Quotes About Value

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. This

Knowledge workers, I'm arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.

He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance—arguably the most valuable substance we possess—and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time.

If you go after more control in your working life without a rare and valuable skill to offer in return, you're likely pursuing a mirage.

When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.

If you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.

The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.

The Minimalist Technology Screen To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it's not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value.

the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises.

In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.

Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it's not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.

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.

The idea that it's valuable to maintain vast numbers of weak-tie social connections is largely an invention of the past decade or so—the detritus of overexuberant network scientists spilling inappropriately into the social sphere.

The things that make a great job great...are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect to get a good job.

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don't cultivate this ability, you're likely to fall behind as technology advances.

simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable.

As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing. A venture capitalist in today's economy can fund a company like Instagram, which was eventually sold for a billion dollars, while employing only thirteen people. When else in history could such a small amount of labor be involved in such a large amount of value?

It follows that if you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.

philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it's not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

tasks that leverage your expertise tend to be deep tasks and they can therefore provide a double benefit: They return more value per time spent, and they stretch your abilities, leading to improvement.