The Task Mistress

From the archives: The Best (Im)Perfect Productivity system is one you actually use. "Unfortunately, what they’ve run up against is the unachievable Promise of Perfection. It’s the idea that if they find the right planner or app or system, everything will click into place and become organized. Tasks will get done with time to spare. Utopia!!!! …alas, that rarely happens. What is the solution they really need, then?"

The Best (Im)Perfect Management System - The Task-Mistress   I’m often called in as a last resort. I don’t take it personally! In fact, I’m happy to be the last resort. It means that my client has tried everything else, and I admire that kind of tenacity. What I usually find, coming in “at last,” is that they were trying to find the […]

The real key to success is not how much you can do or how fast you can do it, but what you can say NO to! It feels counterintuitive but in this issue of my newsletter, All the Tasks Fit to Print, I talk about how important it is to be able to let go of things, systems, and tools that aren't working for you.

Just Say No - The Task-Mistress I came of age in the 1980s (“during the 1900s” she writes with clenched teeth) when the anti-drug fervor was at it’s peak. The ridiculousness of that whole campaign was that it is not actually bad advice, it was just hilariously out of step with culture as a whole and, more tragically, did not...