to Congress in December 1862. The president had outlined a proposal for gradual compensated emancipation in March. Now he sought to establish the specific parameters for this proposal. Undoubtedly, he hoped to demonstrate his sincerity in offering any slave state that wished to do so a chance to experience a slower-paced transition from slavery to freedom. As a way of bringing a close to “our national strife,” President Lincoln suggested the adoption of amendments to the Constitution allowing for gradual compensated emancipation. He set January 1, 1900, as the date by which all slaves ought to be freed and offered owners recompense through the sale of Federal bonds for the liquidation of their assets in human property.

He had a new stereo installed that’s pretty crisp, but I hate music in cars, so it doesn’t do me much good. The second he starts it up, Pigs in the Toaster, this emo band he loves for reasons I cannot fathom, blasts out of the speakers at a volume that should be illegal for whining set to guitar. The singer’s voice is screechy and the music is too disjointed to have a real beat. He doesn’t move to turn it down. Normally,

We found that the students with the three firm deadlines got the best grades; the class in which I set no deadlines at all (except for the final deadline) had the worst grades; and the class in which Gaurav and his classmates were allowed to choose their own three deadlines (but with penalties for failing to meet them) finished in the middle, in terms of their grades for the three papers and their final grade.

That winter remains in my mind as one great blizzard of verbiage. It started with the insolvency of the Employment and Workforce Commission. The Commission had been running through funds budgeted for unemployment benefits at an alarming rate, and nobody had noticed that it was about to run out completely. The Commission blamed the legislature, the legislature blamed the Commission, and the governor blamed the legislature and the Commission, but especially the Commission. The Commission, it turned out, would have to apply for federal money to avoid a shortfall, and for the application to be legal the governor would have to sign it. It was a perfect set-up for him. He refused to sign the application unless the Commission agreed to his demands, one of which was an independent audit. The Commission delayed. The deadline approached; if it were to pass, the Commission would be unable to issue unemployment checks. There was great outrage from the people known for great outrage. Everybody (well, everybody in the state’s media—but it felt like everybody everywhere) was talking about “playing chicken.” The governor was “playing chicken” with the Employment and Workforce Commission; there was a “game of chicken” going on between the state’s chief executive and its workforce agency. The governor was also said to be “holding the unemployed hostage” in his vainglorious attempt to get what he wanted from a government agency; sometimes he was said to be “holding the unemployed hostage to his libertarian ideology” or “holding a state agency hostage for political gain.” The State actually combined these two images in one of its editorials: “You do not play chicken with the lives of 77,000 laid-off citizens, holding them hostage for your own political purposes.” No, I supposed, you do not.

In any creative endeavor, there is a long list of features and effects that you want to include to nudge it toward greatness—a very long list. At some point, though, you realize it is impossible to do everything on the list. So you set a deadline, which then forces a priority-based reordering of the list, followed by the difficult discussion of what, on this list, is absolutely necessary—or if the project is even feasible at all. You don’t want to have this discussion too soon, because at the outset, you don’t know what you are doing. If you wait too long, however, you run out of time or resources. Complicating

I felt super-frustrated. We’d hired all these talented people and were spending tons of money, but we weren’t going any faster. Things came to a head over a top-priority marketing OKR for personalized emails with targeted content. The objective was well constructed: We wanted to drive a certain minimum number of monthly active users to our blog. One important key result was to increase our click-through rate from emails. The catch was that no one in marketing had thought to inform engineering, which had already set its own priorities that quarter. Without buy-in from the engineers, the OKR was doomed before it started. Even worse, Albert and I didn’t find out it was doomed until our quarterly postmortem. (The project got done a quarter late.) That was our wake-up call, when we saw the need for more alignment between teams. Our OKRs were well crafted, but implementation fell short. When departments counted on one another for crucial support, we failed to make the dependency explicit. Coordination was hit-and-miss, with deadlines blown on a regular basis. We had no shortage of objectives, but our teams kept wandering away from one another. The following year, we tried to fix the problem with periodic integration meetings for the executive team. Each quarter our department heads presented their goals and identified dependencies. No one left the room until we’d answered some basic questions: Are we meeting everyone’s needs for buy-in? Is a team overstretched? If so, how can we make their objectives more realistic?

