I’m dying because I am following all the prescribed rules except one.

Here are things I’m doing well:

1. I clear my inbox.  I deal with each email the second I read it–by responding, deleting, or transferring to my to do list.

2. I have a single list. I have A’s, B’s, and C’s for my priorities, so I can tell what is most important to do on any given day.

3. I make sure I have long-term goals. And I put them in my list of A’s. I identify the items I must get done before the end of the day. But I also add at least one non-deadline-based item that helps me reach a bigger, life-changing goal.

4. I rewrite the list every day by hand. Because if something on the list is not worth taking the time to rewrite by hand, it’s not worth taking the time to do.

5. I make sure I get all the A’s done first. Only then do I move on to less important items. Just kidding. I don’t do this. But I should. Honestly, I can tell that it doesn’t really matter if I follow all the other rules when I’m not doing this one.

There’s a book by Michael Stainer titled, Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork. Start the Work That Matters.  I know I have a problem sticking to stuff that matters: as soon as I typed the title, I thought, “Why is the word that capitalized?” I checked back on Amazon twice to make sure. It doesn’t seem right to me.

Then I tell myself I need to look up the AP Stylebook to see what the rule is. I think the is never capitalized in a title and that is optional, but I think, in this case, it looks better as lower case.

Then I tell myself, look, I just really need to get this post done. If I look up the AP Stylebook, and find an answer, which is probably not going to be easy to find because honestly, I’m not the queen of Google searches. Even if I manage to do that, I will not feel like I have accomplished something important today. But if I finish this post, I will feel like I am meeting an important goal of writing a post each day.

Also, I tell myself that the best work I do is when I am not constantly distracted by randomly interesting searches. Like, the last time I remember doing this was, in fact, last night, when I got stuck looking up soporific. It means sleep inducing. But I thought maybe I was missing a nuance of the word because it was in a picture caption in a movie review. Who puts a word like that in a picture caption? So I thought it had another slang meaning or something. And then, when it turns out that it really does mean sleep inducing I didn’t feel accomplished. It was not on my to-do list. And I can’t even figure out how to slip it into my own writing. Unless you find my paragraph about soporific to be soporific.

Stainer's book has a chapter written by me. Which, I’m sure I wrote only because I put it on my A list 400 days in a row, sending it to him, finally, ten days late. Or something like that. And he has chapters by other luminaries who I am convinced do their A list before they even eat breakfast: Seth Godin, Chris Guillebeau, Leo Babauta. The important thing about reading a book like Stainer's is that if I read people telling me that I should not do bullshit work all day, then I am more likely to hold myself accountable to my A list.

This problem comes down to my struggle with self-discipline. I think everyone struggles. I think there’s a Maslow hierarchy of self-discipline. First you have to get out of bed in the morning. Then you have to write a to-do list every morning, and write a schedule to accommodate it. Then you have to have the self-discipline to start giving stuff up because you don’t have time for everything – the highest form of self-discipline is admitting that you will not be doing some things in the day.

I have done all that. So what I’m left with is stuff that is easy to do. But it’s usually B’s. And some stuff that’s hard to do. Those are the A’s.  Today I told myself no surfing. No staring at the wall. No reading my book. (I'm reading Bonk, by the way, which is scintillating, and thank you to Jens Fiederer who recommended the chapter about pig orgasms that last ten minutes.)

But then I saw a GChat link from Michael Roston about the Dutch parliament. I had to click. It turns out that there is a group trying to make sex with twelve-year-olds legal. So they formed a political party in order to get the laws changed. But the group dropped out of the election because they found they are spending so much time campaigning that they are losing focus of their main goal, which is to legalize pedophilia.

And I thought: Dutch pedophiles are more focused on their long-term goals than I am.

My problem is that I cannot write my own long-term goal in as clear a way as the pedophiles. I coach so many people who tell me they can’t move forward because they don’t know where they are going. And I tell them, make something up. I tell them to commit to a goal, any goal, and move toward it until you think of a better one. The act of moving toward something helps you crystallize where, exactly, you want to be moving.

I wish I could tell you I'm doing that, but recently I've been writing about it more than doing it. Because I’m scared. It’s so scary to commit to a goal when you know it’s not the real goal. Success requires a leap of faith that goal setting is trial and error and the process of finding clarity — not the one-time process of immaculate conception of clarity.

When I was learning about to do lists, each step seemed too hard. And empty in box seemed impossible. Handwriting a to do list every morning felt absurd. But in each case, after I did it a while, it felt right and probably essential to me. So I guess I will just have to trust that if I force myself to choose a goal, my goals will get more and more clear, and the productivity piece will start falling into place.

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Then I thought maybe I needed expertise: striving to be an expert would be my obsession. Which it might be. But I don’t think it replaces happiness. It sort of sits next to it. Like, obsessing about being an expert comes naturally to me, but I’m not sure why.

