Quotes About Productivity

For example, you might institute a ban on any Internet use,

lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.

Another issue muddying the connection between depth and meaning in knowledge work is the cacophony of voices attempting to convince knowledge workers to spend more time engaged in shallow activities.

The pianist Glenn Gould once proposed a mathematical formula for this cycle, telling a journalist: "I've always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now what that X represents I don't really know . . . but it's a substantial ratio.

Knowledge workers, I'm arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value. Let's give this tendency a name. Busyness as Proxy for Productivity:

For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. The general exhortation to "spend more time working deeply" doesn't spark a lot of enthusiasm. To instead have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm.

manifesto titled "A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users' Attention.

Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done.

To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.

To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you'll struggle to concentrate. (For

without these accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work, turning my attention to more urgent but less important matters.

The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time.

If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It's a zero-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the latter, the lower your overall benefit.

extracting value from information is an activity that's often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.

This is why it's not uncommon to see a company fire unproductive clients. If 80 percent of their profits come from 20 percent of their clients, then they make more money by redirecting the energy from low-revenue clients to better service the small number of lucrative contracts—each hour spent on the latter returns more revenue than each hour spent on the former.

consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They're easier.

It's instead quite natural once you recognize that the power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate

The Law of the Vital Few*: In many settings, 80 percent of a given effect is due to just 20 percent of the possible causes.

the lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people's daily lives.

Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former.

In my experience, this analysis is spot-on. If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you'll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.

With this in mind, the six strategies that follow can be understood as an arsenal of routines and rituals designed with the science of limited willpower in mind to maximize the amount of deep work you consistently accomplish in your schedule.

If you are working on a computer science programming assignment, schedule yourself to finish a week early so you can add a host of extra bells and whistles.