Good companies usually work to a detailed list of their own internal deadlines. Firms full of unskilled disaster areas celebrate looking busy.

One good way to really achieve nothing is to make sure your company is so busy chasing deadlines that no one has any time to really think about whether those were the deadlines you should have been trying to meet.

At the end of the year, consider what your company has achieved. Did you do what you set out to achieve like Thomas Edison, or is the answer 'we were too busy working to get anything done'?