Here's an idea submitted to Google in a contest they sponsored a couple of years ago.  The idea was to propose an idea that would help a great number of people in some significant way.

10. What one sentence best describes your idea?

Create an interdisciplinary forum to resolve differences and further the work of primary fields of knowledge and transformative disciplines.

11. Describe your idea in more depth.

Different fields of knowledge and transformative disciplines intending to further the health, well-being, and productivity of humanity often generate conflict and are at cross purposes. I propose that we create a forum to provide a common ground of language, principles, and methods through which these fields and disciplines can cooperate and further each others’ pursuits. Many differences among disciplines are due only to a lack of understanding of others’ jargon or meanings. Other conflicts are due to differences in the disciplines’ range of investigation or application—they are simply not addressing the same dimensions of reality or consciousness. The apparent conflict between evolutionism and creationism probably fits in this category. As another example, ‘normal’ human function develops ‘good’ habits and shuns ‘bad’ ones, while deep creative genius seems to preclude all habits in contacting a spontaneous ‘flow’. Establishing common ground should help resolve many of these confusing issues, help investigators focus on what’s important, and add precision rather than heat to their explorations.

Many fields limit—sometimes implicitly--their investigations to ‘normal’ and abnormal levels of consciousness and functioning. As a result most people have lost sight of opportunities for optimizing the human condition. So within the common ground it would be helpful to develop a vision of peak performance based on peak experiential qualities of people from numerous cultures and environments. Precisely what is the ‘zone’ that peak performers talk about? Preliminary efforts to identify desirable personality traits, skills, environments, or ‘best practices’ have been made, but this has actually distracted us from what’s essential. What basic aspects of experience provide moment-to-moment feedback no matter what we’re doing in any situation? Besides ‘normal’ and peak performance, a forum should identify other relevant levels of functioning, as well as the ‘mechanism’ of transition from one level to another. 

13. If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?

Anyone pursuing knowledge, plus all those who eventually make use of the knowledge generated by the many disciplines, would benefit. Take one example, using common ground to explore and appreciate differing moral systems. People all over the world lead their lives in different ways, trying to follow varied moral or ethical systems. Ironically, history has witnessed how differences between these systems lead to conflict, aggression, and even war. A forum could explore what different types of systems there are, how such systems arise, which levels of consciousness they apply to, and whether ‘something’ might explain how they all arise. We might come to appreciate and understand relationships between such systems rather than simply rejecting some as ‘wrong’ or ‘misguided’.

Academic and professional specialization has had the unintended effect of isolating investigators and perpetuating unexamined principles; common ground can reconnect people and further all inquiry. 

I think the most important question in time management is: "What is possible to change about time?"   Many  of you reading this are probably up to your eyeballs in deadlines, and would just like a quick solution  to getting   your projects completed on time, I could spout off a few simple-minded tips, you could read them hurriedly, try to put them into practice, and then get on with getting on with things.

I'm not going to do that.  What I've found is that quick answers don't last, and they certainly don't get to the root  of time pressures.  People are hurrying everything these days, even time management!  There's not much point   in getting things done if you're a nervous wreck afterwards.  

We can't change the way the clock ticks, but we can change the way we experience time if we're clever enough.  

Answer these questions:  During your best performance in some sport, how did you experience time?   When   in love, how  did time feel?   In optimal work, how was time?

Out of the thousands of people I've asked these questions, most say that there was a kind of effortless,  frictionless flow, or that they simply didn't experience time at all.

This is important to  think about, because if time felt really different from  the way it usually does, something   other than 'Western standard hurry time'  is possible.  Even though clock time can't easily  be changed, the  way we experience  time can be substantially changed in some way.  

How  would  you  do  it?  Well,  I can say authoritatively that pressure and anxiety about time are due to an imbalance in the heart, head, and throat energies.  When  the throat is constricted, an excess of energy flows  to  the head, with a dearth of energy to the  heart, and we feel  like time is passing out of our control.  If these  energies are balanced, experience is timeless--not that events in physical time (including your work)  don't happen, they just aren't accompanied by pressure. 

How can you balance these energies?  The best single antidote to 'time poverty' and pressure is to breathe gently, with some consistent awareness of the breath, through both nose and mouth, with the tip of the tongue   placed  lightly on the upper palate just back of the front teeth. This  balances left and right hemispheres  of the  brain, as well as upper and  lower body energies.

This s a simple practice which can be done whenever you  remember it--the greater part of the day, the better.    But in order to rebalance  the energies as they were when you were a child, consistent practice of this breathing technique  is necessary.  After a couple of weeks you should notice a substantial difference in both   time anxiety as well as your overall  energy level.

