ESPP

Employee Stock Purchase Plans are, like much in the stock-related world, a double-edged sword. Depending on how you swing them, they can either be a handy supplement to your paycheck or just another source of complexity and, in the worst case, a way to flush income down the drain. As many of my fellow geeks have access to them — though not as many as a decade ago — I’d like to take some time to talk about them. Even if you’re already familiar with ESPP’s, it’s a good idea to know what’s out there — not every company’s plan works the same as yours, and it’s handy to know what the possibilities are when you’re job-hunting!

The idea behind the ESPP is relatively simple: as part of the benefits your employer is showering upon you — like manna from the heavens — you are given the opportunity to buy their stock at a discount. Nothing in the world of employer benefits is ever that simple, of course, so I’ll walk through the caveats.

The money for purchasing this stock is withheld from your paycheck. In this way, ESPP’s are much like 401(k)’s: you allocate a certain amount of your paycheck to be withheld, and that amount never graces your bank accounts. Also, there are heavy restrictions on when you can change that allocation; generally you can jump out if you like, but you can’t jump back in until the beginning of the next ESPP period.

The stock is often (not always) purchased in one chunk, at the end of the ESPP period. In this case, rather than buying stock each time you get a paycheck, it’s all purchased at the end of an ESPP period (generally 3 or 6 months). You can expect to see fun little jumps in your employer’s stock price on that day, as some/many/most employees (depending on the company) turn around and sell their newfound shares (and speculators buy or sell in response to this).

There is a cap on how much you can purchase. The cap can be either a maximum percentage of your paycheck, or a maximum number of shares bought, or both.

The discount varies greatly with the employer. Most common is a range from 5%-15%; alternately, the company may “match” your contributions to the ESPP up to a certain percentage of your income. Also, the discounted price is not always the fair market value on the day the stock is bought; it could be the lower of that price and the price at the beginning of the period, or even the price at the beginning of a window of periods! For example: say your employer’s stock price was $10 when you joined a year ago, $20 at the beginning of the last period, and $30 today, the end of the latest ESPP period. Depending on your employer, the buy price could be 5%/10%/15% of $30, $20, or even $10!

Depending on the company, it may not be a guaranteed win. In most cases, if you sell immediately you’ll lock in your profit and get a nice bonus. However, if you work for a company with a highly-volatile stock price (e.g. a “microcap”), you can lose your discount (and more!) by the time you sell your stock.

Let’s start with the basic diagram below. At this level, the tax situation is rather simple: the difference between the price at which you bought the stock and the price at which you sold it is income, and thus is taxed.

Sounds simple, right? Well, the trick is how it is taxed. There are three options:

Compensation (ordinary income): Part of your ESPP income is taxed as compensation, i.e. at your normal income tax rate.

Short-term Capital Gains: If you held your shares for a year or less after you purchased them, the part of your ESPP income not taxed as compensation is taxed as short-term capital gains. Currently, that means they’re taxed at the same rate as compensation.

Long-term Capital Gains: If you held your shares for more than a year after you purchased them, the part of your ESPP income not taxed as compensation is taxed as long-term capital gains. As of September 2017, that means they’re taxed at 20%, 15% or 0%, depending on your income.

OK, that doesn’t sound so bad. So that means that all we have to do is figure out how much of the income is compensation, and we’re home free, right? Well, yes…and that’s the tricky part. There are two situations we need to go into: “disqualifying dispositions” and “qualifying dispositions”.

Disqualifying Dispositions: If you did not hold your shares for more than two years after the “grant date” (beginning of the offering window; see previous post) and more than one year after purchasing them, this is a “disqualifying disposition”. In a disqualifying disposition, the difference between the amount you paid for the shares and the amount they were worth when you bought them — in other words, your discount — is counted as compensation income. The rest — the difference between the amount the shares were worth when you bought them and the amount they were worth when you sold them — is capital gains; long-term if you held the shares for more than a year after purchasing them, short-term otherwise.

Sounds relatively straightforward, but what if your stock drops after you buy it? Well, the sad fact is that it the discount still counts as compensation income, even though you didn’t see a red cent of it! To be sure, the capital losses offset your income — but only up to $3,000. (The rest must be carried over to future years.)

