In Part One, visualization was flagged as an important tool for goal setting. Indeed, it's such a key instrument it's recommended by pretty much the entire self-help universe – from mainstream psychologists to the wackiest of fire-walking motivational Svengalis. Given this – and despite some recent criticism that visualization can make you complacent (an unlikely outcome for the insecure in my view, although a potential danger for procrastinators) – it seems a legitimate way to end our journey towards productivity.

However, the aim here is not, as previously, to imagine our desired future. Instead, we need to visualize ourselves going back in time – in fact, by 10 or even 20 years – in order to confront the young and ineffectual person we once were.

If we imagine that meeting – and can get him or her beyond the shock of coming face-to-face with their older and wiser self – what advice would we offer to aid their conversion into the productive and successful person we know they want to become?

In fact, the exercise isn't as daft as it sounds because, the chances are, the lessons we'd like to impart remain relevant for our present and future, though we may have so far failed to articulate them. So, here's our chance. That said, life-coaching our more youthful self is a deeply personal activity – meaning there are no uniform answers.

For illustration purposes only, therefore, I write mine below – the 10 things I wish I could now say to the younger me.

Chaos reigns

In fact, there's an eleventh point, although one too important to share in a list. It's what I say to my team when things go wrong, although – I have to admit – it also undermines the entire premise of this book.

‘It's all chaos,’ I often declare.

What I mean by this is that, by its very nature, life is uncontrollable. After all, we're just tiny organisms clinging to a speck of rock that's hurtling through space. Of course, we spend our time trying to gain an element of control over our lives – quite rightly. We acquire skills and seek work in order to buy shelter and travel further up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But the notion of total control – of eradicating any element of our life that's out of control – is impossible.

It's also worth noting that, from the above tips – and perhaps unusually for a book about productivity – none of the recommendations I made to my younger self involved anally retentive information processing, or minute-by-minute time strictures. Quite the opposite. Your focus should be on setting a broad outline for your life, before creating some sort of sequential order, based on your best guess at the practical steps required for execution. And then get going as best you can.

Anything too inflexible will snap. As stated in Part One, sustained motivation is the key – helped by concepts such as finding ‘flow’. Yet my guess is that flow will arrive when you discover something you love, which is usually something you're good at. Once you find flow, motivation will then be largely due to structure, which means developing a critical path for execution. Of course, success (or at least progress) will keep you motivated, which is great. But you'll also need to calculate how to overcome the occasional obstacle.

And the rest is mere detail. In fact it's chaos – from which you have to snatch the elements you need for your progress.

The joy of winging it

I'll end on a personal note. My PR firm has just turned ten years' old. This means I've spent a decade nurturing a company from the ground up. In fact – given that I had zero experience in public relations when I created the company (just an idea for producing ‘expertise based’ PR) – the concept of ‘starting’ a business was quite literally true in my case. I had to learn the strategies and tactics that are the stock-in-trade of PR executives. And I had to make every lesson count, no matter how embarrassing the mistake.

Those early days were an extraordinary mix of confusion, excitement, anticipation and suppressed panic: I loved it, but it also terrified me. I felt a great sense of freedom – that anything was possible – but also an underlying sense of dread. Surely, someone would point out that I couldn't do this? That I was simply making it up as I went along. That I was an amateur, a chancer, an imposter: and that I was ‘winging it’ to an audience that would eventually work me out and slam the door.

In fact, I was a chancer. And an imposter. And I was, pretty much, making it up as I went along. That said, I'd done my research and – at the very least – knew that my target audience was being poorly served by the existing PR offering. There was a classic gap in the market, even if I'd still to establish how, exactly, I could fill that gap.

So what's my point? Two really. That we can move forward with imperfect knowledge – in fact we must, because perfect knowledge is impossible. And that the chaos doesn't subside as the journey progresses: at least not if we want to keep moving forward.

Hence my phrase ‘it's all chaos’ regularly stated to sometimes panicked colleagues in the office – usually after some minor disaster has unfolded that they're (mistakenly) looking for me to solve.

