Quotes About Efficiency

These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes.

The title of this book, A World Without Email, turns out to be just an approachable shorthand for the more accurate portrayal of my vision: A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow.

The Hyperactive Hive Mind A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.

There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc'ing everybody, like 'Look at all the work I'm doing.' It's annoying

As long as we remain committed to a workflow based on constant, ad hoc messaging, our Paleolithic brain will remain in a state of low-grade anxiety.

As a 2018 article from the MIT Sloan Management Review explains: "The 'keep everybody busy' theory remains alive and well . . . in knowledge work."39 (The article elaborates that the manufacturing sector, by contrast, figured out in the 1980s that relentless busyness was not an optimal way to run things.)

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted.

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.

Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted

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,

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.

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.

this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the journalist philosophy.

the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches.

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.

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

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.

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.

tend to map out when I'll work deeply during each week at the beginning of the week, and then refine these decisions, as needed, at the beginning of each day

Do fewer things. Do them better. Know why you're doing them

Though Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels.

By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.

the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.