Personal effectiveness Archives

Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day (Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky)

Every mistake is just a data point.
You know the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest ….
You only waste time if you’re not intentional about how you spend it.
The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. —Brother David Steindl-Rast
Believe in your Highlight: It is worth prioritizing over random disruption.
Something magic happens when you start the day with one high-priority goal.
When distraction is hard to access, you don’t have to worry about willpower.
Perfection is a distraction—another shiny object taking your attention away from your real priorities.
it’s helpful to remember that Homo sapiens evolved to be hunter-gatherers, not screen tappers and pencil pushers.
Studies have shown that caffeine naps improve cognitive and memory performance more than coffee or a nap alone does.
Every time you check your email or another message service, you’re basically saying, Does any random person need my time right now?
Shifting your focus to something that your mind perceives as a doable, completable task will create a real increase in positive energy, direction, and motivation.
Compared with the life of a hunter-gatherer, farm work and village life sucked. Leisure time plummeted. Violence and disease skyrocketed. Unfortunately, there was no going back.
Combine the four-plus hours the average person spends on their smartphone with the four-plus hours the average person spends watching television, and distraction is a full-time job.
That is, one new tactic to help you make time for your Highlight, one that keeps you laser-focused by changing how you react to distractions, and one for building energy—three tactics total.
Instead of relying on your willpower, create real, physical barriers around distractions to focus your attention like a laser beam on your highlight. Delete all the social apps from your phone.
Another lesson from our design sprints was that we got more done when we banned devices. Since we set the rules, we were able to prohibit laptops and smartphones, and the difference was phenomenal.
In our design sprints, we found that if we ended each workday before people were exhausted, the week’s productivity increased dramatically. Even shortening the day by thirty minutes made a big difference.
Today’s constant noise and distractions are a disaster for your energy and your attention span. We’ll show you easy ways to find moments of quiet, like taking a break without screens and leaving your headphones at home.
Apple reports that people unlock their iPhones an average of 80 times per day, and a 2016 study by customer-research firm Dscout found that people touched their phones an average of 2,617 times per day. Distracted has become the new default.
Set a single intention at the start of each day. You’ll be more satisfied, joyful and effective. The highlight should take 60–90 minutes and will define your day. Of course, it’s not the only thing you’ll do over your day, but it’s the most important one.
All of a sudden I’d realize I was working toward a goal that no longer mattered to me. And living a someday life was demoralizing. In the words of author James Clear, I was essentially saying, I’m not good enough yet, but I will be when I reach my goal.
When you don’t take care of your body, your brain can’t do its job. If you’ve ever felt sluggish and uninspired after a big lunch or invigorated and clearheaded after exercising, you know what we mean. If you want energy for your brain, you need to take care of your body.
Anthropologists estimate that ancient humans worked only thirty hours a week. They lived and worked in tight-knit communities in which face-to-face communication was the only option. And of course they got plenty of sleep, going to bed when it was dark and rising with the sun.
Make Time is a framework for choosing what you want to focus on, building the energy to do it, and breaking the default cycle so that you can start being more intentional about the way you live your life. Even if you don’t completely control your own schedule—and few of us do—you absolutely can control your attention.
The Internet is home to many a treatise about the Best This or the Cool New Way to Do That.16 But this obsession with tools is misguided. Unless you’re a carpenter, a mechanic, or a surgeon, choosing the perfect tool is usually a distraction, yet another way to stay busy instead of doing the work you want to be doing.
We’re the descendants of those ancient humans, but our species hasn’t evolved nearly as fast as the world around us has. That means we’re still wired for a lifestyle of constant movement, varied but relatively sparse diets, ample quiet, plenty of face-to-face time, and restful sleep that’s aligned with the rhythm of the day.
Although some of our tactics turned into habits, others sputtered and failed. But taking stock of our results each day helped us understand why we tripped up. And this experimental approach also allowed us to be kinder to ourselves when we made mistakes—after all, every mistake was just a data point, and we could always try again tomorrow.
Over the centuries, we switched from wood to fossil fuel. We mastered steam and electricity. Then, during the last couple of centuries, things went bonkers. We created factories. We developed the television and then became obsessed with it, changing our sleep schedules to fit in daily TV time. We invented the home computer, the Internet, and the smartphone. Each time, we wrapped our lives around the new invention. Each time, there was no going back.
Every distraction imposes a cost on the depth of your focus. When your brain changes contexts—say, going from painting a picture to answering a text and then back to painting again—there’s a switching cost. Your brain has to load a different set of rules and information into working memory. This boot up costs at least a few minutes, and for complex tasks, it can take even longer. The two of us have found it can take a couple of hours of uninterrupted writing before we’re doing our best work; sometimes it even requires several consecutive days before we’re in the zone.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Cal Newport)

October 10, 2021/in Quotes by book Personal effectiveness Needs curating /by You?