Seibel: What was the relation between the design phase and the coding? You four got together and sorted out the interfaces between the parts. Did that all happen before your 17 programmers started writing code, or did the coding feed back into your design? Allen: It was pretty much happening as we went. Our constraints were set by the people we reported to. And the heads of the different pieces, like myself, reported to one person, George Grover, and he had worked out the bigger picture technically. And a lot of it was driven by the constraints of the customers. There was a lot of teamwork and a lot of flexibility at the time, in part, because we were kind of inventing as we went. But under a deadline. So there was not as much management hierarchy, but just being more part of the team.

But DeMille’s tenure came to an abrupt end in January 1945, in a political dispute with the American Federation of Radio Artists, the actors’ union. At issue was Proposition 12, a ballot proposal popularly known as the “right to work” law. This would allow anyone to work in radio without union membership. AFRA decided to build a war chest to fight it, levying a one-dollar fee against each union member for this purpose. DeMille refused to pay it, or to allow it to be paid on his behalf. He claimed to sympathize with union ideals, but in fact he distrusted AFRA power. It was an issue of freedom, he insisted, and on that there could be no compromise. The argument dragged through late 1944, with AFRA setting and then extending several arbitrary deadlines. DeMille refused to budge, and on Jan. 22 the man who “wouldn’t take a million” for his Lux job gave it up over a dollar, hosted his final show, and never returned. In the fall, William Keighley was given the job on a permanent basis.

Look at your list of bad habits. For each one you’ve written down, identify what triggers it. Figure out what I call “The Big 4’s”—the “who,” the “what,” the “where,” and the “when” underlying each bad behavior. For example: • Are you more likely to drink too much when you’re with certain people? • Is there a particular time of day when you just have to have something sweet? • What emotions tend to provoke your worst habits—stress, fatigue, anger, nervousness, boredom? • When do you experience those emotions? Who are you with, where are you, or what are you doing? • What situations prompt your bad habits to surface—getting in your car, the time before performance reviews, visits with your in-laws? Conferences? Social settings? Feeling physically insecure? Deadlines? • Take a closer look at your routines. What do you typically say when you wake up? When you’re on a coffee or lunch break? When you’ve gotten home from a long day?

Keep your common sense operating system up to date and you’ll be set for life.

Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.” And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn’t have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The

The word ethics tends to come off as academic and authoritarian, but ultimately professional ethics are just a formalized gut check. They’re a personal statement about what you will and won’t do at your job, and a framework for seeking out clients, projects or employers that are a good match for your beliefs. We encourage every design activist to think through and write down a set of personal ethics, so something is in place to guide you when you run into a sticky situation while racing against four different deadlines.

Here is what I recommend: As soon as possible, once you have finished reading this little book, set aside a full day. It might be a Saturday or a Sunday, or some other day you have off from work. Plan to spend six to eight consecutive hours alone, except for bathroom breaks and lunch. Go to a library. Leave your cell phone and computer in the car because you don’t want to be disturbed. Take a pen or half a dozen pencils and a legal pad, find a secluded spot, and get comfortable. Write at the top of the first page, “I am now 101 years old, I am on my death bed, and I’m looking back. If I’d stayed on the course I was on when I was (the age you are now), would I have any regrets? Instead, having learned how to work Actual Magic, I have lived an incredibly successful and fulfilling life. What about it was most important to me? What were my biggest accomplishments? What else stands out?” Write down everything, and I mean everything, that comes to mind. Do not self edit; take your time. Taking time and having time to take is important because your mind works differently when you feel rushed because of a looming deadline. It’s virtually impossible to go deep with a clock ticking in your head. That’s why it’s important for it to be totally relaxed because you have all day. Sit back and let go. Take a deep breath and hold it to the count of four. Then let it out slowly through your mouth. There’s nothing else to do or to think about but the life ahead of you and what you want it to become. Once you reach a point where you cannot think of anything else to write down, go back, look over what you have written and arrange the items in descending order with the most important one first. Having completed that task, go to the next blank sheet and put the number-one most important thing at the top. Then write down what is keeping you from achieving that goal. Is it something buried in your unconscious mind?

