Making It All Work summary

Would you consider yourself a dreamer or a doer?

This question highlights two major traits required to achieve your potential: you need both perspective – meaning the ability to see the big picture – and control, meaning the ability to actually organize and manage your obligations in line with that big picture.

How many times have you gone to the store in order to buy three things and only walked out with two? Or how many times have you had a brilliant idea at lunchtime, but completely forgotten what it was by the evening?

Chances are this happens fairly often.

By now you know the importance of putting down in writing all the ideas that cross your mind and hopefully you have a nice long list of notes.

What now?

By now you should have a long list of actionable tasks that add up in a meaningful way. And if you’re like most people, in addition to this list you’re probably surrounded by a maelstrom of Post-It notes, paper to-dos and reminders in digital calendars.

For this pile of tasks in their various forms to make any sense, they need to be organized and prioritized.

Let’s assume that you now have several well-organized to-do lists. How do you maintain them?

After all, it’s highly likely that you’ll come up with new ideas and tasks faster than you can take care of them. This means that your lists will keep expanding and eventually will be completely out of control, comprising pages upon pages of unfinished tasks.

Have you ever spent an entire day taking care of all manner of little tasks, only to look back on them later and realize that they didn’t actually add up to anything meaningful?

If you want to stay true to your professional and personal priorities, you need to avoid this and ensure what you do day-to-day is important. To achieve this, you must do three things.

So far we’ve mostly looked at how you personally can achieve your ambitions, but what about organizations? How can you get an organization to where it should be?

Obviously the first task is to identify the destination. Visualize where you see your organization going to achieve success. This will make your direction clear.

Imagine yourself walking along a forest path. Every time you come to a crossing you must guess which path you should take, because you can only see a stone’s throw ahead.

Now imagine the same situation, but your viewpoint rises dramatically into the air. You can look down at yourself from a great height and see your path as well as all the other paths perfectly, so you know exactly which one to take.

The key message in this book:

To be productive you must take control of your daily actions. Start capturing all your ideas and tasks on paper, and organize them into meaningful hierarchies according to your bigger goals in life.