Quotes About Efficiency

The killer app is making calls,

What's the impact of our current e-mail habits on the bottom line?

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.

David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: "[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.

Working right trumps finding the right work

The power of this approach is its efficiency. You spend the least amount of time with the questions that you understand the best, and you spend the most amount of time with the questions that cause you the most trouble. You also have a definite endpoint. There is no need to wonder how much longer you should continue reviewing. Once you finish a round without any more check marks, you're finished, and not a minute is wasted.

Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important

Drukheid als Alibi voor Productiviteit: Bij afwezigheid van duidelijke maatstaven voor de productiviteit en de waarde in hun werk keren veel kenniswerkers terug naar een industrieel ijkpunt voor productiviteit: veel dingen heel zichtbaar doen.

There's no one correct deep work ritual—the right fit depends on both the person and the type of project pursued.

2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker's time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.

he came to realize a simple truth: Working right trumps finding the right work. He didn't need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness—he needed instead a better approach to the work already available to him.

A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction.

a New York Times column on the topic, David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: "[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.

To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don't waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment.

the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker's time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers,

These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction

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.

Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity

Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned around and flew back, once again writing the whole way—arriving back in the States only thirty hours after he first left with a completed manuscript now in hand. "The trip cost $4,000 and was worth every penny," he explained.

Don't Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.

This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach.

that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

interruption, even if short, delays the total time required to complete a task by a significant fraction.