I'm breathing with a light and free feeling. It's a feeling of release and independence as I begin my European journey. Backpacking somehow sets me apart from everyone. Even in this airport. True, people here are traveling, but they each have things to do, deadlines to meet, itineraries to follow, specific things to see. Not me, I'm different. I have everywhere to go and anything to see. My destination is culture and knowledge and experience. in 'Waking up to Winter

For example, if you have an employee who chronically misses deadlines, don’t wait until she misses the deadline to coach her. Start coaching her when the deadline is first set. Help her establish intermediate benchmarks, such as deadlines along the way. Every step of the way, help the employee make a plan for completing those intermediate deadlines. And check in with the employee frequently. Talk through the accomplishment of each step in advance. Do that and 99 percent of the time that employee is going to start meeting her deadlines.

have noticed over the years that urgent tasks are very rarely urgent. They are a mix of: - Other people’s priorities dumped on you – making it your priority Other people’s time management failures finding their way to your desk as urgent Misunderstanding in deadlines Over-optimism in setting deadlines A mix of the above.

When we are given the space, as Parkinson’s Law dictates, we expand our work to fill the time. Set aggressive deadlines so that you are actually challenging yourself on a consistent basis, and you’ll avoid this pitfall. A long deadline also typically means a sustained level of background stress—push yourself to finish early and free your mind.

...There were dozens of construction projects where members were coerced into working in dangerous conditions for free...We were paying for the privilege of being forced to build for Sharon and others. The projects always involved impossible deadlines set arbitrarily by Sharon or other leaders...I'll never forget the sight of 65-year-old Joni, with her chronic illnesses, standing on a 10-foot ladder at 2:30 AM with a paint roller in her hand, furiously painting the ceiling before the 3:00 AM deadline.

The deadline is tonight. What kind of a sadist sets a deadline on a Saturday evening? And they just sent the instructions yesterday. Friday!” She didn’t say the words but her facial expression clearly screamed, ‘Fuck capital.

M is for measurable–As you work on achieving the goal, you must track or measure your progress or lack thereof (more on this later). This shows where you are along the way and keeps you motivated as you draw nearer to the goal. A is for achievable–Is the goal you’ve set for yourself achievable? How? Is it realistic? Notice, I didn’t say how easy. You want to stretch yourself, but not to the point of wanting to give up. R is for relevant–Is the goal relevant to your personal growth and what you’re trying to achieve? T is for timely–Establish a time frame you believe would be realistic based on your schedule for accomplishing the goal. Every goal needs a deadline to keep you motivated as you move forward. Keep in mind, when selecting goals, you may find that a larger goal will include smaller goals that help you reach the larger one. Breaking goals down, where possible, into smaller achievable “bites” make the most overwhelming goals more attainable.

■​All negotiations are defined by a network of subterranean desires and needs. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the surface. Once you know that the Haitian kidnappers just want party money, you will be miles better prepared. ■​Splitting the difference is wearing one black and one brown shoe, so don’t compromise. Meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides. ■​Approaching deadlines entice people to rush the negotiating process and do impulsive things that are against their best interests. ■​The F-word—“Fair”—is an emotional term people usually exploit to put the other side on the defensive and gain concessions. When your counterpart drops the F-bomb, don’t get suckered into a concession. Instead, ask them to explain how you’re mistreating them. ■​You can bend your counterpart’s reality by anchoring his starting point. Before you make an offer, emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be. When you get to numbers, set an extreme anchor to make your “real” offer seem reasonable, or use a range to seem less aggressive. The real value of anything depends on what vantage point you’re looking at it from. ■​People will take more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Make sure your counterpart sees that there is something to lose by inaction.