Qualifying Dispositions: If you held your shares for more than two years after the grant date and more than one year after purchasing them, this is a “qualifying disposition”. In a qualifying disposition, your compensation income is equal to the difference between what you paid for the shares and what you sold them for or the discount (difference between what you would have paid for the shares and what they were worth) on the grant date, whichever is lower. The rest is long-term capital gains since, by definition, you held the shares for longer than one year. So an ideal situation would look like this:

That’s good — more of your income is taxed at the (lower) long-term capital gains rate. But here’s a bizarre twist: in the following situation, you would actually pay more in taxes for a qualifying disposition than for a disqualifying disposition!

Note that if this were a disqualifying disposition, your compensation income would be much smaller (look back at the second graph), and the capital gains much larger. Ouch — good things do not, apparently, always come to those who wait!

And that’s how ESPP taxes work. You’ll remember that forever, right? Well, if perchance you think something more important might displace its spot in your memory, feel free to bookmark this article and refer back to it later. (Heck, I’ll probably end up doing that myself!)

Reference

1. https://financialgeekery.com/2012/05/15/the-ins-and-outs-of-espps-part-2-fun-with-taxes/ 

Getting Things Done by David Allen : Book summary

 

The Book in Three Sentences

1. If we don’t appropriately manage the ‘open loops’ in our life, our attention will get pulled.
2. Overwhelm comes from not clarifying what your intended outcome is, not deciding what the very next action is, and not reminding yourself of your intended outcome and action.
3. You need to transform all the ‘stuff’ you attract and accumulate into a clear inventory of meaningful actions, projects, and usable information.

The Five Big Ideas

1. Getting things done requires defining what “done” means and what “doing” looks like.
2. Mastering your workflow involves capturing what has your attention, clarifying what it means, putting it where it belongs, reviewing it frequently, and engaging with it.
3. If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined.
4. Anxiety and guilt don’t come from having too much to do; it comes from breaking agreements with yourself.
5. Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.

Getting Things Done Summary

• A basic truism Allen has discovered over decades of coaching and training thousands of people is that most stress people experience comes from inappropriately managed commitments they make or accept
• “Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an ‘open loop,’ which will be pulling on your attention if it’s not appropriately managed.”
• “You must use your mind to get things off your mind.”
• “Most often, the reason something is on your mind is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet: you haven’t clarified exactly what the intended outcome is; you haven’t decided what the very next physical action step is; and/or you haven’t put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust.”
• Until your thoughts have been clarified and decisions have been made, and the resulting data has been stored in a system that you absolutely know you will access and think about when you need to, your brain can’t give up the job.
• “It’s a waste of time and energy to keep thinking about something that you make no progress on.”
• We need to transform all the ‘stuff’ we attract and accumulate into a clear inventory of meaningful actions, projects, and usable information.

Getting things done requires two basic components:

1. Outcome. Defining what “done” means
2. Action. What “doing” looks like

You need to control commitments, projects, and actions in two ways:

1. Horizontally. Maintaining coherence across all the activities in which you are involved
2. Vertically. Managing thinking, development, and coordination of individual topics and projects.

• “The goal for managing horizontally and vertically is the same: to get things off your mind and get them done.”
• “There is usually an inverse relationship between how much something is on your mind and how much it’s getting done.”
• “There is no reason to ever have the same thought twice unless you like having that thought.”

The Five Steps of Mastering Workflow

1. Capture. Collect what has your attention
2. Clarify. Process what it means
3. Organize. Put it where it belongs
4. Reflect. Review frequently
5. Engage. Simply do.

The Three Requirements to Make the Capturing Phase Work

1. Every open loop must be in your capture system and out of your head
2. You must have as few capturing buckets as you can get by with
3. You must empty them regularly

Getting Things Done Workflow Chart

When you’re processing an item, ask yourself, “What is it?” and, “Is it actionable?”

If it is not actionable, there are three possibilities:

1. Trash. It’s  no longer needed.
2. Incubate. No action is needed now, but something might need to be done later.
3. Reference. The item is potentially useful information that might be needed for something later.

If it is actionable, you have three options:

1. Do it. If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined.
2. Delegate it. If the action will take longer than two minutes, ask yourself, “Am I the right person to do this?” If the answer is no, delegate it to the appropriate entity.
3. Defer it. If the action will take longer than two minutes, and you are the right person to do it, you will have to defer acting on it until later and track it on one or more “Next Actions” lists.

• “Being organized means simply that where something is matches what it means to you.”
• Allen defines a project as any desired result that can be accomplished within a year that requires more than one action step.

