Because metaphors involving sexy cars are always fun….

I’ve ogled the valet lots Newport Beach, CA, where Porsches are pedestrian, but the fanciest car I’ve ever seen was in a Home Depot parking lot in the sleepy town of Phoenix, Oregon. I didn’t know what I was looking at, the only writing on this polished machine was “F1.” Some googling at home later revealed it was a rare McLaren. As one of the fastest production cars in the world, it comes with a price tag that stops you in your tracks: $815,000. I know, right? Top speed: 241 mph. That’s four miles per minute. Zero to sixty in 3.2 seconds, similar to many high-performance motorcycles. Because…what if you really need sandpaper and the hardware store is about to close?

McLaren estimates the cost to maintain their masterpiece at $30,000…annually! Why? How?

High performance means high maintenance. A nail in your tire is going to cost you $6,000. Why? Because McLaren makes you replace both tires on the axle. Patch the tire? Ha. They know the performance of the car is only as strong as its weakest link.

But imagine you think you know better, and you take your F1 to Costco. Despite the valiant protests of the tire techs, you replace your damaged tire with a $100 Goodyear. What’s going to happen? Bad things, right?

627 horsepower is going to push that tire beyond its limits. If it doesn’t fall apart, it will create dangerous handling and braking scenarios that could easily result in the destruction of your $815k investment. But don’t worry, that’ll only bother you if you survive.

It’s hard to appreciate just how fast we move these days, but it wasn’t long ago before we didn’t even have answering machines. Now you can reach just about everyone you know instantly. We hardly even leave voicemails anymore–they’re too slow. You can access nearly any piece of information just as fast. Fax used to be fast. Now it’s a joke. Go to a store to buy a CD? Forget it, you can download the song you want in the time it would take to unwrap the jewel case.

Do you ever feel like there are parts of you that can’t keep up? Feel like you constantly need to get organized? You’re exhausted, overstimulated, dread looking at your email, feel like you’re drowning in loose ends, you don’t have enough time for yourself? Is your life more about “keeping up” than really enjoying yourself?

Get Organized

What if you’re moving at a McLaren pace on Goodyear tires?

It’s easy to see that technology is evolving faster than we are, and it’s one of the primary causes of what I call “chronic overwhelm. The answer is to slow down and get organized.  It’s a serious issue that’s only getting more serious. Like the McLaren increasing speed on those insufficient tires, the problems start small, but then grow. What begins with poor mileage can end in a wreck. What starts as fatigue can eventually end a marriage. An ounce of prevention, right? Get organized before it’s too late. Get whole. Get integrated. Move forward with all of you.

I created Clear Workspace, Open Mind as a solution to this growing problem in our society. It’s not about doing more or less. It’s about moving forward in your life in an integrated, whole way. It feels slower, but it’s actually faster. You have to get organized in this way to experience it. Especially in the US, we have the idea that more and faster is always better, and while most of us know it isn’t, the temptation remains: more projects, more data, more friends, more money, and the result is that the most vulnerable parts of us break down under the strain. It doesn’t have to be this way, get started with the free trial today.