How to set a goal. Several decades ago, renowned management consultant Peter Drucker popularized a system of goal defining and achievement known as the SMART Criteria, a mnemonic acronym to optimally structure the setting of objectives. It works for me, it will work for you. I’ve supplemented it with my own spin. It goes like this: Specific. A goal must be clear and unambiguous; without vagaries and platitudes. It must indicate exactly what is expected, why is it important, who’s involved, where is it going to happen, and which attributes are important. Measurable. A goal must include concrete criteria for measuring progress toward its attainment. If a goal is not measurable, it is not possible to know whether you’re making progress toward successful completion. Attainable. A goal must fall within realistic parameters, accessible enough to craft a logical roadmap toward its achievement. However, I would provide the personal caveat that no goal worthy of your complete attention, time, and resources should be too realistic. It should be big. Big enough to scare you. Audacious enough to tingle the senses, keep you up at night, and launch you out of bed in the morning. In preparation for my first Ultraman, I never missed a single workout, primarily because I was scared out of my mind. That said, a goal must be rooted in tangible reality. Understand the distinction between audacious and ludicrous. Relevant. This takes us back to the spirituality of pursuit. A goal must contain personal meaning. You should understand why its pursuit holds importance in the context of your personal growth. In other words, it has to matter. The more it matters, the better. Time-bound. A goal must have a target date and be grounded within a specific time frame. Deadlines create structure, foster a sense of urgency, and focus the prioritization of time and energy. Service-oriented. This is my personal addition to the criteria (so now it’s “SMARTS”). Although a goal must carry great personal meaning, in my experience, the pursuit of that goal is best served when it is also in service to something beyond the self. This can take any number of forms: raising money for a cause you believe in; perhaps a blog chronicling the journey to inspire friends and family. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is the spirit in which you approach it.

The higher you rise, the greater your desire for becoming loved and admired.” “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” “Remember to be yourself; you don’t need anyone’s approval or appreciation otherwise.” “Some people are so busy looking in the mirror they forget to look at what is around them.” “What comes around goes around and more often than not comes right back at you.” “Good karma will always come back to those who give off positive energy and spread kindness and love. The only person that can truly make a difference in your life is you – start by becoming aware of when narcissism rears its ugly head. “If you do good, you will be rewarded. If you do bad, you will suffer the consequences. That’s what karma is all about.” “Karma has no deadline; be aware that your actions today will always come back to haunt you tomorrow.” “The universe always pays back; you cannot escape from the effects of Karma!” “Good karma requires no explanation and bad karma requires no excuse.” “Karma has a way of returning your secrets in unexpected ways. Be careful who knows them and how they’re shared… or not shared at all!” Selfishness brings misery, whereas kindness brings joy and peace built upon a strong foundation of karma that eventually leads to success.” “In life, we reap what we have sown so it’s best to sow good deeds so one can reap their sweet rewards later on in life through karmic justice!” “Karma has no menu; you get served what you deserve.” “The universe is not punishing you; it’s teaching you.” “Be careful with your words. Once they are said, they can be only forgiven, not forgotten.” “Everything that happens to us happens for a reason and the only viable response we can give is to learn from it and move on.” “By hating someone else, we set ourselves up as judge; we take upon ourselves the powers of Karma: to reward or punish with justice.” “No matter how much suffering you go through, you will never earn the right to be cruel.” If life gives you lemons and all that jazz remember one thing: Everything eventually becomes something else and nobody ever truly knows what the future holds. “Karma is a powerful force that doesn’t forget anyone who has wronged or hurt you.” “You will reap what you sow and what goes around comes around in due time.” “One day the pain and suffering you caused others will come back to you tenfold” “Put kindness out into the world and it will come back to reward you in unexpected ways.

The word deadline comes from the American Civil War, when prison camps set boundaries and any prisoner who crossed a line was shot.

He had at most five minutes of life left. He said that those five minutes were an endless deadline, a colossal wealth. It seemed to him that he lived so many lives in those five minutes that he had no time to think about the final moment, and he even had to attend to different matters. He calculated the time necessary to say goodbye to his comrades and set aside a couple of minutes for that purpose. Then he allotted another two minutes to think about himself one last time and to look around one last time. After bidding farewell to his comrades, those two minutes he had reserved for thinking about himself arrived. He already knew in advance what he would think about: he wanted to imagine, as soon as possible and with utmost clarity, what he could become. At that moment, he existed and lived, and three minutes later he would be someone or something, but who? And where? He believed he would find the answer to all of that in those two minutes! Oh, if only he wouldn't die! If life could be restored to him! What eternity it would be! And all for himself! In that case, he would turn every minute into a whole century, without losing a single one, he would savor each moment and not waste anything! He said that this idea eventually degenerated into such rage that he wished to be executed as soon as possible.

