If you succeed in all of the above, the process should have gone something like this:

• Inbox empty. No more inbox stress. Check.
• All things pending accounted for, organized, and prioritized. Check.
• Accomplishing daily and weekly process, execution and review. Check.
• Realization that you signed up for too much, and have been subconsciously carrying around a lot of baggage/stress, and subsequent freakout. Check.
• Getting control of the outstanding, understanding what you have taken on, choosing wisely about new commitments, and deleting those less important. Check.

Finally now, you have organized and retained only those things most important short term and long, and have become much more efficient at executing them with your new-found “throughput”.

This end-game ultimate conclusion should be:

• Your life is no longer spent 95% in Maintenance mode, frantically trying to keep up with the barrage of new tasks, and retention of old ones.
• You spend the new-found free time contemplating those 5-Someday items, and how you will move them up to 1-Now.
• You spend 50% of your life in Visionary mode, devising new pending actions, dreams and ideas for how you might make a dent in the universe.

The above is what keeps us up at night, and drives us to share TSW.