Reminders of actions you need to take fall into two categories:

1. Those about things that have to happen on a specific day or time
2. Those about things that just need to get done as soon as possible.

There are three things go on your calendar:

1. Time-specific actions. This is a fancy name for appointments.
2. Day-specific actions. These are things that you need to do sometimes on a certain day, but not necessarily at a specific time.
3. Day-specific information. The calendar is also the place to keep track of things you want to know about on specific days—not necessarily actions you’ll have to take but rather information that may be useful on a certain date.

• “It’s useful to have a calendar on which you can note both time-specific and day-specific actions.”
• “Next Actions lists, which, along with the calendar, are at the heart of daily action-management organization and orientation.”

No-action systems fall into three categories:

1. Trash. This is self-evident.
2. Incubation. These are things that require no immediate action but are worth keeping. There are two kinds of incubation tools (i) Someday/Maybe lists and (ii) a tickler system. Someday/Maybe items are of the nature of “projects I might want to do, but not now … but I’d like to be reminded of them regularly.” A tickler system is for items that you don’t want or need to be reminded of until some designated time in the future.
3. Reference. Reference systems generally take two forms: (1) topic- and area-specific storage, and (2) general reference files. The first types usually define themselves in terms of how they are stored. The second type of reference system is one that everyone needs close at hand for storing ad hoc information that doesn’t belong in some predesigned larger category.

• “All of your Projects, active project plans, and Next Actions, Agendas, Waiting For, and even Someday/Maybe lists should be reviewed once a week.”

The Weekly Review is the time to:

1. Gather and process all your stuff
2. Review your system
3. Update your lists
4. Get clean, clear, current, and complete.

The Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment

1. Context
2. Time Available
3. Energy Available
4. Priority

The Threefold Model for Identifying Daily Work

When you’re getting things done, or “working” in the universal sense, there are three different kinds of activities you can be engaged in:

1. Doing predefined work. When you’re doing predefined work, you’re working from your Next Actions lists and calendar—completing tasks that you have previously determined need to be done, or managing your workflow.
2. Doing work as it shows up. Every day brings surprises and you’ll need to expend some time and energy on many of them. However, when you follow these leads, you’re deciding by default that these things are more important than anything else you have to do at those times.
3. Defining your work. Defining your work entails clearing up your in-tray, your digital messages, and your meeting notes, and breaking down new projects into actionable steps.

The Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work

1. Horizon 5: Purpose and principles
2. Horizon 4: Vision
3. Horizon 3: Goals
4. Horizon 2: Areas of focus and accountabilities
5. Horizon 1: Current projects 
6. Ground: Current Actions. This is the accumulated list of all the actions you need to take.
7. Horizon 1: Current Projects. These are the relatively short-term outcomes you want to achieve (e.g. organizing a sales conference).
8. Horizon 2: Areas of Focus and Accountabilities. These are the key areas of your life and work within which you want to achieve results and maintain standards.
9. Horizon 3: Goals. These are thing you’d like to accomplish or have in place, which could add importance to certain aspects of your life and diminish others.
10. Horizon 4: Vision. What do you what your life and work to look like in three to five years? Decisions at this altitude can easily change what your work might look like on many levels.
11. Horizon 5: Purpose and Principles. This is the big-picture view.

The key ingredients of relaxed control are:

1. Clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure
2. Reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly.

• “If you’re waiting to have a good idea before you have any ideas, you won’t have many.”
• “Often the only way to make a hard decision is to come back to the purpose of what you’re doing.”
• “If you’re not sure why you’re doing something, you can never do enough of it.”
• “One of the most powerful life skills and one of the most important to hone and develop for both professional and personal success is creating clear outcomes.”
• “If a project is still on your mind, there’s more thinking required.”
• “The big secret to efficient creative and productive thinking and action is to put the right things in your focus at the right time.”
• “One of the best tricks for enhancing your productivity is having organizing tools you love to use.”
• “Until you’ve captured everything that has your attention, some part of you will still not totally trust that you’re working with the whole picture of your world.”
• “You can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know everything you’re not doing.”

Here are the four categories of things that can remain where they are, the way they are, with no action tied to them:

1. Supplies
2. Reference Material
3. Decoration
4. Equipment

Processing Guidelines

1. Process the top item first
2. Process one item at a time
3. Never put anything back into “in.”

The in-tray is a processing station, not a storage bin. There will be three types of item in it:

1. Trash
2. Items to incubate
3. Reference material

• “It’s fine to decide not to decide about something. You just need a decide-not-to-decide system to get it off your mind.”