So I’m still looking for what can replace happiness as my what-am-I-doing-here thing. And I’m thinking that maybe it’s mindfulness. It kills me to even write the word, because for the last decade, while I was busy turning Ashtanga yoga into a competitive sport, my teachers kept talking about mindfulness. I kept thinking to myself, I wish they’d shut up and just rank us so I know if I’m best.

But I’m convinced that mindfulness is what gives us the self-discipline to do all the stuff the happiness researchers say will make us happy. And it makes sense, because my yoga teacher always told me mindful would make me happy, if I’d just try it.

So I get about ten zillion books in the mail because publishers ignore the fact that most book reviews on this blog simply say why I didn’t like the book. But. Whatever. So I get this book in the mail – The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World – and for some reason I find myself reading it during violin practice. This is very bad because we are in a Suzuki program, which means I’m the teacher.

I said to myself, this is crazy, I’m reading a book about slowing down my life as a way to multitask while I am teaching my child to love music. I forced myself to put the book down.

But I liked the book. And I asked the author, Christine Louise Hohlbaum, to write a guest post on my blog. Which is something I never do. Because I end up hating all guest posts and spending way too much time editing them.

The first thing I did when I saw her guest post is I said no. I said this cannot be a guest post. But I think it was okay because that’s her first piece of advice:

1. Learn to say no with panache.
So instead of spending way too much time going back and forth editing, I am just going to plumage through the guest post for stuff I like. I like no. She says, “One of the biggest time sucks in our lives is saying ‘yes’ to something we should have declined. Taking on that extra project at work, organizing the blood drive (again), or accepting yet another party invitation can eat up your time you could have spent doing something you truly love. We have been conditioned to believe ‘no’ is an evil word, when, in fact, it is a complete sentence.” This is how I know she won’t mind that I dumped her guest post but took her best material.

2. Watch your words.
This is the advice that initially hooked me: Hohlbaum says, “Busy is the new fine.” It’s true. Someone asks, “How are you?” and you say, “Busy.” Can you see how messed up that is? It’s a script, right? The person doesn’t really care how you are. The person wants to just hear that you’re fine and move on to the meat and potatoes of the conversation. So if you say busy, you are either saying you do not understand the social convention of opening niceties (very bad to say) or you are saying that busy is the new fine (also very bad to say). Busy is not fine. Busy is too much going on to be your best self. So stop talking about it and fix it.

3. Honor Set-Up Time.
You know the feeling. You return from a week’s vacation to a mountain of work that piled up in your absence. It takes you three days just to slog through it all, and you wonder why you even bothered to leave in the first place. We have the expectation that we should be able to jump right back into what we were doing at a rapid pace. Not so. Every project requires set-up time. Honor the time it takes to get started. It is not about procrastination. It is about wading into the task at hand. It is no wonder you get your best ideas in the shower. You are relaxed and stress-free. Set-up time allows you to tap into your deepest thinking. Make room for it in your life—it will contribute more to your success than pushing through with no stops.

4. Save the best for last.
“Procrastination is a huge time-killer. You spend most of your time worrying about what you haven’t started, pushing it into the recess of your mind. Instead, start saving the best for last. Tackle the hardest project earlier in the day. Reward yourself with your favorite project at the end.”

I love this advice in a book about slow, because it’s not just a way to get your stuff done. It’s a way to slow time down. If you are procrastinating, time goes so much faster than if you have your most important stuff done.

I am trying to figure out what mindful is. And I’m pretty sure it’s doing this stuff. It’s making little rules for yourself throughout the day that force you to check in to make sure you are living a conscious life, purposefully guided. These might not make me happy—that might be impossible—but they might make my head spin slower.

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But today I’m trying something new. I’m doing a post that is useless to you. Here are four ideas I was just about to toss out as incurably useless, but instead, I bring them to you:

1. Law firms are making concessions for women.
One of the top law firms in the world, Allen Overy, just announced they are letting people become part-time partners. This would be news if no one had tried it before. But many firms that have already done this in response to the extreme brain drain in the legal profession due to women leaving law firms because they are so inflexible.

So now there is the idea that there can be a part-time partner. Fortunately, like most things in workplace reform, Gen X-ers have already been the guinea pigs. My friends, in fact, have tried this. And it turns out that if you give a lawyer a part-time job, she ends up working 50 hours a week instead of 80, and gets part-time credit, which isn’t exactly encouraging.

2. People live together instead of getting married.
This is not news you can use because you already know it. This is what I said to Hannah Seligson, who asked me to write about her new book, A Little Bit Married: How to Know When it's Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door.

I like Hannah. She wrote a great piece for the Daily Beast, about the orgasm gap between men and women. I also like Hannah because when I told her that I thought her book was not news, she exhibited a charming relentlessness about publicizing her book, and she told me:

- Co-habitation is a bigger step in the marriage direction for women than men.

