There's a lot of reasons why deadline-driven may actually - it's not necessarily a bad thing, it just all it does is it speeds up and makes you a little proactive about decision making.

Isn't it interesting that people feel best about themselves right before they go on vacation? They've cleared up all of their to-do piles, closed up transactions, renewed old promises with themselves. My most basic suggestion is that people should do that more than just once a year.

A vision of a desired future allows you to engage and identify immediately in your focus with an improved condition. It changes what you perceive and how you perform NOW. It's not about achieving something in time. It's rather about the quality of choices you are making in this moment - what you choose to perceive, feel, and do. It's about getting the most out of your experience.

Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it's not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly.

Small things done consistently, in strategic places, create major impact.

Most people move actually into high performance in a crisis because that creates the kind of focus that creates high performance.

What you'll tend to avoid doing is probably the most important thing you need to do because it'll probably be the most daunting and the most potentially successful thing you could be doing and that's usually out of people's comfort zone.