Time
Attention, leverage, and the cost of doing things in the wrong order.
The provisional life
Deferring the thing you most want to do until conditions are right — which is not procrastination, and is not fixed by willpower. Three mechanisms that make it feel like maturity, and the one intervention that works.
Procrastination is a design problem, not a feeling
You are not resisting the work. You are resisting the ambiguity of the work. Which makes this a failure of task architecture rather than of motivation — and task architecture is fixable.
Don't Live a Balanced Life If You Have Extreme Goals
Meaningful outputs require meaningful inputs. If your goal is extreme, most of the advice you hear about balance was written for someone with a different goal.
Amara's law
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. Roy Amara, who ran the Institute for the Future, is credited with the formulation.
Memento mori
Remember that you will die — a practice, not a mood. Used by the Stoics, the Epicureans, the medieval Church and the Buddhist traditions for the same purpose: the prospect of an ending sorts what matters from what is merely loud.
Satisficing
Choosing the first option that meets a standard you set in advance, rather than searching for the best available one. Herbert Simon coined the term in 1956 for what people actually do when the cost of searching is real.
The deferred life plan
Organizing life in two stages — do the unwanted thing now, live afterward — where the second stage is indefinitely postponed because its trigger condition keeps moving. Randy Komisar named the pattern in 2000.
Urgent and important
A two-way split of work by urgency and by importance, on the observation that the two come apart constantly and that urgency wins by default. The grid is folklore; the distinction underneath it is not.