- Women are ready to get married before men, even when they're already living together.

This mostly seems like things have not changed. In fact, the most surprising thing about this news is that women are earning more than men, and men have seen a generation of women with fertility nightmares from putting off having children in favor of building their career,  yet still, nothing changes in the marriage equation.

So I don’t know about this book. I’m not sure how useful it is. And I think a book on the orgasm gap would have been more useful, but maybe Hanna's got a few orgasm pages tucked into this book…

3. Texting while driving is bad.
Already 19 states prohibit texting while driving, so that’s gotta make you think twice about doing it in the other 31. Also, it’s clear that even if you’re great with just one-finger on the keyboard, texting while driving is more dangerous than driving drunk.

I would never drive drunk. But I text in car all the time. I tell myself not to, and then I do just one more quick one.

Which is why this falls into the category of news you cannot use: Texting while driving requires the same rules for oneself that driving drunk require. We each self-police, and it’s an issue of self-respect, but also, a social contract with the other people on the road that we will not endanger each other’s lives.

You decide where you are and then no amount of scaring you changes you. So, I read the data, and then I texted that very day. I know I’m a terrible person. But I’m not ready to make the change.

4. Pig sex is on the demise.
The farmer went to grad school for pig genetics, and he has a lot of pigs on his farm. The farmer buys boy pigs to impregnate the girl pigs. But the last batch of boys he bought did not know how to have sex. They would mount the girl pigs, but their penis didn’t go in where it was supposed to. The farmer tells me that so much of pig reproduction is by artificial insemination now that farmers aren’t breeding for pigs who know how to have sex. This is amazing to me. Though I cannot think of how to use the knowledge in any work except farm work.

Okay. So we’re at the end of my post. I thought it would be fun to write about stuff I wish was useful but it is not. I thought it would be fun to break the rule that I have to be useful. But you know what? It wasn’t fun.

My blog is about me doing something nice for you, and then, in turn, you doing something nice for me, by talking about what I want to talk about. But if I am not trying to be useful to you in some way, then I’m not really in a relationship with you. I'm just writing like it's my diary.

There is something really fulfilling about being useful. So here's my tip: You should be useful to readers each time you post. It feels better. For everyone.

Comment on: Workplace news you cannot use

If you are excited about business travel, thinking it’s a free ticket to see the world, you should stop reading now. But if you are having trouble maintaining your personal life in the face of tons of travel, these tips from a cynical traveler will make life easier for you.

1. Stick with your priorities. When people travel to another city, why do they throw out their to do list for sightseeing in random museums? If you have on your top three things you want in life: go to the gym, stay in touch with friends, read a book a week, then sightseeing is not on the list. You don’t need to do it when you travel. You need to stick to your priorities. If sightseeing is on your priority list, then get a new job, because you have no control over where you sightsee if you have a job with a lot of travel.

2. Eat really well. First of all, you’re not paying for your own food, so you should eat really good, healthy food, which is always more expensive than junk food. Second, if you have a rule for yourself that you always eat well when you travel, then you will actually be healthier from traveling. Most people eat crap when they travel because they are tired and they feel like the calories don’t count because they are across state lines. That attitude will make you burn out faster. I can’t find a link but I’m sure there’s a study to support the hypothesis that you deal with the stress of travel more effectively without McDonald’s.

3. Think of balance in terms of weeks, not days. I know I want to spend time with the Farmer, spend time with the kids, be around for dinner invitations, and tooth-fairy moments. I used to worry about this every day. If I didn’t have breakfast with the kids, then I had to have dinner. Now I think in terms of weeks. If I was gone all week, I take off a day from work to have extra time for my personal life. If you are good at your job, and you travel a lot, no one counts how many days you take off.

4. Get elite status. Somewhere. Anywhere. When everyone is staying overnight at O’Hare, the people who are platinum are getting rebooked first. When you are waiting on the tarmac for an hour at LaGuardia because air traffic control cannot remember how many planes are in the air (which, really, is like, every day) if you get upgraded to first class, you’re drinking free wine and eating firm grapes while you are a prisoner of the airport. To get elite status, it means that every time your company wants to save $50 to put you on another airline, you have to say no. If my company will save more than $300, I’ll travel on an airline that I am not platinum on. Make sure your company knows you’re doing them a favor.

5. Do not agree to stupid meetings for geographical reasons. Just because someone you never want to hang out with lives in Saskatchewan and you’re gonna be there doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you should hang out with him. You have a life. And you surely have stuff you can do that evening besides hang out with a loser. Or maybe he’s only a half-loser. The thing is, you don’t have time for half-losers at home. They are the same everywhere: Still just a distraction from the real work of living the life you want.

The bottom line is that you need to  respect your life. Your life cannot be on hold while you travel. The travel, if it’s really frequent, sort of is your life. So the values you have—be spiritual, be frugal, be healthy—have to prevail during your travel. This is not vacation travel. This is not a vacation from your life. Business travel IS your life.

