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Time Management
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blocks of time for life’s pleasures. They know that certain things
need to be organized and others do not. It is the poorly time-
managed who—because of disorganization, stress, and foggy
priorities—lose the fun in life. And time-managed people can
still profit from something that they could not have expected or
planned.
Indeed, sometimes our most productive ideas come to us in
moments of spontaneity or play. People who have a firm control
of their time are able to realize the joy that may come from a
spontaneous moment. And they can recognize an unanticipated
opportunity when they see one.
If you haven’t engaged in at least two of the activities you
find most enjoyable within the past month, you need to learn to
manage your time to enable you to do so, regularly, in the
future. Those who fail to find ways to take advantage of life’s
joys prove to be less effective in their work environment than
those whose lives are more well-rounded—despite the overcom-
mitment of hours they allot to their jobs.
The same thing is true of work itself. It’s important to pur-
sue, among other job-related goals, the goal of doing work you
enjoy and feel motivated to perform. One study concluded that
the problem in America has rarely been high unemployment—
rather, it has been high misemployment. What this really means
is that many people work in jobs that give them no pleasure
and for which they’re temperamentally unsuited.

Karoshi
In Japanese, this term means “death by overwork,” a syn-
drome that purportedly claims at least 75-100 lives a
year in Japan. Studies indicate that of the 8,760 hours in a year, karoshi
victims worked in excess of 3,000 hours during the year prior to their
death. As a service to their employees, one Japanese company even
provided actors who would visit the aging parents of overworked
adult children too busy working to visit their parents themselves.
Though few of us should fear karoshi, we should be especially care-
ful not to allow overwork to drain energy and meaning from our lives.