Focus on the Wildly Important
If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.”
To learn requires intense concentration.”
Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”
Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”
[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”
why a shutdown will be profitable to your ability to produce valuable output
Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.”
(As Nietzsche said: It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”)”
If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.”
Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love – is the sum of what you focus on.”
What we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore – plays in defining the quality of our life.”
why cultures of connectivity persist, the answer, according to our principle, is because it’s easier.
An interruption, even if short, delays the total time required to complete a task by a significant fraction.”
To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.”
To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.
There is a middle ground, and if you’re interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there.”
To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.”
Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.”
The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers are less vital than it often seems in the moment.”
Knowledge workers, I’m arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.”
If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game.”
If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game.”
To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.”
Want to pick up a great book or two this season? Check out our recommendations of hot books selected by your fellow readers, bestselling authors, and more!
As the author Tim Ferriss once wrote: Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.”
As the author, Tim Ferriss once wrote: Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.”
The task of a craftsman, they conclude, is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.”
Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billiondollar industry in less than a semester.
If you believe this formula, then Grant’s habits make sense: By maximizing his intensity when he works, he maximizes the results he produces per unit of time spent working.
Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward—even”
Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy . The ability to quickly master hard things. . The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.”
People will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well defined and well advertised, and outside these stretches, you’re once again easy to find.
A side effect of memory training, in other words, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate. This ability can then be fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work.”
Shallow Work: Non-cognitively 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.
Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.”
In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.
To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.”
In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward the industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.”
Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you are likely to fall behind as technology advances.”
This, ultimately, is the lesson to come away with from our brief foray into the world of experimental psychology: To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.”
The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you’ll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing.
For an individual focused on deep work, hours spent working deeply should be the lead measure. It follows, therefore, that the individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count.
The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.
The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”
When Carl Jung wanted to revolutionize the field of psychiatry, he built a retreat in the woods. Jung’s Bollingen Tower became a place where he could maintain his ability to think deeply and then apply the skill to produce work of such stunning originality that it changed the world.
Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.”
If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive…If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are…The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If you haven’t mastered this foundational skill, you’ll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level.
If your answer is ‘no’ to both questions, quit the service permanently. If your answer was a clear ‘yes,’ then return to using the service. If your answers are qualified or ambiguous, it’s up to you whether you return to the service, though I would encourage you to lean toward quitting. (You can always rejoin later.)
The reduction in shallow frees up more energy for the deep alternative, allowing us to produce more than if we had defaulted to a more typical crowded schedule. Second, the limits to our time necessitate more careful thinking about our organizational habits, also leading to more value produced as compared to longer but less organized schedules.
If you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett’s ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist.
When it comes to deep work, in other words, consider the use of collaboration when appropriate, as it can push your results to a new level. At the same time, don’t lionize this quest for interaction and positive randomness to the point where it crowds out the unbroken concentration ultimately required to wring something useful out of the swirl of ideas all around us.
Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.”
Treat shallow work with suspicion because its damage is often vastly underestimated and its importance vastly overestimated. This type of work is inevitable, but you must keep it confined to a point where it doesn’t impede your ability to take full advantage of the deeper efforts that ultimately determine your impact. The strategies that follow will help you act on this reality.
Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday. It’s natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it’s undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.
The type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work. If you’re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get your performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity increasingly necessary to thrive professionally. Unless your talent and skills absolutely dwarf those of your competition, the deep workers among them will out-produce you.
If you find yourself glued to a smartphone or laptop throughout your evenings and weekends, then it’s likely that your behavior outside of work is undoing many of your attempts during the workday to rewire your brain (which makes little distinction between the two settings). In this case, I would suggest that you maintain the strategy of scheduling Internet use even after the workday is over.
For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. The general exhortation to ‘spend more time working deeply’ doesn’t spark a lot of enthusiasm. To instead have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, when it comes to replacing distraction with focus, matters are not so simple. To understand why this is true let’s take a closer look at one of the main obstacles to going deep: the urge to turn your attention toward something more superficial. Most people recognize that this urge can complicate efforts to concentrate on hard things, but most underestimate its regularity and strength.
Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former. When we reconsider our case studies, for example, we see that the first task is something that you would want to prioritize as a good use of time, while the second and third are activities of a type that should be minimized—they might feel productive, but their return on (time) investment is measly.
If you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur.”
Adam Grant doesn’t work substantially more hours than the average professor at an elite research institution (generally speaking, this is a group prone to workaholism), but he still manages to produce more than just about anyone else in his field. I 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:
Feynman was adamant in avoiding administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life: ‘to do real good physics work.’ Feynman, we can assume, was probably bad at responding to e-mails and would likely switch universities if you had tried to move him into an open office or demand that he tweet. Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.
Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires. This is why the subjects in the Hofmann and Baumeister study had such a hard time fighting desires—over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to you, regardless of your intentions—unless, that is, you’re smart about your habits.
Fixed-schedule productivity, in other words, is a meta-habit that’s simple to adopt but broad in its impact. If you have to choose just one behavior that reorients your focus toward the deep, this one should be high on your list of possibilities. If you’re still not sure, however, about the idea that artificial limits on your workday can make you more successful, I urge you to once again turn your attention to the career of fixed-schedule advocate Radhika Nagpal.
By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task. When Grant is working for days in isolation on a paper, in other words, he’s doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than the standard professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.
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 put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources.
Your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to, so consider for a moment the type of mental world constructed when you dedicate significant time to deep endeavors. There’s a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work—whether you’re Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher’s theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance.
There are two common tropes bandied around when people discuss solutions to e-mail overload. One says that sending e-mails generates more emails,while the other says that wrestling with ambiguous or irrelevant e-mails is a major source of inbox-related stress. The approach suggested here responds aggressively to both issues—you send fewer e-mails and ignore those that aren’t easy to process—and by doing so will significantly weaken the grip your inbox maintains over your time and attention.
Your ritual needs rules and processes to keep your efforts structured. For example, 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 litigate again and again what you should and should not be doing during these sessions and keep trying to assess whether you’re working sufficiently hard. These are unnecessary drains on your willpower reserves.
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…. For example, Adam Grant, the academic… who became the youngest full professor at Wharton by repeatedly shutting himself off from the outside world to concentrate on writing. Such behavior is the opposite of being publicly busy. If Grant worked for Yahoo, Marissa Mayer might have fired him. But this deep strategy turned out to produce a massive amount of value.
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 permeate the typical workday.Fewer official working hours helps squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with their time and that’s a good thing. They don’t waste it on things that just don’t matter. When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely.
An often-overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they’re rarely haphazard in their work habits. Consider the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Robert Caro. As revealed in a 2009 magazine profile, ‘every inch of [Caro’s] New York office is governed by rules.’ Where he places his books, how he stacks his notebooks, what he puts on his wall, even what he wears to the office: Everything is specified by a routine that has varied little over Caro’s long career. ‘I trained myself to be organized,’ he explained.
This brings us to the question of what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive. The first component is of particular importance to our discussion, as it emphasizes that deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction, and that it instead requires uninterrupted concentration.
Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.”
Many knowledge workers spend most of their working day interacting with these types of shallow concerns. Even when they’re required to complete something more involved, the habit of frequently checking inboxes ensures that these issues remain at the forefront of their attention. Gallagher teaches us that this is a foolhardy way to go about your day, as it ensures that your mind will construct an understanding of your working life that’s dominated by stress, irritation, frustration, and triviality. The world represented by your inbox, in other words, isn’t a pleasant world to inhabit.
These services aren’t necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They’re just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers. They can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they’re a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threatening to derail you from something deeper. Or maybe social media tools are at the core of your existence. You won’t know either way until you sample life without them.
For an individual focused on his or her own deep work habit, there’s likely no team to meet with, but this doesn’t exempt you from the need for regular accountability. I… recommend the habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead . During my experiments with 4DX, I used a weekly review to look over my scoreboard to celebrate good weeks, help understand what led to bad weeks, and most important, figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead. This led me to adjust my schedule to meet the needs of my lead measure —enabling significantly more deep work than if I had avoided such reviews altogether.
Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts. This location can be as simple as your normal office with the door shut and desk cleaned off (a colleague of mine likes to put a hotel-style ‘do not disturb’ sign on his office door when he’s tackling something difficult). If it’s possible to identify a location used only for depth—for instance, a conference room or quiet library—the positive effect can be even greater. (If you work in an open office plan, this need to find a deep work retreat becomes particularly important.) Regardless of where you work, be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.
The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. Depending on your profession, this problem might be outlining an article,writing a talk, making progress on a proof, or attempting to sharpen a business strategy. As in mindfulness meditation, you must continue to bring your attention back to the problem at hand when it wanders or stalls….I suggest that you adopt a productive meditation practice in your own life.You don’t necessarily need a serious session every day, but your goal should be to participate in at least two or three such sessions in a typical week.
We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartment…. decades of research contradict this understanding. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.[Suppose you are a cancer patient] If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more pleasant—even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same.
The common habit of working in a state of semi-distraction is potentially devastating to your performance. 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 times (a straw-man habit that few follow anymore). But Leroy teaches us that this is not in fact much of an improvement.That quick check introduces a new target for your attention. Even worse, by seeing messages that you cannot deal with at the moment (which is almost always the case), you’ll be forced to turn back to the primary task with a secondary task left unfinished. The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens your performance.
Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example,the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee, or make sure you have access to enough food of the right type to maintain energy, or integrate light exercise such as walking to help keep the mind clear. (As Nietzsche said:’It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.’) This support might also include environmental factors, such as organizing the raw materials of your work to minimize energy-dissipating friction (as we saw with Caro’s example).To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don’t waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment.
This strategy asks that you perform the equivalent of a packing party on the social media services that you currently use. Instead of ‘packing,’ however, you’ll instead ban yourself from using them for thirty days. All of them: Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Twitter, Snapchat, Vine—or whatever other services have risen to popularity since I first wrote these words. Don’t formally deactivate these services, and (this is important) don’t mention online that you’ll be signing off: Just stop using them, cold turkey. If someone reaches out to you by other means and asks why your activity on a particular service has fallen off, you can explain, but don’t go out of your way to tell people.After thirty days of this self-imposed network isolation, ask yourself the following two questions about each of the services you temporarily quit:
The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. If you suddenly decide, for example, in the middle of a distracted afternoon spent Web browsing, to switch your attention to a cognitively demanding task, you’ll draw heavily from your finite willpower to wrest your attention away from the online shininess. Such attempts will therefore frequently fail. On the other hand, if you deployed smart routines and rituals—perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon—you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going. In the long run, you’d therefore succeed with these deep efforts far more often.
Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either () you have a plan you trust for its completion, or () it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, Shutdown complete”). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.”
When it comes to your relaxation, don’t default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your ‘day within a day.’Addictive websites…[the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Business Insider, and Reddit] thrive in a vacuum: If you haven’t given yourself something to do in a given moment, they’ll always beckon as an appealing option. If you instead fill this free time with something of more quality, their grip on your attention will loosen. It’s crucial, therefore, that you figure out in advance what you’re going to do with your evenings and weekends before they begin. Structured hobbies provide good fodder for these hours, as they generate specific actions with specific goals to fill your time. A set program of reading, à la Bennett, where you spend regular time each night making progress on a series of deliberately chosen books, is also a good option, as is, of course, exercise or the enjoyment of good (in-person) company.
Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success….there are two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures. Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve For example, if your goal is to increase customer satisfaction in your bakery, then the relevant lag measure is your customer satisfaction scores.….Lead measures, on the other hand, ‘measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.’ In the bakery example, a good lead measure might be the number of customers who receive free samples. This is a number you can directly increase by giving out more samples. As you increase this number, your lag measures will likely eventually improve as well. In other words, lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.
If you eat healthy just one day a week,you’re unlikely to lose weight, as the majority of your time is still spent gorging.Similarly, if you spend just one day a week resisting distraction, you’re unlikely to diminish your brain’s craving for these stimuli, as most of your time is still spent giving in to it.I propose an alternative to the Internet Sabbath. Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction. To make this suggestion more concrete, let’s make the simplifying assumption that Internet use is synonymous with seeking distracting stimuli. (You can, of course, use the Internet in a way that’s focused and deep, but for a distraction addict, this is a difficult task.) Similarly, let’s consider working in the absence of the Internet to be synonymous with more focused work. (You can, of course, find ways to be distracted without a network connection, but these tend to be easier to resist.)With these rough categorizations established, the strategy works as follows:Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed—no matter how tempting.
Identify a deep task (that is, something that requires deep work to complete) that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. If possible, commit publicly to the deadline—for example, by telling the person expecting the finished project when they should expect it. If this isn’t possible (or if it puts your job in jeopardy), then motivate yourself by setting a countdown timer on your phone and propping it up where you can’t avoid seeing it as you work.At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity—no e-mail breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee machine. Like Roosevelt at Harvard, attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.Try this experiment no more than once a week at first—giving your brain practice with intensity, but also giving it (and your stress levels) time to rest in between. Once you feel confident in your ability to trade concentration for completion time, increase the frequency of these Roosevelt dashes. Remember,however, to always keep your self-imposed deadlines right at the edge of feasibility. You should be able to consistently beat the buzzer (or at least be close), but to do so should require teeth-gritting concentration.

Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (Nir Eyal)

October 10, 2021/in Quotes by book Personal effectiveness Needs curating /by You?

