Highly efficient people know when they have to start a task and when they have to wait. To be a great performer you need to learn to listen to that inner voice that tells you “wait”.

There are people who live in an eternal pursuit of productivity. They read books and articles related to the topic to learn new methods and techniques, know concrete use cases and discover what is the latest fashion technology in this field. They research into how to get that their boss, their colleagues or their partner do not hinder their productivity. They check out every single application that promises to solve their life.

I am afraid the Someday/Maybe list is doomed to become a bottomless pit where we accumulate our creativity and pending projects. All the stuff that we cannot process right now, are immediately set as something that we will do someday, so this list becomes a huge queue of wishes. It is for this reason that the Someday/Maybe list cannot be treated as a manageable foreground list, like Next Actions, but we should work to structure it so as not to lose confidence on it and avoid turning it into a storeroom for our activity.

I am absolutely convinced that the main reason why many people are not well organized and live burdened by the pressure of their work and personal tasks, is that they fail to establish the necessary habits to have everything under control, calmly.

The phrase falling off the wagon is commonly used when we want to say that, despite our good intentions to acquire a certain habit, we have not been able to. We ended up leaving. We screwed up.

After a brief introduction to the Pomodoro Technique and a post in which I explained this method in more detail, I find it interesting to expose what Francesco Cirillo, author of The Pomodoro Technique, proposes to manage the interruptions that may occur when you are in the middle of a pomodoro.

Unfortunately, we all have to waste some of our precious time waiting somewhere. At the airport, at the doctor’s office, at the bank, at the postal office, in a appointment with an unpunctual person… There is a good amount of waiting times we do not choose or plan, so that when they arrive, we just try to spend the time the best possible.