Quotes About Productivity

you don't produce, you won't thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

This provides another general observation for joining the ranks of winners in our economy: If you don't produce, you won't thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

We should not, therefore, expect the bottom-line impact of depth-destroying behaviors to be easily detected.

Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply

The idle mind is the devil's workshop

build your working life around the experience of flow

There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.

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.

flow activities.

Working right trumps finding the right work

To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli.

We instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant—a setting where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest e-mail than produce the best possible results.

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.

We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.

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.

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

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, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality.

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.