Working alone definitely has its advantages. There was no need for second-guessing decisions or discussions on how to work more efficiently. When you’re alone, you have complete control over the project, tackling it the way you think best without worrying about compromising with others. I could fully immerse myself in the task without worrying about others interfering with my creative process. I could work at my own pace, set deadlines, and put one hundred percent of my effort into every detail.

There were ten thousand things, drop by drop, that had polished and improved him. Every time he held his temper and forced himself to be patient with his children. Each time he had chosen to ignore or forgive when someone cut him off in traffic, every time he had extended himself to learn and grow instead of coast, every time he had gotten outside himself and tried to make someone else’s life better, each time he strove to keep his mind from wandering, every time he turned off the TV to spend time with his kids, every deadline and goal he had set for himself and strove to reach, each another drop in his reservoir of strength, each small and seemingly insignificant, yet each bolstered his spirit and gave him added strength.

The second factor is that almost all of us at some point in our lives have experienced moments of greater rationality. This often comes with what we shall call the maker’s mind-set. We have a project to get done, perhaps with a deadline. The only emotion we can afford is excitement and energy. Other emotions simply make it impossible to concentrate. Because we have to get results, we become exceptionally practical. We focus on the work—our mind calm, our ego not intruding. If people try to interrupt or infect us with emotions, we resent it. These moments—as fleeting as a few weeks or hours—reveal the rational self that is waiting to come out. It just requires some awareness and some practice.

When you are wronged by someone, you have two options: either fight back or walk away. Now, if you can forgive and move on, walk way. But if you will grieve and suffer forever that feeling of having been violated and short-changed, fight. But don’t fight if it will make you wallow in a maze of debilitating emotions – anger, grief, fear, insecurity, worry, hatred…such a fight that drains you of all your goodness, and which leaves you cold and numb, is simply not worth it. But if you don’t fight the good fight, understandably, the cause will be lost. And that’s sacrilege. So, the key is to practice detached determination. Fight with focus and strategy and fight calmly, happily! Fight with detachment – don’t cling on to your desired outcomes, don’t set deadlines. Simply fight. When you fight the good fight, with equanimity and a sense of Purpose, the outcome never matters. The fact that you stood up and fought does.

Predictably irrational 1) the importance of having something for FREE when selling something. 2) the price we hear effects what we’re willing to pay. Known as arbitrary coherence. The basic idea of arbitrary coherence is this: Although initial prices can be "arbitrary," once those prices are established in our minds, they will shape not only present prices but also future ones (thus making them "coherent"). Eg new tv on market we kook for an anchor price. Released at £1200. That’s the anchor 3) when we own something we over value it. The seller feels all the things they could do with it. The buyer feels what they could do with the money. 4) experiences are shaped by our expectations. Coke Pepsi test. Or example if we have heard a movie is good we will enjoy it more. 5) social norms and market norms. 6 ) most people are dishonest. Get people thinking about honesty. When people thought about the 10 commandments. 7) acknowledge your weakness and set your deadlines. Also set yourself short term awards when reaching long term goals. 8) try not to keep your options open. The Chinese war where he burned the boats so they couldn’t retreat. If you have your options open on two things close one of them so you can fully focus on one.

I was tired of feeling like fear had power over me, though, and so I made a rule for myself: Whenever I was having trouble working up the gumption to create something, I simply set a deadline for its completion and told my newfound fans about it, so that they’d help hold me accountable and follow through with it. I continue to put the rule into action to this day, and I urge you to do the same if ever you’re feeling stuck.

By setting yourself early deadlines, not only are you always challenging yourself, but you also put yourself under pressure to finish early, which frees you from the stress of rushing at last minute to meet deadlines.

Whether I'm on a deadline, or I'm distracted by other things going on in my life, or I just need to get through this thing in order to move on to something I'm more passionate about, I will unsheathe the pencil, move a delicious new blank piece of paper into the battlefield, and set myself to drawing in the fight to bring my idea to life.

