Quotes About Focus

Meetings should be great—they're opportunities for a group of people sitting together around a table to directly communicate. That should be a good thing. And it is, but only if treated as a rare delicacy.

The only way to get more done is to have less to do.

It's not uncommon for people to pick up their phones dozens of times a day when some push notification makes it buzz, because WHAT IF IT WAS SOMETHING SUPER IMPORTANT! (It just about never is.)

If the boss is constantly pulling people off one project to chase another, nobody's going to get anything done.

But the thing is, there's not more work to be done all of a sudden. The problem is that there's hardly any uninterrupted, dedicated time to do it.

Focus on reaping the great benefits and mitigating the drawbacks

It's almost impossible to work on something and not be tempted to chase all the exciting new what-if and we-could-also ideas that come up. There's always one more thing it could do, one more improvement it should have. But if you actually want to make progress, you have to narrow as you go.

If you spend 20 percent each on getting five things to 80 percent, well, then, you've done five things!

The further away you are from something, the fuzzier it becomes.

Management scholar Peter Drucker nailed it decades ago when he said "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." Bam!

The answer isn't more hours, it's less bullshit. Less waste, not more production. And far fewer distractions, less always-on anxiety, and avoiding stress.

Not doing something that isn't worth doing is a wonderful way to spend your time.

Don't fill your day with five more just to stay busy or feel productive. Not doing something that isn't worth doing is a wonderful way to spend your time.

You can only do great work if you have adequate quality time to do it.

Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.

Ask yourself: When was the last time you had three or even four completely uninterrupted hours to yourself and your work?

Decisions are progress. Each one you make is a brick in your foundation. You can't build on top of "We'll decide later," but you can build on top of

It's JOMO that lets you turn off the firehose of information and chatter and interruptions to actually get the right shit done. It's JOMO that lets you catch up on what happened today as a single summary email tomorrow morning rather than with a drip-drip-drip feed throughout the day.

When we start designing something, we sketch out ideas with a big, thick Sharpie marker, instead of a ballpoint pen. Why? Pen points are too fine. They're too high-resolution. They encourage you to worry about things that you shouldn't worry about yet, like perfecting the shading or whether to use a dotted or dashed line. You end up focusing on things that should still be out of focus.

Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you're going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance.

The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely. When you work on your own, far away from the buzzing swarm at headquarters, you can settle into your own productive zone. You can actually get work done—the same work that you couldn't get done at work! Yes

The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.

And between all those context switches and attempts at multitasking, you have to add buffer time. Time for your head to leave the last thing and get into the next thing. This is how you end up thinking "What did I actually do today?" when the clock turns to five and you supposedly spent eight hours at the office. You know you were there, but the hours had no weight, so they slipped away with nothing to show.

rearranging your daily patterns to find more time for work isn't the problem. Too much shit to do is the problem.