The one thing we control is the time we put into a task.
Samuel Johnson said, “My life is one long escape from myself.”
Traction (the actions that draw us toward what we want in life)
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity
Loneliness, according to researchers, is more dangerous than obesity.
Play doesn’t have to be pleasurable. It just has to hold our attention.
We are compelled to reach for things we supposedly need but really don’t.
Parents don’t need to believe tech is evil to help kids manage distraction.
Labeling yourself as having poor self-control actually leads to less self-control.
You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it’s distracting you from.
The wealth of information means a dearth of something else . . . a poverty of attention.
People who did not see willpower as a finite resource did not show signs of ego depletion.
The better we are at noticing the behavior, the better we’ll be at managing it over time.
Look for the discomfort that precedes the distraction, focusing in on the internal trigger
As philosopher Paul Virilio wrote, “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.”
Precommitment involves removing a future choice in order to overcome our impulsivity.
Distraction, it turns out, isn’t about the distraction itself; rather, it’s about how we respond to it.
I’m not telling you to tag emails by topic or categories, only by when the message requires a response.
Fun and play don’t have to make us feel good per se; rather, they can be used as tools to keep us focused.
Only by understanding our pain can we begin to control it and find better ways to deal with negative urges
You’ll learn why you can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from.
Values are how we want to be, what we want to stand for, and how we want to relate to the world around us.
Only by understanding our pain can we begin to control it and find better ways to deal with negative urges.
We must disavow the misguided idea that if we’re not happy, we’re not normal—exactly the opposite is true.
Ryan and Deci proposed the human psyche needs three things to flourish: autonomy, competence, and relatedness
While we can’t control the feelings and thoughts that pop into our heads, we can control what we do with them.
We can use the same neural hardwiring that keeps us hooked to media to keep us engaged in an otherwise unpleasant task.
Most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality
Even when we think we’re seeking pleasure, we’re actually driven by the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting.
Dissatisfaction and discomfort dominate our brain’s default state, but we can use them to motivate us instead of defeat us.
Simply put, the drive to relieve discomfort is the root cause of all our behavior, while everything else is a proximate cause.
Self-compassion makes people more resilient to let-downs by breaking the vicious cycle of stress that often accompanies failure.
It’s a curious truth that when you gently pay attention to negative emotions, they tend to dissipate—but positive ones expand.
Simply put, the drive to relieve discomfort is the root cause of all our behavior, while everything else is a proximate cause.
Dweck concluded that signs of ego depletion were observed only in those test subjects who believed willpower was a limited resource.
Bricker then recommends getting curious about that sensation. For example, do your fingers twitch when you’re about to be distracted?
The goal is to eliminate all white space on your calendar so you’re left with a template for how you intend to spend your time each day.
But like the parents who blame a sugar high for their kid’s bad behavior, blaming devices is a surface-level answer to a deep question.
Learning certain techniques as part of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can disarm the discomfort that so often leads to harmful distractions
Fun is looking for the variability in something other people don’t notice. It’s breaking through the boredom and monotony to discover its hidden beauty.
I discovered that living the life we want requires not only doing the right things; it also requires we stop doing the wrong things that take us off track.
People who have a positive and caring attitude . . . toward her- or himself in the face of failures and individual shortcomings tend to be happier.
Test for tech readiness. A good measure of a child’s readiness is the ability to manage distraction by using the settings on the device to turn off external triggers.
Socially, we see that close friendships are the bedrock of our psychological and physical health. Loneliness, according to researchers, is more dangerous than obesity.
Anything that stops discomfort is potentially addictive, but that doesn’t make it irresistible. If you know the drivers of your behavior, you can take steps to manage them.
A study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs found that individuals who believed they were powerless to fight their cravings were much more likely to drink again.
In the future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others and those who proudly call themselves indistractable.
If you were to walk around Slack’s company headquarters in San Francisco, you’d notice a peculiar slogan on the hallway walls. White letters on a bright pink background blare, “Work hard and go home.”
Another study found that people’s tendency to self-blame, along with how much they ruminated on a problem, could almost completely mediate the most common factors associated with depression and anxiety.
Timeboxing enables us to think of each week as a mini-experiment. The goal is to figure out where your schedule didn’t work out in the prior week so you can make it easier to follow the next time around.
When we need to perform a difficult task, it’s more productive and healthful to believe a lack of motivation is temporary than it is to tell ourselves we’re spent and need a break (and maybe some ice cream).
He believes that willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts like an emotion. Just as we don’t run out of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows in response to what’s happening to us and how we feel.
Ten-minute rule. If I find myself wanting to check my phone as a pacification device when I can’t think of anything better to do, I tell myself it’s fine to give in, but not right now. I have to wait just ten minutes.
As is the case with all human behavior, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. If we accept this fact, it makes sense that the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort.
Tantalus’s curse is also our curse. We are compelled to reach for things we supposedly need but really don’t. We don’t need to check our email right this second or need to see the latest trending news, no matter how much we feel we must
Only a third of Americans keep a daily schedule, which means the vast majority wake up every morning with no formal plans. Our most precious asset—our time—is unguarded, just waiting to be stolen. If we don’t plan our days, someone else will.
At the heart of the therapy is learning to notice and accept one’s cravings and to handle them healthfully. Instead of suppressing urges, ACT prescribes a method for stepping back, noticing, observing, and finally letting the desire disappear naturally.
To make sure we always have something fun to do, we spent one afternoon writing down over a hundred things to do together in town, each one on a separate little strip of paper. Then, we rolled up all the little strips and placed them inside our fun jar.
When similar techniques were applied in a smoking cessation study, the participants who had learned to acknowledge and explore their cravings managed to quit at double the rate of those in the American Lung Association’s best-performing cessation program.
Hedonic adaptation, the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction, no matter what happens to us in life, is Mother Nature’s bait and switch. All sorts of life events we think would make us happier actually don’t, or at least they don’t for long.
Being indistractable means striving to do what you say you will do. Indistractable people are as honest with themselves as they are with others. If you care about your work, your family, and your physical and mental well-being, you must learn how to become indistractable
The curse is not that Tantalus spends all eternity reaching for things just out of reach, but rather his obliviousness to the greater folly of his actions. Tantalus’s curse was his blindness to the fact he didn’t need those things in the first place. That’s the real moral of the story.
An individual’s level of self-compassion had a greater effect on whether they would develop anxiety and depression than all the usual things that tend to screw up people’s lives, like traumatic life events, a family history of mental illness, low social status, or a lack of social support.
Next, book fifteen minutes on your schedule every week to reflect and refine your calendar by asking two questions: Question 1 (Reflect): When in my schedule did I do what I said I would do and when did I get distracted? Answering this question requires you to look back at the past week.
When I taught at the Stanford design school, I consistently saw how teams who brainstormed individually before coming together not only generated better ideas but were also more likely to have a wider diversity of solutions as they were less likely to be overrun by the louder, more dominating members of the group.
Eons of evolution gave you and me a brain in a near-constant state of discontentment. We’re wired this way for a simple reason. As a study published in the Review of General Psychology notes, If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.
We can cope with uncomfortable internal triggers by reflecting on, rather than reacting to, our discomfort. We can reimagine the task we’re trying to accomplish by looking for the fun in it and focusing on it more intensely. Finally, and most important, we can change the way we see ourselves to get rid of self-limiting beliefs.
My wife bought a hard-to-miss headpiece on Amazon for just a few dollars. She calls it the concentration crown, and the built-in LEDs light up her head to send an impossible-to-ignore message. When she wears it, she’s clearly letting our daughter (and me) know not to interrupt her unless it’s an emergency. It works like a charm.
In order to live our values in each of these domains, we must reserve time in our schedules to do so. Only by setting aside specific time in our schedules for traction (the actions that draw us toward what we want in life) can we turn our backs on distraction. Without planning ahead, it’s impossible to tell the difference between traction and distraction.
Whether I’m able to fall asleep at any given moment or whether a breakthrough idea for my next book comes to me when I sit down at my desk isn’t entirely up to me, but one thing is for certain: I won’t do what I want to do if I’m not in the right place at the right time, whether that’s in bed when I want to sleep or at my desk when I want to do good work. Not showing up guarantees failure.
The primary objective of most meetings should be to gain consensus around a decision, not to create an echo chamber for the meeting organizer’s own thoughts. One of the easiest ways to prevent superfluous meetings is to require two things of anyone who calls one. First, meeting organizers must circulate an agenda of what problem will be discussed. No agenda, no meeting. Second, they must give their best shot at a solution in the form of a brief, written digest. The digest need not be more than a page or two discussing the problem, their reasoning, and their recommendation.

Radical Focus (Christina Wodtke)

October 10, 2021/in Quotes by book Personal effectiveness Needs curating /by You?

The enemy of timely execution is distraction.
If everything is important, nothing is important.
Solve the problems you have, not the ones you imagine.
Impossible goals are depressing. Hard goals are inspiring
A mission keeps you on the rails. The OKRs provide focus and milestones.
When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it – Jeff Weiner,
You don’t need people to work more, you need people to work on the right things
Life always gives you plenty to do. The secret is not forgetting the things that matter
Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what you need done and let them surprise you
We start our journey to our dreams by wanting, but we arrive by focusing, planning and learning.
It’s not important to protect an idea. It’s important to protect the time it takes to make it real
OKRs are about continuous improvement and learning cycles. They are not about making check marks in a list.
It’s that ideas are easier to come up with than you think. What’s hard — really hard— is moving from an idea to reality.
A mission keeps you on the rails. The OKRs provide focus and milestones. Using OKRs without a mission is like using jet fuel without a jet.
…as an organization scales, the OKRs become an increasingly necessary tool to ensure that each product team understands how they are contributing to the greater whole, for coordinating work across teams, and in avoiding duplicate work.
What all too often happens in this case is that the actual people on the product teams are conflicted as to where they should be spending their time, resulting in confusion, frustration and disappointing results from leadership and individual contributors alike.
Why We Can’t Get Things Done. One: We haven’t prioritized our goals. Two: We haven’t communicated the goal obsessively and comprehensively. Three: We don’t have a plan to get things done. Four: We haven’t made time for what matters. Five: We give up instead of iterate.
One: set inspiring and measurable goals. Two: make sure you and your team are always making progress toward that desired end state. No matter how many other things are on your plate. And three: set a cadence that makes sure the group both remembers what they are trying to accomplish and holds each other accountable.

Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long (David Rock)

October 10, 2021/in Quotes by book Personal effectiveness Needs curating /by You?

