I think this article (and presumably the book) is mostly aimed at people who, in the words of the interviewer, have "this kind of overwhelming ambition that therefore makes the finitude of life seem particularly traumatising." The author claims otherwise, but... I'm skeptical of that claim.<p>When you are active and engaged in pretty much all areas of your life, and you really enjoy learning new things and especially learning how to do things yourself, you will reach a point when "productivity" is much less about minimizing wasteful behaviors, or optimizing routine tasks, and much more about effectively filtering through all of your ideas to identify the ones that truly deserve your finite time and attention.<p>The money quotes are near the end of the article, where he gives the pithy advice of "one thing at a time" (which has a book-length treatment in <i>The One Thing</i> by Gary Keller). In reference to the tendency to keep lots of projects or tasks going at the same time:<p>> the reality of it is that you don't make much progress on any of them because as soon as one of them gets difficult, you just bounce over to another one that feels easier.<p>> “okay, there are, four home improvement projects that all feel essential to making my living space acceptable. I'm going to deliberately give up all hope of making progress on three of them until I have seen one of them through to completion, or consciously abandoned it because it turned out to be a bad idea, that's okay too.”<p>> choosing to do something that matters when you've got more things than that matter than you can handle is always going to come with that feeling of anxiety about what's going unaddressed.<p>It sounds to me like the advice here is that one must learn to say "no", or at least "not right now". And that for most people, this boils down to <i>anxiety management</i>--assuaging those fears of missed opportunities or preventable errors long enough to sit down and focus on something truly worth doing.