Quotes About Balance

For many, the core question of "is this the best way to use technology to support this value?" leads them to carefully optimize services that most people fiddle with mindlessly.

or eliminate the need to carry a separate iPod and phone—and then found ourselves, years later, increasingly dominated by their influence, allowing them to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we behave.

give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life.

All things being equal, workflows that minimize this never-ending stream of urgent communication are superior to those that instead amplify it. When you're at home at night, or relaxing over the weekend, or on vacation, you shouldn't feel like each moment away from work is a moment in which you're accumulating deeper communication debt.

Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid.

For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.

there's nothing wrong with connectivity, but if you don't balance it with regular doses of solitude, its benefits will diminish.

Basic control over your schedule breeds balance.

You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.

Schedule an escape for yourself every single week. And do it alone. Treat it like taking medicine.

hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.

The goal of this book is to make the case for digital minimalism, including a more detailed exploration of what it asks and why it works, and then to teach you how to adopt this philosophy if you decide it's right for you.

wherever they popped up. If my kids were taking a good nap, I'd grab my laptop and lock myself in the home office. If my wife wanted to visit her parents in nearby Annapolis on a weekend day, I'd take advantage of the extra child care to disappear to a quiet corner of their house to write.

skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

Do what Thoreau did, which is learn to have a little disconnectedness within the connected world—don't run away.

The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.

The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish." They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of "wildly important goals.

First, how do you inject free time into your schedule without simply quitting everything and looking like a slacker? Second, how do you effectively "explore" in this free time without having it degenerate into a morass of TV watching and Web surfing?

The idea that you can ever reach a point where all your obligations are handled is a fantasy.

If you don't attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you're unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work.

Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it's high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it's good. Case closed.

recommend that you try to spend some time away from your phone most days. This time could take many forms, from a quick morning errand to a full evening out, depending on your comfort level.

Ryan and Sarah have heaps of control in their working lives, and this is what makes the Red Fire lifestyle so appealing.

Stephenson sees two mutually exclusive options: He can write good novels at a regular rate, or he can answer a lot of individual e-mails and attend conferences, and as a result produce lower-quality novels at a slower rate.