When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, ask yourself whether people are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.
What’s the alternative to this state of affairs? Bennett suggests that his typical man see his sixteen free hours as a day within a day, explaining, during those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a...
What interests me about Charness’s study, however, is that it moves beyond the 10,000-hour rule by asking not just how long people worked, but also what type of work they did. In more detail, they stu...
We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return, and run by twentysomethings who are often making things up as they go along....
We had portable music before the iPod, most commonly in the form of the Sony Walkman and Discman (and their competitors), but these devices played only a restricted role in most people’s lives—somethi...
We can, therefore, still dismiss the depth-destroying open office concept without dismissing the innovation-producing theory of serendipitous creativity. The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke...
Ultimately, the success or failure of the projects pursued in this middle level helps me evolve the research mission maintained by the top level. In other words, the system as a whole is a closed feed...
To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.[referencing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's...
Thoreau establishes early in Walden: The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Thoreau demonstrated similar concern, famously writing in Walden that we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing importan...
Thomas had followed his passion to the Zen Mountain Monastery, believing, as many do, that the key to happiness is identifying your true calling and then chasing after it with all the courage you can...
There is, however, a lesser-known piece to this story. As Christensen recalls, Grove asked him during a break in this meeting, How do I do this? Christensen responded with a discussion of business str...
The traits that define great work are bought with career capital, the theory argues; they don’t come from matching your work to your innate passion.
The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that per...
The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time.
The second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox—responding to the latest missive with...
The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy, explains Matthew Crawford.
The rhythmic philosophy provides an interesting contrast to the bimodal philosophy. It perhaps fails to achieve the most intense levels of deep thinking sought in the daylong concentration sessions fa...
The rapid rise of communication and collaboration technologies has transformed many other formerly local markets into a similarly universal bazaar. The small company looking for a computer programmer...
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...