To beat procrastination once and for all, you have to understand it. You don’t procrastinate because you’re lazy. You procrastinate because:

• You lack enough motivation.
• You underestimate the power of present emotions versus future emotions when you set your goals or make your t...

What I discovered is that highly successful people don’t prioritize tasks on a to-do list, or follow some complex five-step system, or refer to logic tree diagrams to make decisions. 

Actually, highly successful people don’t think about time much at all. Instead, they think about values, pr...

Others choose to do the most unpleasant tasks early in the morning in what’s known as the “eat the frog first” strategy. It’s a procrastination-fighting technique that says if you have something unpleasant to do, just get it out of the way first thing. This is good advice if it d...

Ultimately, if we aren’t jumping out of bed in the morning excited to tackle our project, it’s because our dreams aren’t big enough. They aren’t motivating enough. And motivation comes down to pain and pleasure. For the tough tasks you always ten...

• First, schedule a chunk of time for everything that is important to you; this is called “time blocking” or “time boxing.”
• Second, important items should be scheduled as early in the day as possible. No matter how muc...

Dan Ariely, a Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics, suggests that most people are most productive and have the highest cognitive functioning in the first two hours after they’re fully awake.

The key point is not to use a to-do list as your primary time management tool. Items on a to-do list can sit there forever, constantly getting bumped by things that seem urgent in the moment. And having this list of things that still need to get done is the root ...

In Jeff Weiner's calendar, there is a host of time slots greyed out, but with no indication of what's going on. The grey sections reflect "buffers,"

He schedule between 90 minutes and two hours of these buffers every day. It's a system, he developed over the several years...