Comment on: How to make business travel manageable

Left uninterrupted, we are likely to interrupt ourselves. The Internet, everyone’s interrupter of choice, is the most tantalizing type of reward system to our brain: intermittent but unpredictable rewards, in the form of a randomly great video or a juicy email here or there. (This is also why kids love to whine to get what they want. Parents give in only when they are at their wit’s end, creating, from a child’s perspective, a similar, randomly yummy reward system.)

Each time we interrupt ourselves at work, the process to get us back to that point of focus takes twenty-five minutes.  So we spend nearly a third of our work day recovering from interruptions, trying to recover our focus.

The time management gurus are all over this problem.

Winifred Gallagher is the author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. The thesis of the book is that the ability to positively wield your attention is the key to your quality of life.  Gallagher says (in either her book or in the article that I am liberally quoting from – I’m not sure which, but I am distracted enough by the issue that I feel compelled to distract you as well) “You can’t be happy all the time but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.”

That sounds true to me. We each have a certain amount of attention, and our quality of life depends on how wisely we invest our attention. I have written about how self-discipline is the key to happiness. And then I have written about how knowing that has not helped me much because self-discipline is not an easy nut to crack.

Now I am wondering if attentiveness is the way to achieve self-discipline. You find your goal—the stuff that is really super important—and you focus on it. That focus creates enough self-discipline to do what you need to achieve the goal.

But that isn’t just my idea. There are others thinking the same thing.

Merlin Mann has one of the most popular productivity blogs, and he’s raking in money teaching executives (who surely are too focused to have time to read blogs) to be more productive in their workday. Merlin Mann says that the key to productivity is attention, not lifehacks.

Here’s a gem from Mann’s interview with Anderson in New York magazine: “On the web there’s a certain kind of encouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need. But when I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the idea of lifehacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There’s very little advice right now to tell people that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit.”

Okay. So notice this about focus: You are not actually able to be productive without focus. So we can stop looking for the ultimate moleskin notebook or the perfect Firefox extension because those are actually productivity distractions. The hardest thing about productivity is figuring out what is the number one thing on your to do list.  After that, you need to focus on doing that one thing.

Mann says, “There’s no shell script, there’s no fancy pen, there’s no notebook or nap or Firefox extension or hack that’s gonna help you figure out why the fuck you’re here.”
Maybe what you need instead is Adderall.

Officially, Adderall is prescribed to treat ADHD. Unofficially, it is the drug of choice for Gen Y.  Adderall, or other drugs that treat ADHD, give a typical brain an intense ability to focus for long periods of time.

I got most of my Adderall information from a great article in the New Yorker by Margaret Talbot titled Brain Gain: The underground world of neuroenhancing drugs. In it, Sean Esteban McCabe, from the University of Michigan’s Substance Abuse Research Center says that at some universities, up to 20% of the population is using these drugs: “White male undergraduates at highly competitive schools—especially in the Northeast—are the most frequent collegiate users of neuro-enhancers.”

Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania , coined the term “cosmetic neurology” to describe the trend of taking drugs to enhance ordinary cognition. He says, “Many sectors of society have winner-take-all conditions in which small advantages produce disproportionate rewards.”

That resonates with me. I have already decided that cosmetic surgery is a must-have career tool for the high performers. So why not consider cosmetic neurology as well?

Joshua Foer wrote about his own Adderall experiment in Slate, and it sounds glorious: “The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new emails in my in box apparently shut down.”

So I decided that maybe I should give the Adderall a whirl.

But then I started getting worried. Because I read research from Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse that shows Adderall is addictive. Not addictive like crystal meth. But addictive like, if you have a proclivity to addictive behaviors, you are a sitting duck for this one. “Because drugs that increase dopamine have the potential for abuse, these results suggest that risk for addiction in vulnerable persons merits heightened awareness.”

That scared me.

But what really scared me is that the cost of gaining extreme focus is often losing extreme creativity. A good example is Paul Philips, a professional poker player who won more than a million dollars after taking Adderall to help him. The scary thing about the Philips example is that Adderall also helped him resist the impulse to keep playing losing hands out of boredom.

I think we have some of our most creative moments when we are doing odd stuff to quell boredom. That is, when we are not focused at all.

“Cognitive psychologists have found that there is a trade-off between attentional focus and creativity,” says Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. “There is evidence that individuals who are better able to focus on one thing and filter out distractions tend to be less creative.”

Maybe it’s better just to do lots of things at once without great focus but with natural creativity.

Focusing on focus seems to distract from the real issue, which is knowing what you value most. Do we know that? And if we did know that, maybe our focus would come naturally from that. And our lack of time management comes from a lack of self-discipline which comes from a lack of focus which comes from a lack of knowing the meaning of life.

