Stress-free productivity does exist

Daniel Pink tells us in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us that working is as natural as playing and resting and that, under the proper conditions, humans will accept and even seek this kind of responsibility.

I read over twenty books each year; books on productivity, business, programming, design, economics, and fiction novels. Besides being one of the small pleasures of life, reading helps me learn things I would not learn otherwise. It helps me improve many aspects of my life.

Unfortunately, we have increasingly assumed that working under a lot of pressure is the most natural thing in the world. It’s like part of the game. It’s like something included in our salary. Are we paid to suffer? No way! The pressure with which people work in many companies, and the stress that comes from it, are problems that affect both the employee and the company, and both should try to solve them.

Habits are a fulcrum to make your life better. But changes always cause resistance, right? If instead of a change, you see it as a subtle adjustment to the way you work, you may create the habit less traumatically. You do what you usually do, but in a slightly different way.

In the headline that accompanies the title of his latest book Making It All Work, David Allen uses a word game to indicate that the principles, practices and productivity techniques of its GTD method are equally applicable both at work and in personal life, and moreover, something fantastic occurs when you manage to integrate it all together: “winning at the game of work and the business of life”.