How productive do you think you’d be if someone tapped you on the shoulder every few minutes and went “bing!” in your ear? Turn it off. Switch off the alerts and if at all possible, remove it from your phone. Never leave it running in the background.Simplify, cull or outsource as many of them as you can. All of these things can take an incredible hold over us and our capacity to step back, assess our lives and blaze a trail of our own making. But I will give you a hit list of culprits that consume our time and therefore, our lives. You embrace it.įinding your purpose and the work to go along with it is a whole book, so I'm not going to try and teach you that here. But if that ‘necessary' work is an essential component of your ‘important' work, you won't resent it. Even doing the thing you LOVE done long enough, becomes a job. You're always going to have some of that. Now please don't confuse ‘unimportant' with ‘necessary' work. your family, your freedom, peace of mind, your health or your natural talents and passions), it just doesn't rate. And if it pulls you further away from the things you value most (e.g. If the work you're doing each day doesn't bring you closer to your true purpose, you're squandering time. If it doesn't resonate with who you are if it doesn't truly matter to you, it's not important. I'm sure a lot of what you do feels important, but it just isn't. This ‘busy work' that you do doesn't make you more important, and the crap you keep buying doesn't bring lasting pleasure. Like most men in our age group, you're probably doing way too much of the wrong work, and you're wasting too much money on the wrong things.