And we’ll never know that. So maybe we should just be happy that we have our lack of focus because that enables our creativity. And we don’t know the meaning of life, but we do know that we each get to create our own life, and that, in the end, may be the only guarantee we have.

Comment on: Will taking drugs help your career? Maybe you need Adderall

Here’s what I am going to start saying to those people: Only losers say they don’t have time to read blogs. Because everyone has the same 24 hours in the day. So it’s not that you somehow are more busy than everyone else – no one is actually too busy for anything – the issue is that reading blogs is not high enough on your priority list to read them.

So the real response, when I say, “I’m a blogger,” should be “I stay away from blogs so I can shield myself from alternative opinions to mainstream media.” And you wouldn’t want to be that person, right? In fact, you’re probably not that person, because look, you’re reading this blog.

But the problem of saying “I don’t have time to read that” applies to anything – it could be blogs but it could be those really long articles in the Atlantic that scream: “I know no one is reading this article! I only wrote it to get a book deal!”The reality is that you have time to read everything.

Here's what to do if you feel like you can't get a grip on your reading pile:

Stop talking about information overload. That term is for weaklings. Guess what? Generation Y never talks about information overload. That’s because they know how to process information better than anyone else. That’s actually what they were doing when their parents told them to turn off the TV and the music and log off of IM and do their homework.

Information overload is actually the feeling that you cannot sort through the resources in the world in order to figure out what’s important. If you feel like you are overwhelmed it means that your career is at risk, because the best employees in today’s workplace are information synthesizers. And information synthesizers don’t feel overwhelmed by information – they either use it or they don’t, but they don’t whine that there’s too much.

(Here’s a way to test yourself for how fast you can process information online. Look at these two blogs for three seconds each: On Simplicity and Marginal Revolution. Can you tell which is the bigger? If you can’t figure it out that quickly, you won’t be able to sort information quickly. Solve the problem by practicing: You don’t need to read more stuff to decrease your sense of information overload. You need to read a wider range of sources.)

Stop talking about good and bad media. Just because you don’t read it doesn’t make it bad. There is not any type of media that is so stupid that you can categorically dismiss it. I have found that I learned things from romance novels, People magazine, and even books that, in hindsight, were time wasters. So instead of saying, “I don’t have time for xx,” talk about time like you have a grip on it. Say, “I don’t have that type of media at the top of my list because of xx.” It’s a great exercise to make yourself talk this way, because good time management is actually about understanding your priorities, and you cannot explain your reading choices without also explaining your priorities.

Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better. Look, if you wanted save all your time, and sit around and do nothing all day, then you would be gunning for a 4-hour work week. But most people actually enjoy being busily engaged in interesting things (which is why I think Tim Ferriss is a scam) so we are not so much saving time as figuring out the best use of our time.

So focus on meeting your goals rather than saving time. Information is not something you have time for or don’t have time for. Information is either helping you meet your goals or not.

And anyway, maybe your real time management problem is that you are a perfectionist, you spend too much time doing research, or you work too hard on Mondays (yep, that’s right, you should plan to do the most on Wednesday and Thursday).

Comment on: How to feel like you have time to read everything

My problem with consistency is that I am a tornado, and I have found my tornado nature is both wildly inconsistent and difficult to change, which makes me think that co-dependency on a stable (read: low-maintenance) boyfriend might help. So I think I need an ENTP. So, I’m only dating those from now on. (Yes, the 25-year-old is an ENTP. Personality type is ageless.)

But my inconsistency is no small problem. Here’s an example. I agree to new photos of me for a publication even though I have done tons of photo sessions already and have a gazillion expensively-lit ten-people-making-it-happen photos of myself.

Not only do I say yes, but I agree to do it the day before I leave for the SXSW conference. And I tell the magazine I’ll get a fake tan. Because it’s a summer issue. I’ve never gotten a fake tan and it seemed like maybe it would be fun. Maybe I’d end up looking like I’m in an artsy Versace ad where everyone has big attitudes and big tans.

But at the tanning place I got extremely nervous that maybe tanning places in Madison, Wisconsin suck. I realized that a messed-up tan was no problem for the photographer. He can Photoshop it. But I cannot Photoshop myself at SXSW.

But I already said I’d get the tan. And I am trying to be more consistent. Following through on getting a fake tan would be the consistent thing to do. After all, I didn’t have a commitment to just the photographer, but also to Jan. Jan is the spray-tan lady.

I tried to be trusting but once I got my clothes off, there was no more trust: It occurred to me that I would have this tan for my sex romp with the 25-year-old, and I imagined all the ways that spray tanning could be done incompetently. I ask Jan a barrage of questions: Should people with freckles get a tan? Is that too much too wrong in a Michael Jackson sort of way? Does the spray stuff pool in my belly button? And what about under my breasts? Will that part be white?

Jan charges me double because of the questions. I pay, because maybe it’s true that you get what you pay for.