There are seven primary types of things that you’ll want to keep track of and manage from an organizational and operational perspective:

1. A Projects list
2. Project support material
3. Calendar actions and information
4. Next Actions lists
5. A Waiting For list
6. Reference material
7. A Someday/Maybe list

• “The primary reason for organizing is to reduce cognitive load—i.e. to eliminate the need to constantly be thinking, ‘What do I need to do about this?’”
• “Checklists can be highly useful to let you know what you don’t need to be concerned about.”

Allen on The Weekly Review:

[It] is whatever you need to do to get your head empty again and get oriented for the next couple of weeks. It’s going through the steps of workflow management—capturing, clarifying, organizing, and reviewing all your outstanding commitments, intentions, and inclinations—until you can honestly say, “I absolutely know right now everything I’m not doing but could be doing if I decided to.”

• “Your best thoughts about work won’t happen while you’re at work.”
• “The world itself is never overwhelmed or confused—only we are, due to how we are engaged with it.”
• Allen recommends to always keep an inventory of things that need to be done that require very little mental or creative horsepower.
• “One of the best ways to increase your energy is to close some of your loops.”
• “It is impossible to feel good about your choices unless you are clear about what your work really is.”
• “There are no interruptions—there are only mismanaged inputs.”
• “Do unexpected work as it shows up, not because it is the path of least resistance, but because it is the thing you need to do vis-à-vis all the rest.”
• “Handle what has your attention and you’ll then discover what really has your attention.”
• Allen believes the most important thing to deal with is whatever is most on your mind.
• “If you’re not totally sure what your job is, it will always feel overwhelming.”
• “When you’re not sure where you’re going or what’s really important to you, you’ll never know enough.”

There are two types of projects, however, that deserve at least some sort of planning activity:

1. Those that still have your attention even after you’ve determined their next actions
2. Those about which potentially useful ideas and supportive detail just show up ad hoc.

• “One of the greatest blocks to organizational (and family) productivity is the lack of someone about the need for a meeting, and with whom, to move something forward.”
• “The sense of anxiety and guilt doesn’t come from having too much to do; it’s the automatic result of breaking agreements with yourself.”
• “Negative feelings are simply the result of breaking those agreements—they’re the symptoms of disintegrated self-trust.”
• “Maintaining an objective and complete inventory of your work, regularly reviewed, makes it much easier to say no with integrity.”
• “When a culture adopts ‘What’s the next action?’ as a standard operating query, there’s an increase in energy, productivity, clarity, and focus.”
• “Defining what real doing looks like on the most basic level and organizing placeholder reminders that we can trust are master keys to productivity enhancement and creating a relaxed inner environment.”
• “Without a next action, there remains a potentially infinite gap between current reality need to do.”
• “Avoiding action decisions until the pressure of the last minute creates huge inefficiencies and unnecessary stress.”
• “Defining specific projects and next actions that address real quality-of-life issues is productivity at its best.”
• “Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.”
• “You can only put your conscious attention on one thing at a time.”
• “Providing yourself the right cues, which you will notice at the right time, about the right things, is a core practice of stress-free productivity.”

Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy : Book Summary

The Book in Three Sentences

1. Your ‘frog’ is your biggest, most important task
2. If you have two frogs, eat the ‘ugliest’ one first
3. If you have to eat a frog, don’t procrastinate on it

The Five Big Ideas

1. “The key to reaching high levels of performance and productivity is to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major task first thing each morning.”
2. “Think about your goals and review them daily. Every morning when you begin, take action on the most important task you can accomplish to achieve your most important goal at the moment.”
3. “Think on paper.”
4. “Always work from a list.”
5. “Your ability to choose between the important and the unimportant is the key determinant of your success in life and work.”

Eat That Frog Summary

• “Your ‘frog’ is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.”
• “The first rule of frog eating is this: If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.”
• “Continually remind yourself that one of the most important decisions you make each day is what you will do immediately and what you will do later if you do it at all.”
• “The second rule of frog eating is this: If you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long.”
• “The key to reaching high levels of performance and productivity is to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major task first thing each morning.”

