You might institute a ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty-minute interval to keep your concentration honed. Without this structure, you’ll have to mentally...
In many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.
When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents, Ericsson notes.
To summarize, I’ve presented two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mind...
This concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experienceof life. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that whathappens to us (or fails to happen) de...
The second reason is that the subversive decision to pursue FI at a young age, which typically leads to radical lifestyle decisions, self-selects for individuals who are unusually intentional about ho...
The premise of this chapter is that by cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later.
The fault of the courage culture, therefore, is not its underlying message that courage is good, but its severe underestimation of the complexity involved in deploying this boldness in a useful way.
Second, even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so.
Open offices, for example, might create more opportunities for collaboration,* but they do so at the cost of massive distraction, to quote the results of experiments conducted for a British TV special...
Maher looked into the camera and said: The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts se...
Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea. This advic...
If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind.
I felt like I was stretching to convince the world that my work was interesting, yet no one cared.
Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.
Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves. They don’t accept the idea that offering some small benefit is just...
Network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.
Minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.
Little bet, in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics: It’s a project small enough to be completed in less than a month. It forces you to create new value (e.g., master...
Law of productivity:High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)