Four hours later I do the photos and we end right at five because it’s family dinner night, even though my ex and I are not the family you’re thinking of. And I worry a lot about being consistently there for family stuff, because, remember, you never have a problem at work that you don’t have at home as well.

I get home to dinner and scoop up my three year old and kiss him. He says, “Something smells like dirty socks,” and starts taking off his socks.

I panic. I ask the Ex if I smell. He says, “I don’t want to smell you.” He is working on setting boundaries. Then he says, “Do you have a fake tan?”

Crap. I can’t ask the ex if I look too stupid to go to SXSW. Bad boundaries. And the risk of smelling like fake tan seems very bad in the 25-year-old department. So I take a shower.

Then I call my friend Sharon who is a hairdresser. I am a very inconsistent friend to Sharon and do terrible-friend things to her like only call when I need something. Fortunately she’s a hair stylist to the rich and famous in LA so her knowledge of how to groom to perfection complements my own lack thereof, and I call her a lot.

She says buy Nioxin. And she says, “You are doing too much.” Sharon consistently gives me good advice.

I tuck the kids into bed. After I sing to them so that they will have childhood memories of me being a consistent parent. I take one more shower for good measure. I answer email, return phone calls and IM the 25-year-old to see if he is feeling excited to see me which takes a while since he’s not the type to say so without prodding.

Then it’s 1am and it’s time to pack. I pack almost every week to go on business trips. But SXSW is not a normal business trip. It is prom for bloggers. And I’m not sure what to wear. So I pack everything. I take two suitcases for five days.

I speed on the highway and I make the flight.

But my suitcases don’t.

I tell myself, fine. I’ll get them on the next flight. I tell myself, be calm. Consistent people do not come undone over late baggage.

I get on my plane to Dallas. I sleep. I land. I get on my Blackberry and answer emails because consistent people do not let emails pile up when they travel. I call into the office. I find my gate, and I do not miss my connecting flight.

Then I go to the bathroom. I stand in the stall while I finish an email. I sit on the toilet and I am amazed at how dark I am. I pull down my pants to my ankles to inspect my legs. The airport bathroom light is not flattering, but is likely true. And the truth is that people will know this tan is fake.

I tell myself not to panic. I can have sex with the lights out. But there’s no way SXSW is happening in the dark. Crap.

So far, I have somehow maintained consistency.

Then I leave my Blackberry in the bathroom stall. And I fly to Austin before I notice.

I fall behind on emails. I miss a phone call at 10:15. I also miss the 10:45. Two more people who think I’m unreliable. And I miss my radio show. My guests call in and listeners tune in, and I’m not there. And neither is my consistency.

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It's clear that the deep, fulfilling experiences in life are when we are very focused at what we really enjoy doing. So goals should start with that premise, and aim to create more of that in our lives. Here are five steps to create goals that encourage you to do more of what you love.

1. Stop thinking about the goal, and start thinking about the process.
The things that matter most for success in life is how hard you work at what you want to achieve, according to research reported in Scientific American. So formulate goals that focus on working hard at something you like working at.

For a lot of us this means we need a bit of self-discovery. What are we great at? What do we love doing? If you are not spending a lot of time and energy on what you think you should spend it on, then maybe that's not quite right for you.

The act of being lost in this world is actually the process of figuring out what are appropriate goals for ourselves. Where should we spend our time developing our talents?

2. Discover your best goals by watching what you like to practice.
One of the most disappointing pieces of news for all pushy parents is that innate talent is never enough–there’s always a need for practice. Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt explain in the New York Times that the most successful people who have extreme talent also had an extreme love of practicing, which enabled them to cultivate that talent.

Dubner and Levitt use musicians to illustrate their point. But A-Rod is also good example of the idea that it's a passion for practice that makes someone great, according to reports from Tyler Kepner of the New York Times. A-Rod was obsessive with the details and goals of his practicing from an early age – focusing on the process of greatness as much as on the result.

So focus on the process when you pick your goal. Stop thinking about the end goal just for a minute so you can test yourself – would you really enjoy the life that would require all that practice time? Find something where the answer is yes. Because you will naturally restructure your day to accommodate that process if you are aiming to be great at something you love to practice.

3. Take action where your passion lives, and the other stuff will follow.
I don't have a link for this. But I'm sure of it. Because positive psychology coach Senia Maymin has spent hours on the phone explaining to me that if you just start living a conscious life, you can start meeting lots of disparate goals, not particularly related to the area you focus on for raising your own level of consciousness.

I have blogging goals. I want to go back to posting four times a week. But really, what I love, is sitting down with a block of time and a bunch of quiet, and writing whatever I feel like writing. So my goal needs to be to change my schedule so I lose myself in those moments more often. The extra blog posts will come naturally from me loving what I'm doing.

4. There is only one, real goal. So acknowledge it.
The moment when you reach a goal is so short, and almost immediately deflating. Because it is our nature to want something else, next. And that is not about crossing an item off a list.

