Quotes About Prioritization

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.

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.

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. I

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.

Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you'll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need.

Humans are naturally biased toward activities that require less energy in the short term, even if it's more harmful in the long term—so we end up texting our sibling instead of calling them on the phone, or liking a picture of a friend's new baby instead of stopping by to visit.

Basic control over your schedule breeds balance.

I want to spend time on what's important, instead of what's immediate,

philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.

You can't, in other words, build a billion dollar empire like Facebook if you're wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.

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

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.

First, how do you inject free time into your schedule without simply quitting everything and looking like a slacker? Second, how do you effectively "explore" in this free time without having it degenerate into a morass of TV watching and Web surfing?

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

Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it's instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you're doing with your time going forward—even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.

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.

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 philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable.

By reducing the need to make decisions about deep work moment by moment, I can preserve more mental energy for the deep thinking itself.

If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities.

It's crucial, therefore, that you figure out in advance what you're going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin.