Making It All Work

How you view the business of your life and the game of your work is the ultimate key to winning at them.

In order to relieve the pressure of broken self-agreements, you must know that: • You have captured, clarified, and organized your commitments, at all horizons, and • You will consciously engage with them as often as you need to.

I understand that it would be ideal to be able to cross-reference everything in your system with every possible relevant association and meaning, and within the life of this book we may actually see software that will provide this capability in a manner that’s not more trouble than it’s worth. The truth is, however, that this kind of question almos

Making It All Work is about the work you have to do to know the work you have to do when the work you have to do doesn’t tell you the work you have to do. The work you really have to do is not self-evident—it’s up to you to figure that out.

The Organizing Categories

Usually things remain disorganized when people don’t confront their meaning. To actually decide what you’re going to do with or about something demands that you deal with how you relate to its content, your agreements about it, and how it fits into the rest of your world.

A characteristic of these practices is that we hardly need to think about them when things are obvious and easy. We carry out these practices automatically and rather unconsciously when things are flowing and relatively habitual and simple. But when the world throws us for a loop, and when the familiar flow of habitual engagement is disturbed, even

No matter how elegant, sophisticated, and intelligent your thinking, your vision, and your focus, they must translate into physical action or they’re ultimately vacuous. And no matter to what degree you have achieved a level of control—having collected, processed, organized, and reviewed all your commitments—you must take action to maintain it.

mental intelligence! We need to fully understand, manage, and enhance our thinking process. It’s not that people don’t have the capability to think; they just don’t do so, or they don’t think as effectively as they could, because their mental plumbing is clogged. If you refuse to think in an effective way about even an e-mail you’ve received or you