“The most important idea of all is this one: You will succeed in the face of change when you make the difficult decisions first. It’s easy to justify running for your plane when it’s leaving in two minutes and you’re only five gates away. It’s much harder to justify waking up 10 minutes early to avoid the problem altogether.”

“There are folders on your computer that Microsoft has tried hard to keep secret. Within these folders you will find two major things: Microsoft Internet Explorer has not been clearing your browsing history after you have instructed it to do so, and Microsoft’s Outlook Express has not been deleting your e-mail correspondence after you’ve erased them from your Deleted Items bin. (This also includes all incoming and outgoing file attachments.) And believe me, that’s not even the half of it.”

“I’ve got about twenty projects on the go at any one time. Some are long term, some are on hold pending outside responses, some are at the proposal stage, and some are at the wrap up stage. I’ve tried every method under the sun to stay on top of my work. But they have all failed in one important way: they never stopped my mind from wondering ‘What should I be working on now?’ For me, that awful feeling of being out of control is a total work killer…”