- A specific working strategy (How we will reach them) - Finance (How much it will cost to reach them) and - Facilities (Where we will reach them) STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION It answers the questions: where do we begin, when, and with whom? This step involves determining specific action steps, deciding our priorities, setting deadlines and allocating tasks. MINISTRY CONTINGENCIES This process answers the question: How will we handle pleasant and not so pleasant surprises that could affect the strategy? Churches need to prepare for contingencies both harmful and helpful. Potentially harmful contingencies are: heart attack during the service, a mentally deranged person worshiping with us, an accusation of 419 or sexual molestation against a minister, an HIV/AID baby in the children church, an epileptic patient in the teens church. Pleasant surprises like: large financial donations, visit of a celebrity, General overseer, a revival etc. Even the smallest contingency, helpful or harmful, if handled poorly, could ultimately hurt the growth of a church MINISTRY EVALUATION It asks the question, How are we doing? Churches that do not evaluate what they are doing and the people doing it, will struggle to improve. What gets evaluated gets done, and usually gets done well.

On the most basic level, Toy Story 2 was a wakeup call. Going forward, the needs of a movie could never again outweigh the needs of our people. We needed to do more to keep them healthy. As soon as we wrapped the film, we set about addressing the needs of our injured, stressed-out employees and coming up with strategies to prevent future deadline pressures from hurting our workers again. These strategies went beyond ergonomically designed workstations, yoga classes, and physical therapy. Toy Story 2 was a case study in how something that is usually considered a plus—a motivated, workaholic workforce pulling together to make a deadline—could destroy itself if left unchecked. Though I was immensely proud of what we had accomplished, I vowed that we would never make a film that way again. It was management’s job to take the long view, to intervene and protect our people from their willingness to pursue excellence at all costs. Not to do so would be irresponsible.

Most people, when asked about their goals, are not sure of their goals or cannot articulate them in a clearly defined manner. Part of my success in business has come from teaching my employees how to dream and identify their goals through a goal-setting exercise: Write down all the things you don’t want in life. Once you have nothing left to write, draw a line after the last thing you don’t want in life. Then, on a new sheet of paper, write the opposite of what you just wrote. For example, if you wrote, “I don’t want to be poor,” then on your new sheet of paper write, “I want to be rich.” If you wrote, “I don’t want to be alone,” then write the opposite, “I want to be in a relationship.” And so on: I don’t want to be sick—I want to be healthy. I don’t want to be stuck here forever—I want to travel and see new things. Once you have completed your opposite list, make a third list: “What can I start doing today?” This list is meant to bring specifics to each thing you do want in life. For example, “What can I do today that I enjoy and will make me wealthy?” Alternatively, “If I don’t want to be lonely, what kind of activities, work, and hobbies could I do today that would allow me to have a great social presence and love life?” Or, “If I want to be healthy, what sports or exercises would I enjoy that will impact my health positively?” Once you have created the “What Can I Do Today?” list, circle the top five sentences that inspire you the most and add a reasonable timeline to take action toward these goals. Then, circle the next five and so on until everything is circled with deadlines. Keep your final list accessible so that as you begin to take action, you can adjust your list’s details and timelines. Thinking about what you don’t want and about changing that into what you do want creates a foundation for building goals with real intent and action. It also trains you to live in positivity. This is more than positive thinking. Science supports goal setting.

Before you launch V1, your external deadline is always a little wobbly. There are too many unknown unknowns to write it in stone. So the way you keep everyone moving is by creating strong internal deadlines—heartbeats that your team sets their calendar to: 1. Team heartbeats: Each individual team makes its own rhythm and deadlines for delivering their piece of the puzzle. Then all the teams align for . . . 2. Project heartbeats: These are the moments when different teams sync to make sure the product still makes sense and all the pieces are moving at the right pace. Fig.

This was a welcome change from Musk’s approach, which had been to set overly optimistic deadlines and then try to get engineers to work nonstop for days on end to meet the goals. “If you asked Elon how long it would take to do something, there was never anything in his mind that would take more than an hour,” Ambras said. “We came to interpret an hour as really taking a day or two and if Elon ever did say something would take a day, we allowed for a week or two weeks.

There is no deadline when it comes to setting a goal for yourself !!!