The goal of taking care of one's body, or sitting down to write is really the goal of being more of your true, best self. It's about finding your best self – always changing, always elusive.

And any goal worth having is a goal to change your life to suit that best self.

5. Aim for flow
There is a state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about called flow. It's when you are so involved in what you're doing that you don't think about anything else, and you are performing at your highest level. To get to this state you need some degree of mastery in what you are doing, and a large degree of passion. Arguably, the two go together in a world of practice.

But when your goal is to practice what you love to do, you are generally happier than if you have a specific, end goal. Here's how Csikszentmihalyi says that flow is related to happiness: "Being happy would be a distraction, an interruption of the flow. But afterward, when the experience is over, people report having been in as positive a state as it is possible to feel. Autotelic persons, those who are often in flow, tend also to report more positive states overall and to feel that their lives are more purposeful and meaningful." (Here's the link. Sort of. Click the second reference.)

So flow is about a process, not a goal. You can set a goal and then be in a state of flow every day as you try to meet that goal.

When you restructure your day you get more self-discipline spread all over your day. And when you put yourself into that state of Flow every day, then your body gets used to that, and you elevate your whole life to one that sort of demands that state on a regular basis.

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I didn't blog about it because first of all, I'm sure the buzz about me is that I'm difficult, too. And also, his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was a bestseller and mine wasn't. So I figured people would say that I'm jealous. And really, what author is not jealous sometimes? I mean, every author wants to write a bestseller.

But at this point, two years later, my hatred goes way beyond jealousy. My hatred is more selfless than that. And while I do understand that Tim is great at accelerated learning, the time management tips I have learned from him stem from the energy I have spent hating him:

1. Don’t hang out with people who don’t respect your time
This all started at SXSW conference in 2007, right before Tim's book came out, when he was promoting the hell out of it to bloggers. Of course, this was not a bad idea, and to be fair, Tim was brilliant to start this book marketing trend. But that is beside the point. He approached me after my panel and said, "Can I get you coffee? I'd love to talk with you."

I said, "Uh. No. I have plans."

And he asked who with.

I wasn't really sure. I knew there were cool people to hang out with after my panel, though, and I knew he wasn't one of them. I gave a vague answer.

He said he was also meeting three people, and he name-dropped them. I can't remember who they were. But they were fun, interesting, and I wanted to have coffee with them. So I said okay.

Then Tim couldn't find them and I had coffee with only Tim.

Then I realized this was his strategy all along.

I told myself not to be pissy. I told myself bait-and-switch is the oldest sales tool in the world, and it's my fault for falling for it.

I even wrote a blog post that included his book.

2. Cut to the chase: Tell people who are full of sh*t that they're full of sh*t
When his book came out, there were vacuous, annoying comments all over my blog directing people to his book. Like, "The topic of priorities is an interesting one. I like how Tim Ferris handles that in his new book,blah blah" and then there's a link to the book.

At this point I knew Tim, sort of. And I called him on his phone and told him to tell his employees to stop spamming my blog.

First he implied it was his fan base and he had little control.

I said that I thought he was full of sh*t.

He said he'd make sure there were no more comments like that on my blog.

3. Self-centered people are more likely to waste your time
Really, when I found he was spamming my site, I didn't call him first. First, I emailed him. And I got some sort of crazy response about how he is only checking email twice a day and then instructions on what to do.

I emailed him back to tell him that I do not want automatic emails from him every time I try to contact him.

Which generated another, identical response about how he doesn't check mail.

So I called him to tell him that he is generating spam back to me to tell me about his email checking and I don't care. If he wants to check twice a day, fine, but don't clog my in box with emails about it.

He said he'd take me off his list.

I am STILL getting this sort of spam from him. But the scope has widened. For example, now, he has commented on my blog and he forgot to say that he doesn't want to be alerted to new comments. So every time there's a comment, he spams everyone in the comments string, telling them that he doesn't answer his email.

It's insane. I cannot believe how many automated announcements I receive saying that Tim does not have a Blackberry. (Yes, the email really says that.) What if we all sent automated emails like that? Email would be totally nonfunctional. What if Tim just shut up about his email and if he thinks its fine to answer twice a day, then he should do that? And not spam everyone about it.

4. Productivity is about meeting your goals, not getting out of doing work
The week that Tim actually works a four-hour work week will be a cold week in hell. Tim got to where he is by being an insanely hard worker. I don't know anyone who worked harder at promoting a book than he did. But the thing is, he didn't call it work. Somehow, sliming me into having coffee with him to talk about his book is not work.

Fine. But then his four-hour work week is merely semantic. Because everything Tim does he turns into what the rest of us would call work, and he calls it not-work. For example, tango. If you want to be world-record holder, it's work. It's your job to be special at dancing the tango. That's your big goal that you're working toward. How you earn money is probably just a day job. So most weeks Tim probably has a 100-hour workweek. It's just that he's doing things he likes, so he lies to you and says he only works four hours. He defines work only as doing what you don't like.

