The Front Nine: How to Start the Year You Want Anytime You Want
By Mike Vardy
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About this ebook
—A.J. Jacobs, Editor at Large at Esquire magazine and bestselling author of DROP DEAD and THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY
"Mike Vardy has been the go to person for productivity tips for me over the past few years both as editor of the famous Lifehack.org and via his new site at Productivityist.com. This book is full of his best insights from years of experience of working at the very top in the online industry. I can't recommending this book enough for anyone looking to take 2013 by storm and doubling down on efficiency on any tasks they are working on. Especially his descriptive elements of connecting learnings from golfing makes it all a lot easier to grasp."
—Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer
"While I'm not a golf fan, the use of golf in this book works perfectly. Plus, if you try something from the book and it doesn't work for you, simply call a mulligan and move foward."
—C.C. Chapman, co-author of the bestseller CONTENT RULES
What is THE FRONT NINE?
THE FRONT NINE is a guide by one of the web's leading productivity experts, former Lifehack.org Editor-in-Chief, Mike Vardy, to help you get ready, get set, and go forward with your new year, anytime you want. Taking elements from the game of golf and applying them to productivity and goal-setting, THE FRONT NINE aims to put you in a position to make a fresh start on a project, a goal, or even a deeper desire, whenever you’re ready.
THE FRONT NINE is a resource that is specific in structure, yet fluid in content in that it is accessible to anyone who has an open mind. You don’t need to be a “productivityist” to wrap your head around it -- and you certainly don't need to be a golfer. You don’t need to be using a task manager – or task management system – to make it work for you (although it can help). All you need is the willingness to want to change and see things through to make THE FRONT NINE work for you.
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The Front Nine - Mike Vardy
The Front Nine
How to Start the Year You Want Anytime You Want
by Mike Vardy
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2012 by Mike Vardy
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com.
First Diversion Books edition December 2012.
ISBN: 978-1-938120-24-4
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Patricia’s Story
PART ONE: THE DRIVE
Getting Into The Swing Of Things
How To Prepare For The Tee Shot
Taking The Tee Shot
Plenty of Drive
Before The Second Shot
PART TWO: THE FAIRWAY
The Problem With Choice
Working The Plan
How to Pick Your Next Shot
Tools Of The Trade
Midway on The Fairway
Stuck Off Course
Getting Around The Hazards
How to Avoid Taking a Mulligan
Hazardous Health
Playing Through
Being Deliberate with No
The Power of Reflection
The Tough Mudder
Fore-ward Thinking
PART THREE: THE GREEN
Fear and The Short Game
Add More Meaning To The Shot
Fine Tuning The Finish
Putt Up or Shut Up
The Last Shot
The Next Hole
Conclusion
Epilogue: Going Until It’s Gone
About the Author
Foreword
By Cal Newport
Author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You
The Front Nine is not a book about managing the tasks on your to-do list. It is instead a book about figuring out what should go on that list in the first place. And this is why I love it.
To better understand my enthusiasm for this book you must first understand the culture it transforms. Rewind time to the early 2000s. I call these years the Age of Productivity. In the decades preceding this Age, knowledge workers had embraced bare bones time management tools. They learned to use calendars and keep their responsibilities on a list, perhaps labeled with simple priority codes. Because most workers had a fixed set of responsibilities that changed only rarely these tools worked fine.
By the early 2000s, however, the knowledge work sector had fully assimilated the digital age. With the rise of email, in particular, and the flattened organizational structure it helped to spawn, the idea of a manageable and slowly changing set of responsibilities became a relic. Now any number of different colleagues could easily grab your time and attention and request work from you—it became as easy as jotting down a request and clicking send.
The same became true of friends and family outside work. The type-A classmate you barely knew from college, for example, could now find you on a social network and send you an email requesting a coffee to discuss your industry—the type of energy-demanding task that would have been rare in an earlier period, but now is common. Bare bones productivity tools were quickly swamped by this new onslaught.
Two important forces rose in response to this problem. First, writers like David Allen, with his popular book Getting Things Done, introduced super-charged action management
systems that could handle hundreds of tasks and juggle dozens of projects. At the same time, the lifehacker
movement began to gather steam. This movement’s promise that digital tools could manage and conquer life’s increasing demands was a perfect fit for the type of systems writers like Allen were pitching. Thus we entered the Age of Productivity—a golden period when we believed that with a smart enough system to process and organize our obligations, we would be able to obtain a life that was not only stress-free, but also successful and focused on things that matter.
The problem, of course, is that this vision never came true.
At its best, the Age of Productivity helped us keep track of our growing list of obligations, but it didn’t free us from feeling overwhelmed, and it certainly didn’t push us toward accomplishing more meaningful work. As we enter this new decade, it has become clear that we need something more than just smart task management. This brings us to Mike Vardy and the important book that you’re currently holding.
The Front Nine is an example of a new topic I call meta-productivity. Whereas classical productivity focuses on managing your obligations, meta-productivity tackles the equally important question of figuring out what those obligations should be. The Age of Productivity, with its bulging tasks lists and overwhelmed inboxes taught us that we need a lot of help with this latter issue.
In this book, Mike Vardy pursues a simple question: Why are we so bad at following through with the projects we think are important, and what can we do to get better? He smartly points out that there’s a big gap between deciding on a goal and translating that decision into a series of steps that will actually accomplish the goal. In the pages ahead, you’ll learn why strategic reflection can be just as important as action. You’ll also learn about managing your psychology, avoiding hazards that derail multi-stage endeavors, and discover why the final steps of a project can become the hardest to finish. These ideas are classic examples of meta-productivity. Until we understand the art of how people accomplish meaningful goals, Vardy emphasizes, no amount of task management can get us where we want to be with our lives.
If the early 2000s was the Age of Productivity, we’re now in the Age of Meta-Productivity, and it’s thinkers like Mike Vardy, penning books like