Author: Michael Neill

Have you ever wondered why we don’t all have the same things on our “Avoiding Doing” list? Some people find it easy enough to write a book but just can’t bring themselves to book a restaurant; others will do anything to avoid cleaning their home while still others will clean their home to avoid doing…

Years ago, I came across a notion called “tolerations” in the work of Thomas Leonard. In his words, “tolerations are things that bug us, sap our energy, and could be eliminated.” In my own work, I’ve found it helpful to distinguish between things I’m avoiding doing that either actively bother me or that I can…

Have you ever noticed how much we love the idea of a good productivity tool?  In fact, I suspect the open rate for today’s email was noticeably higher than for the rest of the series as it sounds like I’m going to tell you the magic bullet answer to all of your productivity problems for…

There’s an old joke about a very clever person who somehow manages to get themselves up to heaven on a day pass and sits down to have a conversation with God. They ask, “God, can you explain how eternity looks to you?” God replies “To me, all of eternity is like a blink of an…

In 2017, I began working on the manuscript for Creating the Impossible. I had run the online version of the program for close to a decade, so I felt confident that this would be a relatively easy book to write. For the first time in memory, I didn’t freak out as the deadline approached, recognizing…

“To Do” lists are funny creatures.  On the one hand, they can be incredibly helpful ways of keeping our heads clear and present by giving us a more stable and reliable storage shelf than the three pound cauliflower shaped  lump of grey matter inside our skulls. On the other hand, they can become an endless…

When my son Oliver was about 12 years old, he began playing Pee Wee football. While he was actually one of the better players on the team in practice,…

If there was such a thing as a “magic formula” for getting things done, it would look something like this: T (time) +A (attention) =R (results)

When it comes to getting stuff off of our getting stuff done lists, it’s sometimes helpful to delineate between things that have to get done, things…

In over thirty years of coaching people, I’ve come to see that there are two primary approaches people take to getting things done in life. The first is “Fixed Means, variable outcome”, which I tend to illustrate like this: In this approach, there is a right and/or best way to do something, and you accept…