Personal productivity improvements can be compared to a closed-loop system. The feedback from trying out new methodologies impacts how we work as we continue ever to calibrate ourselves to make the most of our time. On this journey of self-improvement, some things have become self-evident to me:

• To be more effective, it is about what you do not do. You have to say no more. You do not need more time; you need less distraction. By eliminating distractions, you become more efficient.
• Focus on doing a few things well, instead of doing many things passably. You can only do a few things.
• Pick your battles. Prioritize and let the rest go.
• Everything you say yes to takes time away from another thing you would otherwise be doing.
• Relentlessly prioritize. As you grow as a professional, you must aggressively prioritize to succeed.
• You won't get more time. You cannot control that anyway. Focus on what you can control, which is, how you use your time.

We can use a computer's RAM(Random Access Memory) metaphor to put the above points into context. Your working memory has a capacity, beyond which memory segments used by some programs have to be paged to disk to accommodate new programs. This over-simplification of memory paging highlights the opportunity costs of taking on more responsibilities.