Your alarm goes off at 5am, and you immediately get out of bed without a second thought.  As you orient yourself to the waking world, you can barely detect any lingering grogginess, even if you look for it.  You stand up and stretch, feeling totally alert, fully conscious, and eager to start your day.  The thought [...]

John Assaraf is an international best-selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur. You may have seen him as one of the experts in the popular movie The Secret (as well as in The Secret book), talking about how he manifested his dream house. What’s most amazing is that he lived in that house for quite a while before discovering it was the exact same house he originally posted on his [...]

If you want to absorb written material at a faster rate, you can learn to speedread or PhotoRead.  But what if you have a lot of audio material to listen to, such as audio books or podcasts? Did you know that if you have 60 minutes of audio material to listen to, you can very [...]

A scaffold is a temporary structure that supports tools, materials, and people while erecting or repairing a building.  A similar construct can be used to improve your personal productivity.  Much like wearing braces to reposition crooked teeth, a personal productivity scaffold is something you temporarily insert into your daily routine to help create and establish new habits.  Once those habits are conditioned, [...]

Sometimes we procrastinate on projects because we don’t know where to begin.  A goal like “write a book” might seem straightforward enough when first set, but when it’s time to act, the goal becomes this huge, amorphous blob.  Procrastination soon follows. A popular suggestion is to define the immediate next action that must be taken, and then focus on [...]

Journaling is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to accelerate your personal development.  By getting your thoughts out of your head and putting them down in writing, you gain insights you’d otherwise never see. Beyond sequential thinking While your brain is technically capable of processing a great deal of input simultaneously, your conscious thoughts [...]

Sometimes we face tough decisions that involve one or more unknowns.  We can’t know in advance what the consequences of each alternative will be.  This is especially true of big decisions like quitting a job, entering or exiting a relationship, or moving to a new city. When faced with such a decision, what do you do?  If you [...]

Too often our important-but-not-urgent tasks get put on the back burner… and never make it to the front burner.  When you get busy with urgent tasks, you may feel pressured to finish those first before you can justify doing anything less urgent.  But then when you finally catch a break, you may decide you need [...]

How is it that your mind is capable of handling new situations you’ve never previously encountered?  How do you solve a problem you’ve never solved before?  Is this just the magic of consciousness, or is there an underlying process — or algorithm — your mind uses behind the scenes to deal with the unique experiences you encounter each [...]

Virtually every time management system teaches that you must prioritize your projects to make sure you’re working on what’s truly important instead of getting caught up in minor things.  However, few systems explain precisely how to do this.  How do you decide which task is really the most important at any given time?  Is it the one that’s most urgent, [...]