Quotes About Productivity

The use of network tools can be harmful. If you don't attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you're unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work. This

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. When

Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, "the superpower of the 21st century.

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.

I get an extra 20 IQ points from being in that office,

Acuity, ScheduleOnce, Calendly, and, of course, x.ai (to name a few examples among many)

In such a culture, we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we're now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist.

In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it's tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do—whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-watching.

While email use certainly saves people time and effort in communicating," the authors of the 2016 study conclude, "it also comes at a cost." Their recommendation? "[We] suggest that organizations make a concerted effort to cut down on email traffic.

As I argued, when you delegate productivity decisions to the individual, it's not surprising that you end up stuck with a simple, flexible, lowest common denominator–style workflow like the hyperactive hive mind.

constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.

As email spread through the professional world in the 1980s and 1990s it introduced something novel: low-friction communication at scale. With this new tool, the cost in terms of time and social capital to communicate with anyone related to your job plummeted from significant to almost nothing. As the writer Chris Anderson notes in his 2009 book, Free, the dynamics of reducing a cost to zero can be "deeply mysterious,

One study estimates that by 2019 the average worker was sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one message every four minutes.2 A software company called RescueTime recently measured this behavior directly using time-tracking software and calculated that its users were checking email or instant messenger tools like Slack once every six minutes on average.3 A

Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you're engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.

I'm usually facing someone who wants to send twenty-nine emails to fix a problem." His solution is simpler: "Go talk to them.

For many, the core question of "is this the best way to use technology to support this value?" leads them to carefully optimize services that most people fiddle with mindlessly.

If you slacked off your attention for even a moment, you could stall the entire line—forcing workers into an unnatural combination of boredom and constant attentiveness.

Optimize processes, he urged, not people.

All things being equal, workflows that minimize this never-ending stream of urgent communication are superior to those that instead amplify it. When you're at home at night, or relaxing over the weekend, or on vacation, you shouldn't feel like each moment away from work is a moment in which you're accumulating deeper communication debt.

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

Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid.

Basic control over your schedule breeds balance.