Quotes About Efficiency

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) If you believe this formula, then Grant's habits make sense: By maximizing his intensity when he works, he maximizes the results he produces per unit of time spent working.

What makes general-purpose computing powerful is that you don't need separate devices for separate uses, not that it allows you to do multiple things at the same time. The

The rise of professional instant messaging, mentioned earlier in this chapter, can be seen as this mind-set pushed toward an extreme. If receiving an e-mail reply within an hour makes your day easier, then getting an answer via instant message in under a minute would improve this gain by an order of magnitude.

For example, it might be the case that 80 percent of a business's profits come from just 20 percent of its clients, 80 percent of a nation's wealth is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens, or 80 percent of computer software crashes come from just 20 percent of the identified bugs.

Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester.

The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.

People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task," and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.

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.

I've invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up. I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive.

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

Christensen wrote for a book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four "disciplines" (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully implement high-level strategies. What struck me as I read was that this gap between what and how was relevant to my personal quest to spend more time working deeply.

If your schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day. You can turn to a new page. You can erase and redraw blocks. Or do as I do: Cross out the blocks for the remainder of the day and create new blocks to the right of the old ones on the page (I draw my blocks skinny so I have room for several revisions).

When she leveraged her value to obtain a thirty-hour schedule at her first job, for example, her employer couldn't say no (she was saving them too much money), but they didn't like it. It took nerve on Lulu's part to push through that demand.

capture every task in a common list, and then review these tasks before making a plan for the next day.

To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It's better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision.

Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated.

attention residue.

the individual's scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual's current deep work hour count.

The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established: network tools.

Stephenson sees two mutually exclusive options: He can write good novels at a regular rate, or he can answer a lot of individual e-mails and attend conferences, and as a result produce lower-quality novels at a slower rate.

organizing the raw materials of your work to minimize energy-dissipating friction

Mike's goal with his spreadsheet is to become more "intentional" about how his workday unfolds. "The easiest thing to do is to show up to work in the morning and just respond to e-mail the whole day," he explained. "But that is not the most strategic way to spend your time.

a good process-centric message immediately "closes the loop" with respect to the project at hand. When a project is initiated by an e-mail that you send or receive, it squats in your mental landscape—becoming something that's "on your plate" in the sense that it has been brought to your attention and eventually needs to be addressed. This method closes this open loop as soon as it forms.