1. Set the Table

• “Think on paper.”
• “One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all.”
• “Think about your goals and review them daily. Every morning when you begin, take action on the most important task you can accomplish to achieve your most important goal at the moment.”

2. Plan Every Day in Advance

• “Always work from a list.”
• “Make your list the night before for the workday ahead.”
• “You need different lists for different purposes.”
• “First, you should create a master list on which you write down everything you can think of that you want to do sometime in the future.”
• “Second, you should have a monthly list that you make at the end of the month for the month ahead.”
• “Third, you should have a weekly list where you plan your entire week in advance.”
• “Finally, you should transfer items from your monthly and weekly lists onto your daily list.”

3. Apply the 80/20 Rule to Everything

• “Before you begin work, always ask yourself, ‘Is this task in the top 20 percent of my activities or in the bottom 80 percent?’”
• “Resist the temptation to clear up small things first.”
• “Your ability to choose between the important and the unimportant is the key determinant of your success in life and work.”

4. Consider the Consequences

• “Long-term thinking improves short-term decision making.”
• “In your work, having a clear idea of what is really important to you in the long term makes it much easier for you to make better decisions about your priorities in the short term.”
• “Before starting on anything, you should always ask yourself, ‘What are the potential consequences of doing or not doing this task?’”
• “Future intent influences and often determines present actions.”
• “Successful people are those who are willing to delay gratification and make sacrifices in the short term so that they can enjoy far greater rewards in the long term.”
• “Motivation requires motive.”
• “Thinking continually about the potential consequences of your choices, decisions, and behaviors is one of the very best ways to determine your true priorities in your work and personal life.”
• The Law of Forced Efficiency: “There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.”
• “There will never be enough time to do everything you have to do.”

Ask yourself:

1. “What are my highest value activities?”
2. “What can I and only I do that if done well will make a real difference?”
3. “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?”
4. “What is my biggest frog of all at this moment?”

• “Do first things first and second things not at all.”

5. Practice Creative Procrastination

• “The difference between high performers and low performers is largely determined by what they choose to procrastinate on.”
• “To set proper priorities, you must set posteriorities as well.”
• “A priority is something that you do more of and sooner, while a posteriority is something that you do less of and later, if at all.”
• “You can get your time and your life under control only to the degree to which you discontinue lower-value activities.”
• “Say no to anything that is not a high-value use of your time and your life.” (Sam: this is similar to Derek Sivers’s, “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.” rule from Anything You Want and Greg McKeown’s philosophy in Essentialism.)
• “Your job is to deliberately procrastinate on tasks that are of low value so that you have more time for tasks that can make a big difference in your life and work.”
• “Continually review your life and work to find time-consuming tasks and activities that you can abandon. Cut down on television watching and instead spend the time with your family, read, exercise, or do something else that enhances the quality of your life.”
• “Look at your work activities and identify the tasks that you could delegate or eliminate to free up more time for the work that really counts.”
• “Ask yourself continually, ‘If I were not doing this already, knowing what I now know, would I start doing it again today?’”

6. Use the ABCDE Method Continually

• “You start with a list of everything you have to do for the coming day. Think on paper. You then place an A, B, C, D, or E next to each item on your list before you begin the first task.”
• “An ‘A’ item is defined as something that is very important, something that you must do. This is a task that will have serious positive or negative consequences if you do it or fail to do it, like visiting a key customer or finishing a report that your boss needs for an upcoming board meeting.”
• “A ‘B’ item is defined as a task that you should do.”
• “The rule is that you should never do a B task when an A task is left undone.”
• “A ‘C’ task is defined as something that would be nice to do but for which there are no consequences at all, whether you do it or not.”
• “A ‘D’ task is defined as something you can delegate to someone else.”
• “An ‘E’ task is defined as something that you can eliminate altogether, and it won’t make any real difference.”

7. Focus on Key Result Areas

• “Your weakest key result area sets the height at which you can use all your other skills and abilities.”
• One of the greatest questions you will ever ask yourself: “What one skill, if I developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my career?”

8. Apply the Law of Three

• “It is the quality of time at work that counts and the quantity of time at home that matters.”

9. Prepare Thoroughly Before You Begin

• Get everything you need at hand before you begin.
• Brian’s personal rule is “Get it 80 percent right and then correct it later.”

10. Take It One Oil Barrel at a Time

• Get your mind off the huge task in front of you and focus on a single action that you can take.

11. Upgrade Your Key Skills

• “Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.”

