I used to think that being really organized was a prerequisite to being highly productive. Yet plenty of folks are very successful without having read Getting Things Done or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

That’s because having a sophisticated productivity system isn’t really about productivity—it’s about reducing stress. It’s possible to be completely unorganized yet insanely productive in one’s narrow area of expertise. It’s actually the minor administrative tasks of life that require a well-built personal productivity system, and an alternative to adopting such a system is simply to let many of these things go.

For most career destinations, there's at least one existing path. For example, let’s talk about how to become an astronaut.

Lots of people want to be astronauts—so many, in fact, that NASA has shared the job requirements on its website. If you’re a US citizen who wants to be an astronaut, here’s what you need:

1. A master's degree in a STEM field, like engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, computer science or mathematics.
2. Two years of work experience in that STEM field or 1,000 pilot hours on jet aircraft.
3. A passing grade on NASA's long-duration flight astronaut physical.

In short, astronauts tend to be former Navy test pilots with graduate degrees in physics who are unusually psychologically stable and in exceptionally good shape. For the aspiring astronauts among us, the path to astronaut-hood is right there in black and white. No mystery.

In our quest for a meaningful life, we need both knowledge and wisdom.

Knowledge is easy to access, thanks to the relentless march of scientific progress and, of course, the internet. All the information we need is available—the sum of human knowledge, on tap. More than we could absorb in a thousand lifetimes.

When it comes to knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, the more recent, the better. A medical textbook that was published 6 months ago is far preferable to one from 1995. And a medical textbook from 1895 would be just about useless today, or even harmful. Bloodletting, anyone?

Professional musicians often purchase a device called a practice pod.

It’s nothing more than a soundproofed booth (about twice the size of a refrigerator) that can be set up in an apartment. There’s room for a chair, a music stand, and usually little else. A practice pod allows a musician to practice their instrument at all hours without disturbing the neighbors. If you’re a pro player in, say, New York City, this is a boon.

Follow me on a brief thought experiment.

Imagine an app that alerted you every time a violent crime were reported anywhere in the country. Let’s call it Crimely.

Crimely would work by tapping into the National Crime Information Center (the FBI’s sprawling database of US crime data) and watching for new violent crimes to be added. Upon detecting a new crime, Crimely would cause the user’s phone to vibrate and display details of the crime on the home screen: the nature and location of the crime, the names of any suspects, etc. Being a Crimely user might not be pleasant, but its users would be completely up-to-date on all the bad stuff happening in the country.