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we see the world as we are, not as the world is.
Schedule blocks of time for different modes of thinking.
The wrong answers are stopping the right ones from emerging.
Your brain craves patterns and searches for them endlessly. Thomas B. Czerner
They need leaders who help them shine, who help them fulfill their potential at work.
The right dose of expectations can be as powerful as one of the strongest painkillers.
We all often think about what’s easy to think about, rather than what’s right to think about.
Sometimes reducing a problem to one short sentence can be enough to bring about insight on its own.
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions. ANTHONY JAY
Bring your dopamine or adrenaline level down by activating other regions of the brain other than the prefrontal cortex.
When you get the nerve to talk to the attractive person across the room, your brain was being bold three-tenths of a second before you.
study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test.
Want to pick up a great book or two this season? Check out our recommendations of hot books selected by your fellow readers, bestselling authors, and more!
It appears that the perception of choice may be more important than diet and other factors for health. Choosing in some way to experience stress is less stressful than experiencing stress without a sense of choice or control.
May your cortisol levels stay low, your dopamine levels high, your oxytocin run thick and rich, your serotonin build to a lovely plateau, and your ability to watch your brain at work keep you fascinated until your last breath. I wish you well on your journey.
One final insight about prioritizing involves getting disciplined about what you don’t put on the stage. This means not thinking when you don’t have to, becoming disciplined about not paying attention to non-urgent tasks unless, or until, it’s truly essential that you do.
Mindfulness is a habit, it’s something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort…it’s a skill that can be learned. It’s accessing something we already have. Mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.
New lovers tend to lose their minds and do all sorts of crazy things in the heat of the moment. One study showed that new lovers’ brains have a lot in common with people on cocaine. Dopamine is sometimes called the drug of desire. Too much dopamine, from being high with excitement.
Microsoft has a division that studies the way people work, to develop efficiency-improving software. (According to Microsoft’s research up to 2007, if you’re looking for a technological solution to being more efficient, getting a bigger computer screen is one of the few clear winners.)
Here’s my full list of guidelines for how to apply the principles of this chapter to email communication. 1. Emails should contain as few words as possible. 2. Make it easy to see your central point at a glance, in one screen. 3. Never send an email that could emotionally affect ano . . . Read more
As Stone says, This always on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to mammals in a state of constant crisis is the adrenalized fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. It’s great when tigers are chasing us. How many of those five hundred emails a day is a tiger? Despite
There’s a famous finding in the psychological literature, Ochsner explains, showing that six months later, someone who has become a paraplegic is just as happy as someone who’s won the lottery. It seems clear people are doing something to find what’s positive in even the most dire of circumstances. The one thing you can always do is control your interpretation of the meaning of the situation,
Studies of teenage behavior shows that the terrible teens is not a biological necessity, as a number of cultures don’t experience this phenomenon. A study of teenagers in Western cultures found that these teenagers have fewer choices than a felon in prison. Food for thought. Finding a way to make a choice, however small, seems to have a measurable impact on the brain, shifting you from an away response to a toward response.
Even the strongest toward emotion, lust, is unlikely to make you run, whereas fear can do so in an instant. The toward emotions are more subtle, more easily displaced, and harder to build on, than the away emotions. This also explains why upward spirals, where positive emotions beget more positive emotions, are less common than downward spirals, where negative emotions beget more negative emotions. Human beings walk toward, but run away.
Trying to change other people’s thinking appears to be one of the hardest tasks in the world. While the easy answer may seem to be to give people feedback, real change happens when people see things they have not seen before. The best way to help someone see something new is to help quiet her mind so that she can have a moment of insight. As you have insights, you change your brain, and by changing your brain you change your whole world.
Without this ability to stand outside your experience, without self-awareness, you would have little ability to moderate and direct your behavior moment to moment. Such real-time, goal-directed modulation of behavior is the key to acting as a mature adult. You need this capacity to free yourself from the automatic flow of experience, and to choose where to direct your attention. Without a director you are a mere automaton, driven by greed, fear, or habit.
Many great leaders understand intuitively that they need to work hard to create a sense of safety in others. In this way, great leaders are often humble leaders, thereby reducing the status threat. Great leaders provide clear expectations and talk a lot about the future, helping to increase certainty. Great leaders let others take charge and make decisions, increasing autonomy. Great leaders often have a strong presence, which comes from working hard to be authentic and real with other people, to create a sense of relatedness. And great leaders keep their promises, taking care to be perceived as fair.
More people than ever are being paid to think, instead of just doing routine tasks. Yet making complex decisions and solving new problems is difficult for any stretch of time because of some real biological limits on your brain. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to improve mental performance is to understand these limits. In act 1, Emily discovers why thinking requires so much energy, and develops new techniques for dealing with having too much to do. Paul learns about the space limits of his brain, and works out how to deal with information overload. Emily finds out why it’s so hard to do two things at once, and rethinks how she organizes her work. Paul discovers why he is so easily distracted, and works on how to stay more focused. Then he finds out how to stay in his brain’s sweet spot. In the last scene, Emily discovers that her problem-solving techniques need improving, and learns how to have breakthroughs when she needs them most.
The impact of doing too much. A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night’s sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis. While this fact might make an interesting dinner party topic, it’s really not that amusing that one of the most common productivity tools can make one as dumb as a stoner. (Apologies to technology manufacturers: there are good ways to use this technology, specifically being able to switch off for hours at a time.) Always on may not be the most productive way to work. One of the reasons for this will become clearer in the chapter on staying cool under pressure; however, in summary, the brain is being forced to be on alert far too much. This increases what is known as your allostatic load, which is a reading of stress hormones and other factors relating to a sense of threat.
In the workplace, you could increase people’s status by publicly recognizing them. The positive reward from positive public recognition can resonate with people for years. In the workplace, increasing a sense of certainty comes from having a better understanding of the big picture. You could reward someone by giving him or her access to more information. Some innovative firms allow all employees access access to full financial data, weekly. People feel much more certain about their world when they have information, which puts their mind more at ease and therefore makes them better able to solve difficult problems. In the workplace, you could increase autonomy by letting people work more flexibly, or work from home, or reducing the amount of reporting required. In the workplace, an example of increasing relatedness would be giving people opportunities to network with their peers more, by allowing them to attend more conferences or networking groups. In the workplace, in order to increase fairness some organizations allow employees to have community days, where they give their time to a charity of their choice.

The Power of Focus (Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen)

July 20, 2021/in Quotes by book Personal effectiveness Needs curating /by You?

Remember, nothing will change until you do.
A goal that is not measurable is just wishful thinking.
When you stand for something and do a remarkable job of
Decisiveness separates great leaders from dreamers and talkers.
I think when you have big dreams you attract other big dreamers.
If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you.
Successful people have successful habits unsuccessful people don’t!
A goal is the ongoing pursuit of a worthy objective until accomplished.
The results of your bad habits usually don’t show up until much later in life
A habit is a cable; we weave a thread each day, and at last we cannot break it. Horace Mann
Life doesn’t just happen to you. It’s all about choices and how you respond to every situation.
Expect the unexpected. Focus on what you can control and acknowledge what’s out of your control.
if you surround yourself with people who are strong and positive, you’re more likely to see a world full of opportunity and adventure.
All of the results you are currently experiencing in your life are absolutely perfect for you. This includes your career, personal relationships and financial status.
Every action you take has consequences. Bad habits (negative behavior) produce negative consequences. Successful habits (positive behavior) produce benefits and rewards.
To be truly rich includes not only financial freedom but developing rich, meaningful relationships, enriching your health, and enjoying a rich balance between your career and your personal life.
If you require two hours of uninterrupted time, turn off your iPhone, Blackberry, or whatever your particular preference is. Use your tech aid wisely—obviously there are times when you need to be available.
If you spend too much time working on your weaknesses, all you end up with is a lot of strong weaknesses! This doesn’t give you a competitive edge in the marketplace or position you to be wealthy. It just keeps you average. In fact, it’s an absolute insult to your integrity to major in
When you consistently make better choices you create better habits. These better habits produce better character. When you have better character, you add more value to the world. When you become more valuable, you attract bigger and better opportunities. This allows you to make more of a contribution in your life. This in turn leads to bigger and better results.
If you just keep on doing the same things that you’ve always done, what will your lifestyle be like five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now? What words will describe your future financial picture if you don’t make any changes? What about your health, relationships and the amount of time you have off for fun? Will you be enjoying a lot more freedom or still be working too many hours a week?

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (Daniel Goleman)

July 20, 2021/in Quotes by book Personal effectiveness Needs curating /by You?

Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.
Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.
But amid the din and distraction of work life, poor listening has become epidemic.
I don’t think focus is in itself ever a bad thing. But focus of the wrong kind, or managed poorly, can be.
One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us.
The sweet spot for smart decisions, then, comes not just from being a domain expert, but also from having high self-awareness.
Mindfulness helps especially for those of us for whom every setback, hurt or dissapointment creates endless cascades of rumination
We learn best with focused attention. As we focus on what we’re learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know making new neural connections.
Rapport demands joint attention—mutual focus. Our need to make an effort to have such human moments has never been greater, given the ocean of distractions we all navigate daily.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” Albert Einstein once said. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
A Persian fairy tale tells of the Three Princes of Serendip, who were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of. Creativity in the wild operates much like that.
In any interaction the more high-power person tends to focus his or her gaze on the other person less than others, and is more likely to interrupt and to monopolize the conversation—all signifying a lack of attention.
In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential.
No birthday, concert, hangout session, or party can be enjoyed without taking the time to distance yourself from what you are doing to make sure that those in your digital world know instantly how much fun you are having.
In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential.
Brain studies of mental workouts in which you sustain a single, chosen focus show that the more you detach from what’s distracting you and refocus on what you should be paying attention to, the stronger this brain circuitry becomes.
The antidote for mind wandering is meta-awareness, attention to attention itself, as in the ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correcting your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.
Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets. People who are highly resilient—who bounce back right away—can have as much as thirty times more activation in the left prefrontal area than those who are less resilient.
In fact, people who are extremely adept at mental tasks that demand cognitive control and a roaring working memory—like solving complex math problems—can struggle with creative insights if they have trouble switching off their fully concentrated focus.5
Martin Luther King Jr. observed that those who failed to offer their aid asked themselves the question: If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me? But the Good Samaritan reversed the question: If I do not stop to help this man what will happen to him?
Whenever you notice your mind wandering, a fundamental instruction in meditation advises, bring your mind back to its point of focus. The operative phrase here is whenever you notice. As our mind drifts off, we almost never notice the moment it launches into some other orbit on its own.
The inability to resist checking email or Facebook rather than focus on the person talking to us leads to what the sociologist Erving Goffman, a masterly observer of social interaction, called an away, a gesture that tells another person I’m not interested in what’s going on here and now.
It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled. Start to subtract sevens successively from 100 and, if you keep your focus on the task, your chatter zone goes quiet.
Tightly focused attention gets fatigued—much like an overworked muscle—when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion. The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy.
You see it in jazz musicians, who never rehearse exactly what they do, but just seem to know when to take center stage, when to fade into the background. When jazz artists were compared with classical musicians in brain function, they showed more neural indicators of self-awareness.15 As one jazz artist put it, In jazz you have to tune in to how your body is feeling so you know when to riff.
For leaders to get results they need all three kinds of focus. Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions. Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the larger world. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.
If you are a duffer at golf, say, and make the same mistakes every time you try a certain swing or putt, 10,000 hours of practicing that error will not improve your game. You’ll still be a duffer, albeit an older one. No less an expert than Anders Ericsson, the Florida State University psychologist whose research on expertise spawned the 10,000-hour rule of thumb, told me, You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal. 2
The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing. The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes. There’s an algorithm for this, a data mining method called automated social hierarchy detection, developed at Columbia University.8 When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person’s emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures.

Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (Jocelyn K. Glei)

July 19, 2021/in Quotes by book Personal effectiveness Needs curating /by You?

Frequency keeps ideas fresh.
Hardwork is the key to success Quote
DON’T WAIT FOR MOODS. Show up, whether you feel inspired or not.
What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.
The work, the process, is the goal. It builds character. It makes us better.
waiting for inspiration to write is like standing at the airport waiting for a train.
To truly excel, you must also continue to create for the most important audience of all: yourself.
Simple behaviors like regularly getting a good night’s sleep are shown to improve focus and self-control.
Alternate challenging creative work with more mindless tasks to give your brain time to rest and refuel.
The trouble with this approach is it means spending the best part of the day on other people’s priorities.
Even a small time set aside for solitude each day—from twenty minutes to an hour—can make an enormous difference.
All of the most fulfilled people I know focus more on the quality of their connections than the quantity of them.
Don’t trust technology over your own instincts and imagination. Doing busywork is easy; doing your best work is hard.
Move rhythmically between spending and renewing your energy by working in ninety-minute bursts and then taking a break.
Book time on your calendar for uninterrupted, focused work—and respect those blocks of time as you would any client meeting.
Commit to working on your project at consistent intervals—ideally every day—to build creative muscle and momentum over time.
Repetition is the enemy of insight. Take unorthodox—even wacky—approaches to solving your stickiest problems and see what happens.
Dedicate different times of day to different activities: creative work, meetings, correspondence, administrative work, and so on.
If you want to create something worthwhile with your life, you need to draw a line between the world’s demands and your own ambitions.
Keep your inner perfectionist in check by defining what finished looks like at the beginning of a project. And when you get there, stop!
Creative minds are highly susceptible to distraction, and our newfound connectivity poses a powerful temptation for all of us to drift off focus.
Tackle the projects that require ‘hard focus’ early in your day. Self-control —and our ability to resist distractions—declines as the day goes on.
Creative minds are highly susceptible to distraction, and our newfound connectivity poses a powerful temptation for all of us to drift off focus.
We’re using today’s technologies as prosthetics for our minds,when the real opportunity is for these technologies to be prosthetics for our beings.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently.
Yet there wasn’t a single day when I sat down to write an article, blog post, or book chapter without a string of people waiting for me to get back to them. It
Like it or not, we are constantly forced to juggle tasks and battle unwanted distractions—to truly set ourselves apart, we must learn to be creative amidst chaos.
Through our constant connectivity to each other, we have become increasingly reactive to what comes to us rather than being proactive about what matters most to us.
Marking progress is a huge motivator for long-term projects. Make your daily achievements visible by saving iterations, posting milestones, or keeping a daily journal.
At the end of the day—or, really, from the beginning—building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it.
The part of our brain associated with decision-making and goal-directed behaviors shrinks and the brain regions associated with habit formation grow when we’re under chronic stress.
If you want to succeed, you need to communicate. And grow a thicker skin. Show me a creative who’s never suffered a setback or a bad review, and you won’t be pointing at a superstar.
Frequency keeps the pressure off. If you’re producing just one page, one blog post, or one sketch a week, you expect it to be pretty darned good, and you start to fret about quality.
A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules. Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.
it’s true that frequency doesn’t have to be a daily frequency; what’s most important is consistency. The more widely spaced your work times, however, the less you reap all of these benefits.
sleep is more important than food. You can go a week without eating and the only thing you’ll lose is weight. Give up sleep for even a couple of days and you’ll become completely dysfunctional.
What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.Day by day, we build our lives, and day by day, we can take steps toward making real the magnificent creations of our imaginations.
Unlike computers, however, human beings aren’t meant to operate continuously, at high speeds, for long periods of time. Rather, we’re designed to move rhythmically between spending and renewing our energy.
With one eye on our gadgets, we’re unable to give our full attention to who and what is in front of us—meaning that we miss out on the details of our lives, ironically, while responding to our fear of missing out.
Lots and lots of people are creative when they feel like it, but you are only going to become a professional if you do it when you don’t feel like it. And that emotional waiver is why this is your work and not your hobby.
Frequency makes starting easier. Getting started is always a challenge. It’s hard to start a project from scratch, and it’s also hard each time you re-enter a project after a break. By working every day, you keep your momentum going.
People have a really bad habit of coming in and checking e-mail first thing in the morning. And for many people, the morning is the most productive time.E-mail is very, very tempting, so they basically sacrifice their productive time for e-mail.
The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off.
Extrinsic motivations—such as money and reputation—have a negative impact on creativity. It’s only when you’re focused on intrinsic motivations—such as your fascination with the material or the sheer pleasure you take in creating it—that you do your best work.
It’s no surprise that you’re likely to get more accomplished if you work daily. The very fact of each day’s accomplishment helps the next day’s work come more smoothly and pleasantly. Nothing is more satisfying that seeing yourself move steadily toward a big goal.
I know tons of people who call themselves artists who were born with talents and never really had to push themselves to be good at it. They think they are entitled to make a living at this thing, but they are not willing to do the hard part—selling—that everyone finds hard.
Perfectionism can inhibit your ability to reach your full potential. If you refuse to put yourself in a situation where you might give an imperfect performance, you’ll prevent yourself from receiving the proper feedback, input, and direction necessary for additional growth.
Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of success is showing up. Having written and directed fifty films in almost as many years, Allen clearly knows something about How, when, and where you show up is the single most important factor in executing on your ideas.
When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.Frequency nurtures frequency. If you develop the habit of working frequently,it becomes much easier to sit down and get something done even when you don’t have a big block of time; you don’t have to take time to acclimate yourself.
every great leader must face his or her demons in order to overcome them. I’ve always known this, but I wasn’t aware of any immediate problems. But these days the demons are more insidious; they’re the everyday annoyances, the little things that suck away our potential to do big things.
The basic combination of these three things: (1) that the world around us tries to tempt us; (2) that we listen to the world around us (e.g., choice architecture); and (3) that we don’t deal very well with temptation… if you put all of those things together, you have a recipe for disaster. So
Today’s challenge is to keep your focus and preserve the sanctity of mind required to create, and to ultimately make an impact in what matters most to you. This can only happen when you capitalize on the here and now. To do this, alternate periods of connectedness with periods of truly being present:
Deep and regular breathing, also referred to as diaphragmatic breathing, helps to quiet the sympathetic nervous system and allows the parasympathetic nervous system—which governs our sense of hunger and satiety, the relaxation response, and many aspects of healthy organ function—to become more dominant.
Studies show that the human mind can only truly multitask when it comes to highly automatic behaviors like walking. For activities that require conscious attention, there is really no such thing as multitasking, only task switching—the process of flicking the mind back and forth between different demands
We’re all too willing to trade away an hour of sleep in the false belief that it will give us one more hour of productivity. In fact, even very small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our cognitive capacity. The notion that some of us can perform adequately with very little sleep is largely a myth.
Truly great creative achievements require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, and we have to make time every single day to put in those hours. Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating.
If you’re feeling frustrated with your progress toward your goals, it’s tempting to focus on what you lack that other people seem to have, to obsess over followers, engagement, traffic, or any other benchmark. The reality is that numbers don’t necessarily measure success, and they’re certainly not a requirement for fulfillment.
Every time you’re doing something, you’re not doing something else. But you don’t really see what it is that you’re giving up. Especially when it comes to,let’s say, e-mail versus doing something that takes fifty hours. It is very easy for you to see the e-mail. It is not that easy for you to see the thing that takes fifty hours.
The world around us, including the world in our computers, is all about trying to tempt us to do things right now. Take Facebook,for example. Do they want you to be more productive twenty years from now?Or do they want to take your time, attention, and money right now? The same thing goes for YouTube, online newspapers, and so on.
when temptation hits, it’s going to be incredibly hard for us to resist. So if your e-mail is running and it is telling you that a message is waiting for you, that’s going to be very hard to resist. In your mind, you’ll keep thinking about what exciting things are waiting for you. Now, if you never opened your e-mail, you would do much better.
Frequency is helpful when you’re working on a creative project on the side, with pressing obligations from a job or your family. Instead of feeling perpetually frustrated that you don’t have any time for your project, you make yourself make time, every day. If you do a little bit each day, you can get a lot done over the course of months and years.
Establish hard edges in your day. Set a start time and a finish time for your workday—even if you work alone. Dedicate different times of day to different activities: creative work, meetings, correspondence, administrative work, and so on. These hard edges keep tasks from taking longer than they need to and encroaching on your other important work.
Treat your work as a refuge—an oasis of control and creative satisfaction in the midst of the bad stuff. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not on fire creatively every day—give yourself credit if you show up for work and make even a small amount of progress. When you put down your tools for the day, you may even see your personal situation with a fresh eye.
Once the contract is signed and the deal is done (whether it’s an album,client commission, or a job), put all thoughts of rewards out of your mind and focus relentlessly on the work itself. It may help to have a studio or other space dedicated to creative work—a place you never contaminate by talking business or daydreaming about success while you’re there.
A great novel, a stunning design, a game-changing piece of software, a revolutionary company—achievements like these take time, thought, craft, and persistence. And on any given day, this effort will never appear as urgent as those four e-mails (in the last half hour) from Client X or Colleague Y asking for something that can likely wait a few hours, if not days.
No one likes the feeling that other people are waiting— impatiently—for a response. At the beginning of the day, faced with an overflowing inbox, an array of voice mail messages, and the list of next steps from your last meeting, it’s tempting to clear the decks before starting your own work . When you’re up-to-date, you tell yourself, it will be easier to focus.
Treat your work as a refuge—an oasis of control and creative satisfaction in the midst of the bad stuff. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not on fire creatively every day—give yourself credit if you show up for work and make even a small amount of progress. When you put down your tools for the day, you may even see your personal situation with a fresh eye. POVERTY
Paradoxically, you hold both the problem and the solution to your day-today challenges. No matter where you work or what horrible top-down systems plague your work, your mind and energy are yours and yours alone. You can surrender your day-to-day and the potential of your work to the burdens that surround you. Or, you can audit the way you work and own the responsibility of fixing it.
Set a start time and a finish time for your workday—even if you work alone. Dedicate different times of day to different activities: creative work, meetings, correspondence, administrative work, and so on. These hard edges keep tasks from taking longer than they need to and encroaching on your other important work. They also help you avoid workaholism, which is far less productive than it looks.
We’re asked to apply our intellectual capital to solve hard problems—a creative goal that requires uninterrupted focus. At the same time, we’re asked to be constantly available by e-mail and messenger and in meetings—an administrative goal that creates constant distraction. We’re being asked, in other words, to simultaneously resist and embrace distraction to advance in our careers—a troubling paradox.
While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal. Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen.
Our bodies follow what are known as ultradian rhythms—ninety-minute periods at the end of which we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level. It’s possible to push ourselves past ninety minutes by relying on coffee, or sugar, or by summoning our own stress hormones, but when we do so we’re overriding our physiological need for intermittent rest and renewal. Eventually, there’s a price to pay.
If you’re like me, you have far too many things you want to do, read, see, test, and experience. Your inbox is a treasure trove of possibilities. To a creative mind, that’s very enticing. It’s easy for an optimist to keep fifty, a hundred, or even a thousand e-mails hovering in their inbox in the hopes that, someday soon, they’ll get a chance to give each opportunity the precious time that it deserves. But guess what? That’s never gonna happen.
I don’t bring technology into the bedroom. You shouldn’t be checking your e-mails before you go to sleep. Your brain gets overstimulated. You need to just unwind your mind.I’m also a big believer of curating who you follow on social media. You’re letting those people into your brain and they’re going to influence your thoughts.I find that I even dream about some of the people I follow. We need to be really mindful of who we let into our stream of consciousness.
There are many ways to use positive distraction techniques for more than just resisting marshmallows. Set a timer and race the clock to complete a task.Tie unrelated rewards to accomplishments—get a drink from the break room or log on to social media for three minutes after reaching a milestone. Write down every invading and negatively distracting thought and schedule a ten-minute review session later in the day to focus on these anxieties and lay them to rest.
Double-tasking isn’t our only affliction. Perhaps even more insidious is our habit of superficially committing to focused work while leaving e-mail or social media sites open in the background. All it takes is a whistle from one of these apps offering the thrill of an unexpected communication, and bam, we’re off course.But we don’t just lose the time spent answering a message when this happens; we also struggle to rediscover the ‘flow’ we were enjoying before we were disturbed.
Frequency makes starting easier. Getting started is always a challenge. It’s hard to start a project from scratch, and it’s also hard each time you re-enter a project after a break. By working every day, you keep your momentum going. You never have time to feel detached from the process. You never forget your place, and you never need to waste time reviewing your work to get back up to speed or reminding yourself what you’ve already done. Because your project is fresh in your mind, it’s easy to pick up where you left off.
Human mind can only truly multitask when it comes to highly automatic behaviors like walking. For activities that require conscious attention, there is really no such thing as multitasking, only task switching—the process of flicking the mind back and forth between different demands. It can feel as though we’re super-efficiently doing two or more things at once. But in fact we’re just doing one thing, then another, then back again, with significantly less skill and accuracy than if we had simply focused on one job at a time.
An adult who spends an average of six hours a day watching TV over the course of a lifetime can expect to live 4.8 years fewer than a person who does not watch TV. These results hold true even for people who exercise regularly.Researchers tell us that when we’re sedentary, our skeletal muscles,especially in our lower limbs, do not contract, thus requiring less fuel. But the negative impact of sitting is just the tip of the iceberg. Screen time also feeds into a vicious cycle of chronic stress in a way that most of us don’t even realize.
We have become so trusting of technology that we have lost faith in ourselves and our born instincts. There are still parts of life that we do not need to better with technology. It’s important to understand that you are smarter than your smartphone. To paraphrase, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your Google. Mistakes are a part of life and often the path to profound new insights—so why try to remove them completely? Getting lost while driving or visiting a new city used to be an adventure and a good story. Now we just follow the GPS.
self-control is not genetic or fixed, but rather a skill one can develop and improve with practice.One of [the] strategies is to develop a seemingly unrelated habit, such as improving your posture or saying ‘yes’ instead of ‘yeah’ or flossing your teeth every night before bed. This can strengthen your willpower in other areas of your life. Additionally, once the new habit is ingrained and can be completed without much effort or thought, that energy can then be turned to other activities requiring more self-control. Tasks done on autopilot don’t use up our stockpile of energy like tasks that have to be consciously completed.
We may tell ourselves that we’ll just answer one quick e-mail or make one short phone call. But in reality, switching tasks sends us down a rabbit hole,pulling our attention away from our priority work for much longer than we anticipate.Even if you have cast-iron willpower, the mere fact that the Internet is lying in wait on your computer takes a toll on your work performance. The very act of resisting temptations eats up concentration and leaves you mentally depleted. In short, committing to ignore distractions is rarely enough.we must strive to remove them entirely from our field of attention. Otherwise,we’ll end up using half our mental energy just keeping ourselves from breaking our own rules.
OPEN YOURSELF TO SERENDIPITY Chance encounters can also provide enormous benefits for your projects—and your life. Being friendly while standing in line for coffee at a conference might lead to a conversation, a business card exchange, and the first investment in your company a few months later. The person sitting next to you at a concert who chats you up during intermission might end up becoming your largest customer. Or, two strangers sitting in a nail salon exchanging stories about their families might lead to a blind date, which might lead to a marriage. (This is how I met my wife. Lucky for me, neither stranger had a smartphone, so they resorted to matchmaking.) I am consistently humbled and amazed by just how much creation and realization is the product of serendipity. Of course, these chance opportunities must be noticed and pursued for them to have any value. It makes you wonder how much we regularly miss. As we tune in to our devices during every moment of transition, we are letting the incredible potential of serendipity pass us by. The greatest value of any experience is often found in its seams. The primary benefits of a conference often have nothing to do with what happens onstage. The true reward of a trip to the nail salon may be more than the manicure. When you value the power of serendipity, you start noticing it at work right away. Try leaving the smartphone in your pocket the next time you’re in line or in a crowd. Notice one source of unexpected value on every such occasion. Develop the discipline to allow for serendipity.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Cal Newport)