Don't take my word for it--try it and see. 

(First published in the Australian CPA Practitioner, December 1999, p. 6)

What's our main human problem?
If we ran our lives like a business we'd ask about our mission, our long-term vision or goals.

Our primary problem seems to be the habitual structuring of experience.

Quite possibly, all other major problems are a result of this one. If we can solve this one, the other (local) issues will just naturally 'unravel'.

How do we know this structuring process is problematic?
Because all the structures it fabricates are absent from the zone of peak performance.


What is the 'zone' of peak performance?
This can be generally characterized as experiences of glow, flow, or zero. It is not characterized by any particular ordinary aspects of appearance (the forms of appearances 'don't in themselves seem to look different' as one becomes enlightened). In addition, zone experiences do not include experiential structures such as those fabricated by the field communique.

Conclusion: All conventional activities are best done without these (limiting) structures in one's experience. Apparently experiential structures obscure the zone of peak performance and experience.

In today's postmodern world we need a natural, secular, and cross-cultural vision of peak performance, realization, morality, and spiritual experience. This can be found in TSK and the zone.


What are the problematic structures the communique fabricates, and how are they established?
There is a dynamic, creative process that may be described as the field communique, or an existentializing, substantializing, indensifying, and dimensionalizing process. The process 'establishes' or 'fabricates' these structures and 'endows' them with a kind of authenticity, credibility, existence, substance, and independence.

This process, depending on current awareness and action, perpetuates, then eventually breaks up previously reinforced habits, complexes, or previously recorded actions (karma).

The limiting structures include: Personality complexes, here-there, now-then, linear time, container or extended space, self-other, observer-observed, . . . .


How does one dissolve these 'normal', or common experiential structures?
People often aren't even aware of the structures--we're obsessed with content, with conventional designations.

We can learn about, notice, and 'unravel' the communique itself, our one big habit, tracing it back to a 'shorter' process that tends to set up simpler interdependent read-outs with simpler, less troublesome structures. In the process we can learn how structures and meaning are generated. This process opens up, simplifies, and clarifies everything, and reveals an inherent fulfillment, moving us 'closer to the zone's attributes'. By just clearing away the clouds, more light naturally appears.

A new 'psychology', or transformative discipline, can be based on handling this one encompassing communique problem. If we can solve this one, other local (describable as content of a read-out) issues will just naturally 'unravel'.

In clarifying experience we learn to distinguish the practical, conventional, commonsense, outer, scientific world, and the experiential, private, inner values- and meaning-creation world of psychology and spirit.

Tarthang Tulku authored two books on developing values and productivity in work, Skillful Means, and Mastering Successful Work. Though he is a Buddhist master, both of these works are primarily secular in approach, not based on belief or injunction. They discuss values useful for fostering improvement of well-being and realization as well as productivity.

These works help in the ongoing development of a secular morality foreseen by the Dalai Lama, who said, “In the West, religions have lost their dominance. . . . I believe deeply that we must find . . . a new spirituality. . . . This new concept ought to be elaborated alongside the religions . . . . We need a new concept, a lay spirituality. . . . It could lead us to set up what we are all looking for, a secular morality. . . .” (p. 16, p. 104, Violence & Compassion)
 
The Time, Space, and Knowledge (TSK) vision seems to offer even more in developing and actualizing such a natural, shared morality. Expressed in six volumes authored by Tarthang Tulku from 1977 (Time, Space, and Knowledge) to 1997 (Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space), the vision provides a comprehensive forum for interdisciplinary studies, including a comparison of the values, assumptions, principles, and methods of business, education, psychology, and spiritual and religious disciplines.

Using the principles, and three levels of statements of the vision, it has been possible to derive a detailed description of the cross-cultural core ‘zone’ of peak performance and realization, including its secular values or attributes, as well as two other levels of experience, providing a broad spectrum from greed to goodness to Godness within which different values systems can be compared. These valued facets of enlightened experience are described with detail and precision that is far more granular and operationally useful than typical one-word value descriptions.

General guidelines have been derived to support decision-making in any situation: a counterproductive (or detrimental, vs. beneficial) act (whether ‘inward’ or ‘outward’, presuming that these can be distinguished) is (1) a ‘movement’ that darkens, clouds, or scatters rather than brightens/clarifies/focuses/coheres the energy in a moment-world-view, or (2) that divides or increases the separations within awareness or a focal setting or frame of mind rather than further illuminating awareness or dissolving boundaries within awareness.

In a business environment, [unlike most other values systems,] all this supports the possibility of truly continuous improvement of well-being and productivity for any mission, and during any work process, and even when switching between tasks.
 
Steve Randall