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Create a "To-Don't" list that contains tasks, rituals, and meetings that you should never waste your time on again. Then stick to it.

Balance is not a math problem: It's not a matter of shifting a few hours each week from one activity to another. If it were that easy, everyone with a PalmPilot would look as serene as the Dalai Lama. Balance is a design problem -- a matter of coming to terms with your values and priorities, of reckoning with the trade-offs that they require. Balance is not about willpower. If you depend only on willpower, you're likely to cave in whenever you feel pressured, tired, or unhappy. Balance is about discipline: It's about deciding what's important and then creating a structure that defines how you spend your time.

To access the energy of the human spirit, people need to clarify priorities and establish accompanying rituals in three categories: doing what they do best and enjoy most at work; consciously allocating time and energy to the areas of their lives—work, family, health, service to others—they deem most important; and living their core values in their daily behaviors.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

If you're too busy to help those around you succeed, you're too busy.

Our relationship to time has become corrupted exactly because we allow ourselves very little experience of the timeless. We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. At speed, the world becomes a blur, and all those other lives we encounter that aren’t our own become another blur, too.