The Importance of Organizing Your Life

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About 60% of our time at work is spent on what they call work about work, which is a form of running in circles we might call meta work, searching for documents, organizing folders, pinging people three or four times, and then those people pinging other people three or four times, talking about the pings, gossiping about the pings, planning meetings about unnecessary meetings about planning more meetings and so on.
And though we spend most of our time doing that, we believe we spend about 30% of our time doing that.
The result is we feel like we don't have enough hours in the day. But as Nick says, that feeling is generated by the quote, thousands of seemingly small inefficiencies at work that add up over time to become major drains on everyone's productivity.

Nick Sonnenberg doesn’t believe there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. That’s because when his business was in crisis mode, he developed a framework for eliminating inefficiencies and preventing the sort of metawork – working on working – that leads to scavenger hunts and meetings that could be emails, and for that matter, email runarounds that get everyone ever farther from inbox zero. He turned that framework into a consultancy business, and put it all together in a new book for people who feel underwater titled Come up For Air.