July 19, 2021/in Quotes by book Personal effectiveness Needs curating /by You?

Running is cheaper than therapy.
Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.
Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.
Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
The more time you spend connecting on these services, the more isolated you’re likely to become.
Marcus Aurelius asked: You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?
Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.
how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.
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.
Where we want to be cautious . . . is when the sound of a voice or a cup of coffee with a friend is replaced with ‘likes’ on a post.
Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone, Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century.
Who could justify trading a lifetime of stress and backbreaking labor for better blinds? Is a nicer-looking window treatment really worth so much of your life?
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.
Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.
Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.
To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation.
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.
We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.
The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.
It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.
It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life. Thoreau and Storr worried about people enjoying less solitude. We must now wonder if people might forget this state of being altogether.
If you’re wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram—you’re not really walking, and therefore you’re not going to experience this practice’s greatest benefits.
Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.
Face-to-face conversation is the most human and humanizing thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.
Outsourcing your autonomy to an attention economy conglomerate—as you do when you mindlessly sign up for whatever new hot service emerges from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist class—is the opposite of freedom, and will likely degrade your individuality.
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 selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your likes is the new smoking.
Because digital minimalists spend so much less time connected than their peers, it’s easy to think of their lifestyle as extreme, but the minimalist would argue that this perception is backward: what’s extreme is how much time everyone else spends staring at their screens.
You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.
By removing your ability to access social media at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from bigger voids in your life. At the same time, you’re not necessarily abandoning these services. By allowing yourself access (albeit less convenient) through a web browser, you preserve your ability to use specific features that you identify as important to your life—but on your own terms.
We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction.
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 justification for allowing an attention-gobbling service into their lives, and are instead interested in applying new technology in highly selective and intentional ways that yield big wins. Just as important: they’re comfortable missing out on everything else.
This strategy is classic digital minimalism. By removing your ability to access social media at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from bigger voids in your life. At the same time, you’re not necessarily abandoning these services. By allowing yourself access (albeit less convenient) through a web browser, you preserve your ability to use specific features that you identify as important to your life—but on your own terms.
As Virginia Woolf argues in her 1929 feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, this imbalance should not come as a surprise. Woolf would agree that solitude is a prerequisite for original and creative thought, but she would then add that women had been systematically denied both the literal and figurative room of their own in which to cultivate this state. 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.
To be clear, conversation-centric communication requires sacrifices. If you adopt this philosophy, you’ll almost certainly reduce the number of people with whom you have an active relationship. Real conversation takes time, and the total number of people for which you can uphold this standard will be significantly less than the total number of people you can follow, retweet, like, and occasionally leave a comment for on social media, or ping with the occasional text. Once you no longer count the latter activities as meaningful interaction, your social circle will seem at first to contract.
Being less available over text, in other words, has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship even while making you (slightly) less available to those you care about. This point is crucial because many people fear that their relationships will suffer if they downgrade this form of lightweight connection. I want to reassure you that it will instead strengthen the relationships you care most about. You can be the one person in their life who actually talks to them on a regular basis, forming a deeper, more nuanced relationship than any number of exclamation points and bitmapped emojis can provide.
When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks. We shouldn’t be surprised that these absences lead to malfunctions.

Stillness is the Key (Ryan Holiday)

July 11, 2021/in Quotes by book Personal effectiveness Needs curating /by You?

