Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear, Martin said. What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’… but I alwa...
Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman explaining in an interview one of his less orthodox productivity strategies: To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time… it...
My author website doesn’t provide a personal e-mail address, and I didn’t own my first smartphone until 2012 (when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum—you have to have a phone that works before our...
Leah Pearlman, who was a product manager on the team that developed the Like button for Facebook (she was the author of the blog post announcing the feature in 2009), has become so wary of the havoc i...
Knowledge workers, I’m arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.
Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that’s often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.
It might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes or so. Indeed, many justify this behavior as better than the old practice of leaving an inbox open on the screen at all ti...
It is never too late to give up our prejudices.
In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a colleague of Neil Charness at Florida State University, coined the term deliberate practice to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an a...
In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in...
In all of these examples, it’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To p...
In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what’s not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism.
If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece ofinformation immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier—at least, inthe moment. If you c...
If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not you’ve found your true calling, the question will be rendered moot when you find yourself out of work.
If you go after more control in your working life without a rare and valuable skill to offer in return, you’re likely pursuing a mirage.
If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that...
I shared the details of Steve Jobs’s story, because when it comes to finding fulfilling work, the details matter. If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he love...
I had reached the level of expertise you would expect from someone who had played an instrument seriously for the last six years. But this is what I find fascinating: Compared to Jordan Tice’s ability...
I follow a rule with my life that if something is scary, do it. I’ve lived everywhere in America, and for me, a big scary thing was living outside the country. After
I follow a rule with my life that if something is scary, do it. I’ve lived everywhere in America, and for me, a big scary thing was living outside the country.