For some reason foreign to our modern ears, God tells us that celebration is central to pleasing Him; it is central to leading a good life. Modern American life has no time for serious celebrations as did life in centuries past. We've got work to do; projects and deadlines press us. And yet for all our industrial-strength pragmatism, few if any truly important things get accomplished. We have forgotten that celebration isn't just an option; it's a call to full Christian living. Celebration is worshiping God with our bodies, with the material creation He has set up around us. Celebrating-whether in feasts, ceremonies, holidays, formal worship, or lovemaking-are all part of obeying God's command to "love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength" (Deut. 6:5; Mk. 12:30). We are to show our love for God not just with one portion of our being (the spiritual aspect); we are to love God with our whole body, heart and strength and legs and lips.

Be realistic. You want to set the bar high but not so high that your goals are merely impossible dreams. Don’t ever settle for less, but be realistic when setting the bar high, especially when it comes to timelines and deadlines. In most cases, there are no such things as unrealistic goals, just unrealistic timetables for their achievement.

She trudged along the side path. It all looked tidy enough. Kicking off the sand on her shoes, she looked down at the ground. And that’s when she saw the footprints. Several of them and two different sizes. Her own and another set... Much larger. Twice her size. And

From: Jonathan Rosenberg Date: Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 2:59 PM Subject: Amidst boundless opportunities, 13 PMs whiff on OKRs (names included) Product Gang, As most of you know, I strongly believe that having a good set of quarterly OKRs is an important part of being successful at Google. That’s why I regularly send you notes reminding you to get them done on time, and why I ask managers to review them to make sure all of our OKRs are good. I’ve tried notes that are nice and notes that are mean. Personal favorites include threatening you with Jonathan’s Pit of Despair in October 07 and celebrating near perfection in July 08. Over time I iterated this carrot/stick approach until we reached near 100% compliance. Yay! So then I stopped sending notes, and look what happened: this quarter, SEVERAL of you didn’t get your OKRs done on time, and several others didn’t grade your Q2 OKRs. It turns out it’s not the type of note I send that matters, but the fact that I send anything at all! Names of the fallen are duly noted below (with a pass given to several AdMob employees who are new to the ways of Google, and to many of you who missed the deadline but still got them done in July). We have so many great opportunities before us (search, ads, display, YouTube, Android, enterprise, local, commerce, Chrome, TV, mobile, social . . .) that if you can’t come up with OKRs that get you excited about coming to work every day, then something must be wrong. In fact, if that’s really the case, come see me. In the meantime, please do your OKRs on time, grade your previous quarter’s OKRs, do a good job at it, and post them so that the OKR link from your moma [intranet] page works. This is not administrative busywork, it’s an important way to set your priorities for the quarter and ensure that we’re all working together. Jonathan

particular, identify a deep task (that is, something that requires deep work to complete) that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. If possible, commit publicly to the deadline—for example, by telling the person expecting the finished project when they should expect it. If this isn’t possible (or if it puts your job in jeopardy), then motivate yourself by setting a countdown timer on your phone and propping it up where you can’t avoid seeing it as you work. At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity—no e-mail breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee machine.

Second, come up with a reason for each due date. For example, suppose it’s summertime and your child is due for a dental checkup. You’d probably want to schedule a dentist appointment by August 31 to ensure it gets done before your child returns to school. You have a reason to act. The reason makes the deadline genuine. When a deadline is set without a reason - that is, the date is arbitrarily chosen - there’s less impetus to take action. The sense of urgency is artificial.

You said there were five steps to follow to make my desires come true,” I said impatiently. “What are the remaining three?” “Yes, John. Step one is to have a clear vision of your outcome. Step two is to create positive pressure to keep you inspired. The third step is a simple one: never set a goal without attaching a timeline to it. To breathe life into a goal you must attach a precise deadline to it. It’s just like when you are preparing cases for court; you always focus your attention on the ones the judge has scheduled to be heard tomorrow rather than on the ones without any court date. “Oh, and by the way,” explained Julian, “remember that a goal that is not committed to paper is no goal at all. Go out and buy a journal — a cheap coil notepad will do. Call this your Dream Book and fill it with all your desires, objectives and dreams. Get to know yourself and what you are all about.” “Don’t I already know myself?” “Most people don’t. They have never taken the time to know their strengths, their weaknesses, their hopes, their dreams. The Chinese define image in these terms: there are three mirrors that form a person’s reflection; the first is how you see yourself, the second is how others see you and the third mirror reflects the truth. Know yourself, John. Know the truth.

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