It's childish. It's a childish, semantic game. And it reminds me of him winning the Chinese National Kickboxing Championships by leveraging a little-known rule that people are disqualified if they stop outside the box. So he pushed each of his opponents outside the box to win.

He is winning the I-work-less-than-you game with a similarly questionable method: semantics.

5. Time management is about making time to connect with people
The idea of time management only matters in relation to how important the stuff is that's competing for your time. The stuff that makes time management the most difficult is relationships. Which Tim does not excel in.

Fine. Not everyone has to be good at making real connections.

But Tim runs around telling people who have lots of relationships competing for their time how to think about work/not work, forgetting that in the real world, where people are not assholes, time management is not an equation or a semantic game because relationships really matter. And figuring out how to judge time in terms of competing values is the hardest thing of all.

Tim is all about time management for achievement and winning. But there are not trophies or measurements for relationships. There is only that feeling that someone is kind. And good. And truly connected.

And Tim is not.

Comment on: 5 Time management tricks I learned from years of hating Tim Ferriss

Also, I try not to work on the holidays because I want to be known, somehow, as a Jew who blogs about being Jewish. And if I'm going to do that, then I want to be known as someone who does not work on the holidays. It's part of being Jewish, I think, to struggle with what to do on these days. So I want to struggle, too.

Every year it is hard for me to stay away from work, even when every year that I have worked has felt terrible. But even if I could feel okay working on these days, it's not the person I want to be. Here’s who I am right now: the person who just two years ago moved to a state I knew no one in, and then got a divorce. So I'm not exactly the queen of community right now. A holiday like Rosh Hashanah emphasizes this, but makes me more committed to fixing the problem.

This is also the time that I start gearing up for Yom Kippur, which comes in a week. Yom Kippur is about being sorry for not being nice to other people, so I try to fix as much as I can in the next week so I can be less sorry.

I think first of my not-quite ex-husband. And I cry. Maybe you didn't think that I cry about the divorce. I didn't ever start crying about it until he became a little nicer, which was once he was sure he was getting a divorce. He really wants a break from me. I'm not sure he totally hates me, but I am sure he totally hates being married to me.

But we have great moments, too. He came to the house for Rosh Hashanah. I usually leave the house to give him space to be with the kids. But he agreed that we could all eat dinner together for the holiday because he knows how important it is to me.

I cooked. Which I'm thinking is a primal instinct thing for someone you love. I mean, cooking is very easy to outsource, (since I outsource almost everything already) but it doesn't feel right to me. I want to cook for people I'm close to. But it doesn't feel right to do a primal-instinct-I-love-you-thing for the guy who wants a divorce, so I also bought sushi, which he really likes.

Then my not-quite-ex, who is not-quite-convinced that religion matters, said the prayers with us before dinner. Which almost made me cry.

Then, I said, "Oh. There's a fly. We need a fly swatter."

And he said, "You should hire one."

And we both laughed.

That's what made me cry.

We had a nice dinner, and then after dinner, I had to leave the house. Because the not-ex and I have a deal that he doesn't have to have me around when he's parenting. I think I make him nervous. Or I make him want to kill me. It's a fine line, really.

So I left. Usually I love leaving. Because I work. I usually have phone meetings booked when I leave the house until midnight. But I didn't want to work. I thought reading would be more appropriate. But I didn't want to buy a latte at Starbucks and read there. I can't be a self-respecting Jew and buy a latte on Rosh Hashanah.

So I sat in the car on a dark street and thought about work. I thought about what work I would most like to be doing instead of sitting in the car in the dark.

And here's what I thought of: The three blog posts I owe to people who have been really nice to me. I have made three promises to write posts and broken all three of them.

One of the promises is more than a year old, to ERE. It's a great organization because they are  at the cutting edge of online recruiting. Actually one of the best speaking gigs I've ever had.

Then there's the post for Tony Morgan. He's a Christian blogger who reads this blog—I love that blogging helps me cross cultural lines to people who I wouldn't normally come into contact with. I want him to know that I love being part of a Christian community when he links to me. (And I love watching how the Christians leverage the blogosphere to make being Christian interesting. Why can't the Jews do that? Probably because we just blog about High Holiday guilt.)

The last one is that I owe Leo Babauta a blurb. He asked me to write one for the back of his new book that's been sitting on my desk for a while. It is about to be the next thing that I've waited on so long that I have actually been inconsiderate.

So I decide that as soon as Rosh Hashanah ends, I'm going to write these three things. And write this post.

All this to say: you don't need the Jewish holidays in order to learn something about yourself. Force yourself to isolate for a day. Don't allow yourself to do all the usual things. You will learn something about yourself. It's impossible not to.

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