Very few go astray who comport themselves with restraint.
People who don’t read have no advantage over those who cannot read.
It takes real work to grasp what is invisible to just about everyone else.
It’s not that we need to believe that God is great, only that God is greater than us.
If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.
It generates a vision, helps us resist the passions of the mob, makes space for gratitude and wonder.
If you wish to improve, Epictetus once said, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.
So much of the distress we feel comes from reacting instinctually instead of acting with conscientious deliberation.
Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections.
Remember, there’s no greatness in the future. Or clarity. Or insight. Or happiness. Or peace. There is only this moment.
[On reading] I cannot understand how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth.
The less energy we waste regretting the past or worrying about the future, the more energy we will have for what’s in front of us.
Routine, done for long enough and done sincerely enough, becomes more than routine. It becomes ritual—it becomes sanctified and holy.
Being present demands all of us. It’s not nothing. It may be the hardest thing in the world.
Stillness is not an excuse to withdraw from the affairs of the world. Quite the opposite‚ it’s a tool to let you do more good for more people.
This is what the best journals look like. They aren’t for the reader. They are for the writer. To slow the mind down. To wage peace with oneself.
Be present. And if you’ve had trouble with this in the past? That’s okay. That’s the nice thing about the present. It keeps showing up to give you a second chance.
Most of us would be seized with fear if our bodies went numb, and would do everything possible to avoid it, yet we take no interest at all in the numbing of our souls.
There was no better decision I could have made than the discipline I put on myself of having responsibility, having another human being—my wife—that I have to answer to.
Every prophet must be forced into the wilderness—where they undergo solitude, deprivation, reflection, and meditation. It’s from this physical ordeal that ‘psychic dynamite’ is made.
There is no stillness to the mind that thinks of nothing but itself, nor will there ever be peace for the body and spirit that follow their every urge and value nothing but themselves.
We have to do the kind of thinking that 99 percent of the population is just not doing, and we have to stop doing the destructive thinking that they spend 99 percent of their time doing.
Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death. The higher the interest rate and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.
To have an impulse and to resist it, to sit with it and examine it, to let it pass by like a bad smell—this is how we develop spiritual strength. This is how we become who we want to be in this world.
Tolstoy expressed his exasperation at people who didn’t read deeply and regularly. I cannot understand, he said, how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth.
We have to get better at thinking, deliberately and intentionally, about the big questions. On the complicated things. On understanding what’s really going on with a person, or a situation, or with life itself.
Seneca reminded himself that before we were born we were still and at peace, and so we will be once again after we die. A light loses nothing by being extinguished, he said, it just goes back to how it was before.
We can’t be afraid of silence, as it has much to teach us. Seek it. The ticking of the hands of your watch is telling you how time is passing away, never to return. Listen to it.
The world is like muddy water. To see through it, we have to let things settle. We can’t be disturbed by initial appearances, and if we are patient and still, the truth will be revealed to us.
What is it? Why does it matter? Do I need it? Do I want it? What are the hidden costs? Will I look back from the distant future and be glad I did it? If I never knew about it at all—if the request was lost in the mail, if they hadn’t been able
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: Every day I walk myself into a state of wellbeing and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
Somebody who thinks they’re nothing and don’t matter because they’re not doing something for even a few days is depriving themselves of stillness, yes—but they are also closing themselves off from a higher plane of performance that comes out of it.
How different would the world look if people spent as much time listening to their conscience as they did to chattering broadcasts? If they could respond to the calls of their convictions as quickly as we answer the dings and rings of technology in our pockets?
You may be sure that you are at peace with yourself, when no noise reaches you, when no word shakes you out of yourself, whether it be flattery or a threat, or merely an empty sound buzzing about you with unmeaning sin. Seneca
How noble and good everyone could be if at the end of the day they were to review their own behavior and weigh up the rights and wrongs. They would automatically try to do better at the start of each new day, and after a while, would certainly accomplish a great deal.
Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save face. Put yourself in his shoes—so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil—nothing is so self-blinding.
When we not only automate and routinize the trivial parts of life, but also make automatic good and virtuous decisions, we free up resources to do important and meaningful exploration. We buy room for peace and stillness, and thus make good work and good thoughts accessible and inevitable.
[Leisure] is a physical state—a physical action—that somehow replenishes and strengthens the soul. Leisure is not the absence of activity, it is activity. What is absent is any external justification—you can’t do leisure for pay, you can’t do it to impress people. You have to do it for you.
The gift of free will is that in this life we can choose to be good or we can choose to be bad. We can choose what standards to hold ourselves to and what we will regard as important, honorable, and admirable. The choices we make in that regard determine whether we will experience peace or not.
None of us are perfect. We have biologies and pathologies that will inevitably trip us up. What we need then is a philosophy and a strong moral code—that sense of virtue—to help us resist what we can, and to give us the strength to pick ourselves back up when we fail and try to do and be better.
Yes, every individual should make the life choices that are right for them. Still, there is something deeply misguided—and terribly sad—about a solitary existence. It is true that relationships take time. They also expose and distract us, cause pain, and cost money. We are also nothing without them.
We are restless because deep in our hearts we know now that our happiness is found elsewhere, and our work, no matter how valuable it is to us or to others, cannot take its place. But we hurry on anyway, and attend to our business because we need to matter, and we don’t always realize we already do.
Epicurus once said that the wise will accomplish three things in their life: leave written works behind them, be financially prudent and provide for the future, and cherish country living. That is to say, we will be reflective, we will be responsible and moderate, and we will find time to relax in nature.
No one dogged by creditors is free. Living outside your means is not glamorous. Behind the appearances, it’s exhausting. It’s also dangerous. The person who is afraid to lose their stuff, who has their identity wrapped up in their things, gives their enemies an opening. They make themselves extra vulnerable to fate.
Mental stillness will be short-lived if our hearts are on fire, or our souls ache with emptiness. We are incapable of seeing what is essential in the world if we are blind to what’s going on within us. We cannot be in harmony with anyone or anything if the need for more, more , more is gnawing at our insides like a maggot.
Take action. Get out from under all your stuff. Get rid of it. Give away what you don’t need. You were born free—free of stuff, free of burden. But since the first time they measured your tiny body for clothes, people have been foisting stuff upon you. And you’ve been adding links to the pile of chains yourself ever since.
Don’t reject a difficult or boring moment because it is not exactly what you want. Don’t waste a beautiful moment because you are insecure or shy. Make what you can of what you have been given. Live what can be lived. That’s what excellence is. That’s what presence makes possible. ~ Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 28)
Before we can make deep changes in our lives, we have to look into our diet, our way of consuming. We have to live in such a way that we stop consuming the things that poison us and intoxicate us. Then we will have the strength to allow the best in us to arise, and we will no longer be victims of anger, of frustration. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, via Stillness is the Key (Page 34)
It is difficult to think clearly in rooms filled with other people. It’s difficult to understand yourself if you are never by yourself. It’s difficult to have much in the way of clarity and insight if your life is a constant party and your home is a construction site. Sometimes you have to disconnect in order to better connect with yourself and with the people you serve and love.
To have an impulse and to resist it, to sit with it and examine it, to let it pass by like a bad smell—this is how we develop spiritual strength. This is how we become who we want to be in this world. Only those of us who take the time to explore, to question, to extrapolate the consequences of our desires have an opportunity to overcome them and to stop regrets before they start.
More does nothing for the one who feels less than, who cannot see the wealth that was given to them at birth, that they have accumulated in their relationships and experiences. Solving your problem of poverty is an achievable goal and can be fixed by earning and saving money. No one could seriously claim otherwise. The issue is when we think these activities can address spiritual poverty.
We will not simply think our way to peace. We can’t pray our soul into better condition. We’ve got to move and live our way there. It will take our body—our habits, our actions, our rituals, our self-care—to get our mind and our spirit in the right place, just as it takes our mind and spirit to get our body to the right place. It’s a trinity. A holy one. Each part dependent on the others.
Journaling is a way to ask tough questions: Where am I standing in my own way? What’s the smallest step I can take toward a big thing today? Why am I so worked up about this? What blessings can I count right now? Why do I care so much about impressing people? What is the harder choice I’m avoiding? Do I rule my fears, or do they rule me? How will today’s difficulties reveal my character?*
To go through our days looking out for no one but ourselves? To think that we can or must do this all alone? To accrue mastery or genius, wealth or power, solely for our own benefit? What is the point? By ourselves, we are a fraction of what we can be. By ourselves, something is missing, and, worse, we feel that in our bones. Which is why stillness requires other people; indeed, it is for other people.
Yes, thinking is essential. Expert knowledge is undoubtedly key to the success of any leader or athlete or artist. The problem is that, unthinkingly, we think too much. The ‘wild and whirling words’ of our subconscious get going and suddenly there’s no room for our training (or anything else). We’re overloaded, overwhelmed, and distracted… by our own mind! ~ Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 42)
Breakthroughs seem to happen with stunning regularity in the shower or on a long hike. Where don’t they happen? Shouting to be heard in a bar. Three hours into a television binge. Nobody realizes just how much they love someone while they’re booking back-to back-to-back meetings. If solitude is the school of genius, as the historian Edward Gibbon put it, then the crowded, busy world is the purgatory of the idiot.
The way you feel when you awake early in the morning and your mind is fresh and as yet unsoiled by the noise of the outside world—that’s space worth protecting. So too is the zone you lock into when you’re really working well. Don’t let intrusions bounce you out of it. Put up barriers. Put up the proper chuting to direct what’s urgent and unimportant to the right people. ~ Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 35)
Our job is not to ‘go with our gut’ or fixate on the first impression we form about an issue. No, we need to be strong enough to resist thinking that is too neat, too plausible, and therefore almost always wrong. Because if the leader can’t take the time to develop a clear sense of the bigger picture, who will? If the leader isn’t thinking through all the way to the end, who is? ~ Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 14)
If true peace and clarity are what you seek in this life—and by the way, they are what you deserve—know that you will find them nearby and not far away. Stick fast, as Emerson said. Turn into yourself. Stand in place. Stand in front of the mirror. Get to know your front porch. You were given one body when you were born—don’t try to be someone else, somewhere else. Get to know yourself. Build a life that you don’t need to escape from.
