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You know the feelings of operating on autopilot, running from one meeting to the next--or skipping from one email distraction to another.

Before you know it, the month has passed, the season has changed and you're left scratching your head, wondering how to bring meaning back to your career and life.

Kory Kogon, FranklinCovey productivity expert and co-author of The 5 Choices to Extraordinary Productivity, says the problem is widespread. In fact, an international six-year study by FranklinCovey found that 40 percent of respondents indicated they spent 40 percent of their time on things that were "not important" to them or to their companies.

Based on the timeless principles of human productivity and backed by the latest neuroscience (神经系统科学) research, Kogon's co-authored book aims to help people increase productivity at work and in their personal lives by making wise choices on a daily basis.

"Our attention is under attack, and people feel overburdened like never before," Kogon says.

Kogon says the condition is that people live with the effects of a productivity paradox (悖论). Technology has left individuals feeling overburdened with the number of decisions they must make during the day, the number of tasks that require their attention and the drain of their personal energy.

Adam Merril, another co-author of The 5 Choices, says that the book research made him much more aware of how these challenges make harmful impact on individuals.

"You can see the cost of this on our daily lives, on our relationships that have not been cultivated and on our goals that have not been met," Merril says. People waste time, attention and energy on things that don't drive the most important results.

Before jumping into the specific choices, it's important to note that the book builds on the FranklinCovey principles of time management, specifically the idea of fitting activities into quadrants (象限) based on what's urgent, not urgent, important and not important.

Quadrant 2, the home of activities that are important but not urgent, is seen as the place of extraordinary productivity. Kogon says it's in this quadrant that you can focus on doing proactive (积极主动的) work, achieving high-impact goals, creative thinking, planning, relationship building and learning.

"Unlike the other quadrants, where things come at you, you have to consciously choose to be in quadrant 2," she notes.

But to get there, you must learn to rewire your brain, which has become accustomed to responding to the urgent and feeling that dopamine (多巴胺) high. Kogon says that the latest brain science shows that individuals can overcome "urgency addiction" by taking time to pause and consider what's actually important.

The strategy, which the authors call "pause-clarify-decide", puts emphasis on the difference between the "reactive brain" and the "thinking brain".

When you can pause long enough to ask yourself if something is important, you can clarify and decide what will give you the best return on every moment of your day.