Quotes About Efficiency

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.

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.

Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you'll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.

1) Jot down new tasks and assignments on your list during the day; (2) next morning, transfer these new items from your list onto your calendar; and (3) then take a couple of minutes to plan your day.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

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)

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

Why bother hiring a hotshot if the bulk of their time is spent doing administrative work?

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

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital. To

The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.

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." This

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

To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction. A

Perhaps Marshall's most striking habit was his insistence on leaving the office each day at 5:30 p.m. In an age before cell phones and email, Marshall didn't put in a second shift late into the night once he got home. Having experienced burnout earlier in his career, he felt it was important to relax in the evening. "A man who worked himself to tatters on minor details had no ability to handle the more vital issues of war," he once said.

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.

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.

monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations.

In this second part, I introduce a framework I call attention capital theory that argues for creating workflows built around processes specifically designed to help us get the most out of our human brains while minimizing unnecessary miseries. This