Quotes About Time

I argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he's leveraging the following law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.

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.

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

This magician's trick of shifting the units of measure from money to time is the core novelty of what the philosopher Frédéric Gros calls Thoreau's "new economics," a theory that builds on the following axiom, which Thoreau establishes early in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

The key here isn't to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

The "great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day," he elaborates, is that even though he doesn't particularly enjoy his work (seeing it as something to "get through"), "he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as 'the day,' to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.

Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.

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.

Basic control over your schedule breeds balance.

Conclusion #2: Passion Takes Time

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.

You can't, in other words, build a billion dollar empire like Facebook if you're wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.

Arnold Bennett took up the cause of active leisure in his short but influential self-help guide, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. In this book, Bennett notes that the average London middle-class white-collar worker putting in an eight-hour day is left with sixteen additional hours during which he is as free as any gentleman to pursue virtuous activity.

Neither Wozniak nor Jobs left their regular jobs: This was strictly a low-risk venture meant for their free time.

Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it's instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you're doing with your time going forward—even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.

if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity—the state in which real breakthroughs occur. This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day.

If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities.

It's crucial, therefore, that you figure out in advance what you're going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.

Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work. In much the same way that maintaining visual indicators of your work progress can reduce the barrier to entry for going deep, eliminating even the simplest scheduling decisions, such as when during the day to do the work, also reduces this barrier.

As Johnson explained to me, it takes time to figure out how best to structure the crazy inputs and interaction that surround most work processes. He's diligent in making sure that everyone keeps prioritizing this. "You need time away from inputs to figure out how best to systematize those inputs," he explained.

If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It's a zero-sum game.

Because digital minimalists spend so much less time connected than their peers, it's easy to think of their lifestyle as extreme, but the minimalists would argue that this perception is backward: what's extreme is how much time everyone else spends staring at their screens.

Thoreau establishes early in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.