In MIT lore, it’s generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventivenes...
If you don’t attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you’re unwittingly crippling your ability t...
If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you’d be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long. This type of planning is...
I want to spend time on what’s important, instead of what’s immediate,
Getting to the cutting edge of a field can be understood in these terms: This process builds up rare and valuable skills and therefore builds up your store of career capital. Similarly, identifying a...
Don’t Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus.
Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said
Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important
Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. I like the term stretch for describing what deliberate practice feels like,
By taking the time consumed by low-impact activities—like finding old friends on Facebook—and reinvesting in high-impact activities—like taking a good friend out to lunch—you end up more successful in...
Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly guided the construction of a new home for the lab that would purposefully encourage interaction between its diverse mix of scientists and engineers. Kelly dismissed the...
As Fried expands: Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You’re lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that...
Anthony Storr helped correct this omission with his seminal book, Solitude: A Return to the Self.
Another benefit of a sender filter is that it resets expectations. The most crucial line in my description is the following: I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule...
After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office. In my retiring room I am by myself, Jung...
Thoreau’s new economics was developed in an industrial age, but his basic insights apply just as well to our current digital context.
These stimuli invoke attention modestly, allowing focused-attention mechanisms a chance to replenish. Put another way, when walking through nature, you’re freed from having to direct your attention, a...
The First Control Trap In which I introduce the first control trap, which warns that it’s dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange. Jan...
If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers.