Willpower

living. But it’s not the usual personality-driven cult of self-help gurus and motivational speakers. Allen doesn’t offer seven simple rules of life or rouse crowds into frenzies of empowerment. He doesn’t offer vague wisdom like “Begin with the end in mind,” or exhortations like “Awaken the giant within.” He focuses on the minutiae of to-do lists, folders, labels, in-boxes.
    It’s a system involving a mental phenomenon that psychologists recognized decades ago—your inner nag—but that wasn’t really understood until some recent experiments in Baumeister’s laboratory testing ways to silence that inner voice. The experimenters and Allen independently arrived at the same technique, but they took very different paths. Allen did not operate from any psychological theory. He worked strictly by trial and error, starting, in his own life, with lots of trials and a good deal of error. Coming of age in the 1960s, he studied Zen and Sufi texts, started grad school in history at Berkeley, dropped out, experimented with drugs (punctuated by a brief mental breakdown), taught karate, and worked for a company offering personal-growth seminars. Along the way, he paid the bills by being a moped salesman, magician, landscaper, travel agent, glassblower, cab driver, U-Haul dealer, waiter, vitamin distributor, gas station manager, construction worker, and chef.
    “If you had told me in 1968 that I’d end up being a personal productivity consultant,” he says, “I would have told you that you’re out of your mind.” He drifted from job to job—he counted thirty-five by his thirty-fifth birthday—until his skill at running seminars led to invitations to work with executives at Lockheed and other corporations. As weird as this résumé path sounds, Allen sees a certain consistency in the progression from philosophy, mind-altering drugs, and karate to personal-growth trainer and corporate consultant. He describes it all as a quest for mental peace, for a “mind like water,” the phrase he borrows from his karate lessons: “Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact.”
    You can get a sense of this philosophy by visiting his office, which will produce a severe case of desk envy. You would expect an efficiency expert to be orderly, but it’s still a shock to arrive at his company’s headquarters in Ojai, a small town in the mountains of Southern California near Santa Barbara, and see the complete absence of paperwork or any kind of clutter. On the right side of his L-shaped desk are three stacked wooden trays, all utterly empty, including his in-box. On the left side are another two trays with a dozen books and magazines, which are his to-read pile for airplane trips. Otherwise, his desk is immaculate. In accordance with the four D s of his system, everything that has not been done, delegated, or dropped has been deferred to a half dozen two-drawer file cabinets, which contain his alphabetized plastic folders with labels printed by the little machine next to his computer. You might dismiss this all as evidence of dreary anal-retentiveness, but Allen could not be less dour or more relaxed.
    When he began working with overtaxed executives, he saw the problem with the traditional big-picture type of management planning, like writing mission statements, defining long-term goals, and setting priorities. He appreciated the necessity of lofty objectives, but he could see that these clients were too distracted to focus on even the simplest task of the moment. Allen described their affliction with another Buddhist image, “monkey mind,” which refers to a mind plagued with constantly shifting thoughts, like a monkey leaping wildly from tree to tree. Sometimes Allen imagined a variation in which the monkey is perched on your shoulder jabbering into your ear, constantly second-guessing and interrupting until you want to scream, “Somebody, shut up the monkey!”
    “Most people have never tasted what it’s like to have nothing on their mind except whatever they’re doing,” Allen says. “You could tolerate that dissonance and that stress if it only happened once a month, the way it did in the past. Now people are just going numb and stupid, or getting too crazy and busy to deal with the anxiety.”
    Instead of starting with goals and figuring out how