12. Leverage Your Special Talents

Continually ask yourself these key questions:

1. “What am I really good at? What do I enjoy the most about my work?”
2. “What has been most responsible for my success in the past?”
3. “If I could do any job at all, what job would it be?”

13. Identify Your Key Constraints

• Successful people always begin the analysis of constraints by asking the question, “What is it in me that is holding me back?”
• Keep asking, “What sets the speed at which I get the results I want?”

14. Put the Pressure on Yourself

• “To reach your full potential, you must form the habit of putting the pressure on yourself and not waiting for someone else to come along and do it for you.”
• Work as though you have only one day to get your most important jobs done.

15. Maximize Your Personal Powers

• “Whenever you feel overtired and overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time, stop yourself and just say, ‘All I can do is all I can do.’”
• “Take one full day off every week. During this day, either Saturday or Sunday, absolutely refuse to read, clear correspondence, catch up on things from the office, or do anything else that taxes your brain.”

Resolve today to improve your levels of health and energy by asking the following questions:

1. “What am I doing physically that I should do more of? What am I doing that I should do less of?”
2. “What am I not doing that I should start doing if I want to perform at my best?”
3. “What am I doing today that affects my health that I should stop doing altogether?”

16. Motivate Yourself into Action

• Optimism is the most important quality you can develop for personal and professional success and happiness.

Optimists have four special behaviors, all learned through practice and repetition:

1. They look for the good in every situation
2. They always seek the valuable lesson in every setback or difficulty
3. They always look for the solution to every problem
4. They think and talk continually about their goals

17. Get Out of the Technological Time Sinks

• “For you to stay calm, clearheaded, and capable of performing at your best, you need to detach on a regular basis from the technology and communication devices that can overwhelm you if you are not careful.”
• “For you to be able to concentrate on those few things that make the most difference in your business or personal life, you must discipline yourself to treat technology as a servant, not as a master.”
• “Resist the urge to start turning on communication devices as soon as you wake up in the morning.”

Keep asking yourself:

1. “What’s important here?”
2. “What is important for me to accomplish at work?”
3. “What is important in my personal life?”
4. “If I could only do one or two of the activities, which ones would they be?”

• “Very few things are so important that they cannot wait.”

18. Slice and Dice the Task

Cut a big task down to size using the “salami slice” method of getting work done.

“With [the salami slice] method, you lay out the task in detail and then resolve to do just one slice of the job for the time being, like eating a roll of salami one slice at a time—or like eating an elephant one bite at a time.”

Another technique you can use to get yourself going is called the “Swiss cheese” method of working.

“You use [the Swiss cheese] technique to get yourself into gear by resolving to punch a hole in the task, like a hole in a block of Swiss cheese. You Swiss cheese a task when you resolve to work for a specific time period on it. This may be as little as five or ten minutes, after which you will stop and do something else.”

19. Create Large Chunks of Time

• “Your ability to carve out and use these blocks of high-value, highly productive time is central to your ability to make a significant contribution to your work and to your life.”
• “Make work appointments with yourself and then discipline yourself to keep them. Set aside thirty-, sixty- and ninety-minute time segments that you use to work on and complete important tasks.”

20. Develop a Sense of Urgency

• Highly-effective people launch quickly and strongly toward their goals and objectives.
• “When you work on your most important tasks at a high and continuous level of activity, you can actually enter into an amazing mental state called ‘flow.’”
• “One of the ways you can trigger this state of flow is by developing a sense of urgency.”
• “With this ingrained sense of urgency, you develop a ‘bias for action.’”
• “When you regularly take continuous action toward your most important goals, you activate the Momentum Principle of success. This principle says that although it may take tremendous amounts of energy to overcome inertia and get started initially, it then takes far less energy to keep going.”
• “One of the simplest and yet most powerful ways to get yourself started is to repeat the words ‘Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!’ over and over to yourself.”

21. Single Handle Every Task

• “Every great achievement of humankind has been preceded by a long period of hard, concentrated work until the job was done.”
• “Your ability to select your most important task, to begin it, and then to concentrate on it single-mindedly until it is complete is the key to high levels of performance and personal productivity.”
• “Single handling requires that once you begin, you keep working at the task without diversion or distraction until the job is 100 percent complete.”
• “You keep urging yourself onward by repeating the words ‘Back to work!’ over and over whenever you are tempted to stop or do something else.”