Quite rightly, they plan a particular campaign meticulously – down to the meetings scheduled and the phone calls required: where, when and with whom. They have sheets of instructions, lists, press releases, FAQs and Q&As – all pre-prepared and pre-approved. And then they execute, which results in every last element of their highly calculated plan going straight out the window.

‘No plan survives contact with the enemy’, said Helmuth von Moltke, the renowned German general, although what he meant by this wasn't that the goal should change or our objectives be in anyway compromised. It's that – having established the strategy and tactics for a particular pursuit – they'll act as a strong benchmark for our actions: no more.

We have a plan – great! But it's almost certainly wrong in ways we've yet to discover. Indeed, it's wrong in ways that only execution can reveal – the ‘unknown unknowns’ of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's famous phrase during the Iraq War.

Does this make planning pointless? Absolutely not. To use one last military quote, ‘plans are nothing, planning is everything’. This one's from General Dwight D. Eisenhower who, like von Moltke, was simply stating that any action involves countless twists and turns that cannot possibly be predicted. But we must plan for it anyway.

So we can plan for a positive outcome, but – once we've started to execute – we can guarantee something will turn up that knocks us slightly off course, which makes knowing the course (towards our goal) all the more important. Meanwhile plans without flexibility – with no give – are asking to be rendered useless almost immediately.

And this explains the ‘all is chaos’ comment to my team. They need the confidence to act, which planning gives them. But they also need the confidence to keep acting once their plans prove inadequate, as they will.

They've done nothing wrong – quite the opposite. They've fired up the machine, and some of the atoms have gone off in unexpected directions. Fine: let's stay on top of it, re-evaluate as we proceed and keep going – using all that planning as a good basis for further planning.

In my view, this is the single most important lesson anyone can learn. There are no perfect circumstances for taking action. There are no perfect outcomes. Compromise is a certainty. If we therefore spend our lives trying to create the perfect circumstances, or perfect outcome – or if we avoid the cost or refuse the compromise – we'll spend our lives in frustrated paralysis.

Act or be acted upon

But there's another important point here. The result of inaction isn't neutral. The score doesn't remain at zero, or nil-nil. In fact it rapidly becomes minus 100. Why? Because, if we refuse to act on our own account, we'll find ourselves no more than the pawns of those who are taking action towards their own goals.

‘Act or be acted upon’, said Stephen Covey (1989) – meaning we're either in charge of our own progress (imperfect as that progress may be) or we'll be recruited by someone else in order to assist their progress.

Indeed, there's no alternative to these two choices. If we opt out – perhaps becoming a hippy – fine, we're still making an active choice with its own objectives, strategic requirements and endeavours. If we cannot muster even that obtuse – but legitimate – goal, then we'll almost certainly find ourselves the unwilling recruit of more motivated people: even if they're people we never meet such as political ideologues, Latin-American drug lords or daytime TV schedulers.

So, we have a choice. Make plans and take positive action – no matter what the pursuit or how offensive the goal to our significant others. Or we can do nothing and let others control our destiny, which will almost certainly, somewhere along the line, be unplanned and unpleasant.

Are you ready?

Ending on an admonishment will win me few friends, however – not least because it's both unnecessary and ineffective. Too many people lectured me in my youth – about my disabling self-beliefs, about my directionless even feckless pursuits, about my self-fulfilling self-hatred – without it making any difference. In fact, the impact was negative: compounding my funk, exacerbating my sense of isolation, exaggerating the dread. Yet that's because I wasn't ready to listen.

In Part One I mentioned the friend who snapped at my ineffective negativity and, finally, shook me from my self-absorbed and negative stupor. Yet his was a lecture I'd heard many times before, but ignored. He got through because it was what I needed to hear at that moment. I was ready. This leaves you to ponder whether the time is right for you to listen to that message also. And, if you've managed to keep reading to this point, then I think the answer's obvious.