Phones have become woven into a fraught sense of obligation in friendship. . . . Being a friend means being on call—tethered to your phone, ready to be attentive, online.
Professional Goal: To craft well-written, narrative-driven stories that change the way people understand the world. Key Activities Supporting This Goal: • Research patiently and deeply. • Write carefu...
Returning to my own example, it’s a similar commitment that enables me to succeed with fixed scheduling. I, too, am incredibly cautious about my use of the most dangerous word in one’s productivity vo...
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. In an age of n...
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
So next time you start to question whether you’re missing out on some dream job waiting for you to muster the courage to pursue it, conjure up a pair of images. First, recall passion-obsessed Thomas,...
Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.
Stephenson wrote an essay titled Why I Am a Bad Correspondent. At the core of his explanation for his inaccessibility is the following decision: The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other...
THREE DISQUALIFIERS FOR APPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN MINDSET The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. The job focuses on something...
Take book writing: If I published a book of solid advice for helping recent graduates transition to the job market, you might find this a useful contribution, but probably wouldn’t find yourself whipp...
You’re either remarkable or invisible, says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.1 As he elaborated in a Fast Company manifesto he published on the subject: The world is full of boring stuff—...
Two forces from this longer treatment that not only seemed particularly relevant to our discussion, but as you’ll soon learn, repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage beha...
The insights of Rule #2 fundamentally changed the way I approach my work. If I had to describe my previous way of thinking, I would probably use the phrase productivity-centric. Getting things done wa...
The more I studied the issue, the more I noticed that the passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there’s a magic right job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they’ll immediately r...
The more you try to force it, I learned, the less likely you are to succeed. True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need t...
The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous. Telling someone to follow their passion is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with...
He came to realize a simple truth: 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 alre...
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...
When you study the type of careers that make others remark, That’s the type of job I want, this trait almost always plays a central role. Once you understand this value of control, it changes the way...
Argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s leveraging the following law of productivity: High-...
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