This is Steven Robbins. Welcome to the Get It Done Guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

It causes me great anguish to admit it, but sometimes you actually can't work less and get more done.

Some things just take a certain amount of work. If you're willing to make lemonade out of all of the lemons that life handed you, for example, you just have to squeeze a lot of lemons.

No matter how smart you work, life simply demands that you squeeze all those lemons completely,

even if you're allergic to lemons and they make you sneeze.

Life can be cruel.

Even when there's no real way to work smarter, sometimes you might be able to work

faster, and you do that by finding ways to do things in parallel. Doing things in parallel

means doing two things at the same time. Now, not actually at the exact same time. That would

be multitasking, and thanks to the fine scientists at Stanford, we've known for almost 10 years

that multitasking

fries your brain and turns you into a semi-coherent vegetable.

Doing things in parallel, however, means that progress is being made on two parts of a project

at once.

Consider babies.

It takes nine months to make one of those, and no matter how hard you try, it still

pretty much takes nine months.

So if you want

one, you better get started. And won't your Shmoopy be surprised and just cry and cry and

cry when you tell them the news? And I'm sure they're tears of joy, because what else would they be?

But while you or Shmoopy or your surrogate or your test tube are busy growing a baby,

it all kind of

...