Episode number one of my new podcast Precision Change went live recently. Enjoy!

Are you overwhelmed by information? Do you have 1000's of emails sitting in your inbox right now, many unread, all nagging at you to do something about them? Have you declared email bankruptcy, hoping that "if it's important, they'll write back?"

You are just minutes away from a permanent and responsible solution...and it has nothing to do with getting a Blackberry or the latest upgrade of Microsoft Outlook.

According to Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, the digital age has created both new opportunities and new problems with these things he calls "bits."

In this interview, listen to Mark teach you...

• How to "let the bits go" in a world of infinite bits, and why this is vitally important to your productivity.
  
  
• How the inbox was not designed to be a filing system and an address book and a to-do list and a calendar.
  
  
• How to get your email inbox and to-do list to zero—today and every day—even with exponentially increasing incoming messages.
  
  
• How to procrastinate more effectively by deferring things into the future as far as possible.
  
  
• Why you need a simple to-do list, and how to get it to 0 so you experience the feeling of being done.
  
  
• How mastering bits gives you time to actually do your work, and enjoy your life more when you're not working.
  
  
• Why you may have failed with David Allen's complex Getting Things Done method, and what to do instead.
  
  
• The power of bit levers, and why you are typing far more than you need to if you aren't using one.

Take responsibility for your relationship to the digital world by listening to this interview now.

Check this out, but watch it full screen and with the music up:

Johnny Bunko trailer from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

Looks like a brilliant way to get people to read your business book, from Dan Pink who used to be Al Gore's speechwriter.

I recently watched The 11th Hour, a documentary produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio about the global environmental crisis. I've also been reading and thinking about systems, and "the ecology of mind."

The problems we are facing with global warming, peak oil, overpopulation, etc. are due to the ways we have been thinking, especially the ways we have been thinking about creating energy and making stuff. We have been thinking in abstractions and ignoring contexts.

People are starting to understand that if you make something, it's a problem if it is made with something nonrenewable (like coal) or creates "waste." In a closed system, waste is food, or else it is destructive. Economies become more productive only when they don't liquidate their "natural capital."

The ideas that there are "unlimited natural resources" and "unlimited places to store our waste "are ending as we come up against the limits and carrying capacity of our planet.

Similarly, within personal development literature there is much written about your "unlimited potential" to be, do, or have whatever you want in life. This is false. Your potential is limited, just as the Earth's supply of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels is limited.

Intense personal development workshops that promote ideas of unlimited potential can induce states of mania and psychosis. It can take days, weeks, or years to integrate the fallout from these irresponsible approaches to change.

It's time for an ecological personal development movement to emerge alongside the movement to save civilization (not the planet--the planet will survive even if human civilization does not).

We must understand that our personal development can be ecological, whole, and integrated. We do not need to have a "breakthrough"--nature will break us in it's own time anyhow. By recognizing our limitations and by understanding the limitations of the methods we use to develop ourselves we can grow and change and minimize painful side effects.

What we are learning is that limitations do not necessarily limit our thinking or limit our ability to increase our productivity personally and globally. By understanding that waste = food, by thinking in terms of contexts and systems, and by intelligently designing our solutions to problems we can continue to grow and develop in more elegant ways.

If we do not begin thinking ecologically at all levels, we may experience some very painful consequences, personally and globally. Let's promote healing that we don't have to heal from. Let's promote global solutions that increase productivity and quality of life without reducing the stability and long-term health of the planet's ecosystems. We have the knowledge and the ability to do this.