Lust is a destroyer of peace in our lives: Lust for a beautiful person. Lust for an orgasm. Lust for someone other than the one we’ve committed to be with. Lust for power. Lust for dominance. Lust for other people’s stuff. Lust for the fanciest, best, most expensive things that money can buy. And is this not at odds with the self-mastery we say we want? A person enslaved to their urges is not free—whether they are a plumber or the president.
No one has less serenity than the person who does not know what is right or wrong. No one is more exhausted than the person who, because they lack a moral code, must belabor every decision and consider every temptation. No one feels worse about themselves than the cheater or the liar, even if—often especially if—they are showered with rewards for their cheating and lying. Life is meaningless to the person who decides their choices have no meaning.
Confident people know what matters. They know when to ignore other people’s opinions. They don’t boast or lie to get ahead (and then struggle to deliver). Confidence is the freedom to set your own standards and unshackle yourself from the need to prove yourself. A confident person doesn’t fear disagreement and doesn’t see change—swapping an incorrect opinion for a correct one—as an admission of inferiority. ~ Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 72)
We were not put on this planet to be worker bees, compelled to perform some function over and over again for the cause of the hive until we die. Nor do we ‘owe it’ to anyone to keep doing, doing, doing—not our fans, not our followers, not our parents who have provided so much for us, not even our families. Killing ourselves does nothing for anybody. It’s perfectly possible to do and make good work from a good place. You can be healthy and still and successful.
Who is so talented that they can afford to bring only part of themselves to bear on a problem or opportunity? Whose relationships are so strong that they can get away with not showing up? Who is so certain that they’ll get another moment that they can confidently skip over this one? The less energy we waste regretting the past or worrying about the future, the more energy we will have for what’s in front of us. ~ Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 27)
When you step back from the enormity of your own immediate experience—whatever it is—you are able to see the experience of others and either connect with them or lessen the intensity of your own pain. We are all strands in a long rope that stretches back countless generations and ties together every person in every country on every continent. We are all thinking and feeling the same things, we are all made of and motivated by the same things. We are all stardust.
Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections. It slows the ball down so that we might hit it. It generates a vision, helps us resist the passions of the mob, makes space for gratitude and wonder. Stillness allows us to persevere. To succeed. It is the key that unlocks the insights of genius, and allows us regular folks to understand them. ~ Ryan Holiday, via Stillness is the Key (Page 2)
Find people you admire and ask how they got where they are. Seek book recommendations. Add experience and experimentation on top of this. Put yourself in tough situations. Accept challenges. Familiarize yourself with the unfamiliar. That’s how you widen your perspective and your understanding. The wise are still because they have seen it all. They know what to expect because they’ve been through so much. They’ve made mistakes and learned from them. And so must you.
Those who think they will find solutions to all their problems by traveling far from home, perhaps as they stare at the Colosseum or some enormous moss-covered statue of Buddha, Emerson said, are bringing ruins to ruins. Wherever they go, whatever they do, their sad self comes along. A plane ticket or a pill or some plant medicine is a treadmill, not a shortcut. What you seek will come only if you sit and do the work, if you probe yourself with real self-awareness and patience.
Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty. What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you’re utterly and completely overworked? It’s a vicious cycle: We end up having to work more to fix the errors we made when we would have been better off resting, having consciously said no instead of reflexively saying yes. We end up pushing good people away (and losing relationships) because we’re wound so tight and have so little patience.
During the recording of her album Interiors, the musician Rosanne Cash posted a simple sign over the doorway of the studio. ‘Abandon Thought, All ye Who Enter Here.’ Not because she wanted a bunch of unthinking idiots working with her, but because she wanted everyone involved—included herself—to go deeper than whatever was on the surface of their minds. She wanted them to be present, connected to the music, and not lost in their heads. ~ Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 43)
I think I understand now that the restlessness we feel as we make our plans and chase our ambitions is not the effect of their importance to our happiness and our eagerness to attain them. We are restless because deep in our hearts we know now that our happiness is found elsewhere, and our work, no matter how valuable it is to us or to others, cannot take its place. But we hurry on anyway, and attend to our business because we need to matter, and we don’t always realize we already do.
We want to learn to see the world like an artist: While other people are oblivious to what surrounds them, the artist really sees. Their mind, fully engaged, notices the way a bird flies or the way a stranger holds their fork or a mother looks at her child. They have no thoughts of the morrow. All they are thinking about is how to capture and communicate their experience. An artist is present. And from this stillness comes brilliance. ~ Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 28)
There are going to be setbacks in life. Even a master or a genius will experience a period of inadequacy when they attempt to learn new skills or explore new domains. Confidence is what determines whether this will be a source of anguish or an enjoyable challenge. If you’re miserable every time things are not going your way, if you cannot enjoy it when things are going your way because you undermine it with doubts and insecurity, life will be hell. ~ Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 73)
People who are driven by anger are not happy. They are not still. They get in their own way. They shorten legacies and short-circuit their goals. The Buddhists believed that anger was a kind of tiger within us, one whose claws tear at the body that houses it. To have a chance at stillness—and clear thinking and big-picture view that defines it—we need to tame that tiger before it kills us. We have to beware of desire, but conquer anger, because anger hurts not just ourselves but many other people as well.
Epicurus was right—if God exists, why would they possibly want you to be afraid of them? And why would they care what clothes you wear or how many times you pay obeisance to them per day? What interest would they have in monuments or in fearful pleas for forgiveness? At the purest level, the only thing that matters to any father or mother—or any creator—is that their children find peace, find meaning, find purpose. They certainly did not put us on this planet so we could judge, control, or kill each other.
We must be disciplined about our discipline and moderate in our moderation. Life is about balance, not about swinging from one pole to the other. Too many people alternate between working and bingeing, on television, on food, on video games, on laying around wondering why they are bored. The chaos of life leads into the chaos of planning a vacation. Sitting alone with a canvas? A book club? A whole afternoon for cycling? Chopping down trees? Who has the time? If Churchill had the time, if Gladstone had the time, you have the time.
Most students, whether it’s in archery or yoga or chemistry, go into a subject with a strong intention. They are outcome-focused. They want to get the best grade or the highest score. They bring their previous ‘expertise’ with them. They want to skip the unnecessary steps and get right to the sexy stuff. As a result, they are difficult to teach and easily discouraged when the journey proves harder than expected. They are not present. They are not open to experience and cannot learn.
There’s no greatness in the future. Or clarity. Or insight. Or happiness. Or peace. There is only this moment. Not that we mean literally sixty seconds. The real present moment is what we choose to exist in, instead of lingering on the past or fretting about the future. It’s however long we can push away the impressions of what’s happened before and what we worry or hope might occur at some other time. Right now can be a few minutes or a morning or a year—if you can stay in it that long.
Anger is counterproductive. The flash of rage here, an outburst at the incompetence around us there—this may generate a moment of raw motivation or even a feeling of relief, but we rarely tally up the frustration they cause down the road. Even if we apologize or the good we do outweighs the harm, damage remains—and consequences follow. The person we yelled at is now an enemy. The drawer we broke in a fit is now a constant annoyance. The high blood pressure, the overworked heart, inching us closer to the attack that will put us in the hospital or the grave.
A person who makes selfish choices or acts contrary to their conscience will never be at peace. A person who sits back while others suffer or struggle will never feel good, or feel that they are enough, no matter how much they accomplish or how impressive their reputation may be. A person who does good regularly will feel good. A person who contributes to their community will feel like they are a part of one. A person who puts their body to good use—volunteering, protecting serving, standing up for—will not need to treat it like an amusement park to get some thrills.
People say, ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead,’ as they hasten that very death, both literally and figuratively. They trade their health for a few more working hours. They trade the long-term viability of their business or their career before the urgency of some temporal crisis. If we treat sleep as a luxury, it is the first to go when we get busy. If sleep is what happens only when everything is done, work and others will constantly be impinging on your personal space. You will feel frazzled and put upon, like a machine that people don’t take care of and assume will always function.
Always think about what you’re really being asked to give. Because the answer is often a piece of your life, usually in exchange for something you don’t even want. Remember, that’s what time is. It’s your life, it’s your flesh and blood, that you can never get back. In every situation ask: What is it? Why does it matter? Do I need it? Do I want it? What are the hidden costs? Will I look back from the distant future and be glad I did it? If I never knew about it at all—if the request was lost in the mail, if they hadn’t been able to pin me down to ask me—would I even notice that I missed out?
Monks and priests take vows of poverty because it will mean fewer distractions, and more room (literally) for the spiritual pursuit to which they have committed. No one is saying we have to go that far, but the more we own, the more we oversee, the less room we have to move and, ironically, the less still we become. Start by walking around your house and filling up trash bags and boxes with everything you don’t use. Think of it as clearing more room for your mind and your body. Give yourself space. Give your mind a rest. Want to have less to be mad about? Less to covet or be triggered by? Give more away.
How different would the world look if people spent as much time listening to their conscience as they did to chattering broadcasts? If they could respond to the calls of their convictions as quickly as we answer the dings and rings of technology in our pockets? All this noise. All this information. All these inputs. We are afraid of the silence. We are afraid of looking stupid. We are afraid of missing out. We are afraid of being the bad guy who says, ‘Nope, not interested.’ We’d rather make ourselves miserable than make ourselves a priority, than be our best selves. Than be still… and in charge of our own information diet.
Each of us will, in our own lives, face crisis. A business on the brink of collapse. An acrimonious divorce. A decision about the future of our career. A moment where the whole game depends on us. These situations will call upon all our mental resources. An emotional, reactive response—an unthinking, half-baked response—will not cut it. Not if we want to get it right. Not if we want to perform at our best. In these situations we must: be fully present; empty our mind of preconceptions; take our time; sit quietly and reflect; reject distraction; weight advice against the counsel of our convictions; deliberate without being paralyzed. We must cultivate mental stillness to succeed in life and to successfully navigate the many crises it throws our way.
Instead of carrying that baggage around in our heads or hearts, we put it down on paper. Instead of letting racing thoughts run unchecked or leaving half-baked assumptions unquestioned, we force ourselves to write and examine them. Putting your own thinking down on paper lets you see it from a distance. It give you objectivity that is so often missing when anxiety and fears and frustrations flood your mind. What’s the best way to start journaling? Is there an ideal time of day? How long should it take? Who cares? How you journal is much less important than why you are doing it: To get something off your chest. To have quiet time with your thoughts. To clarify those thoughts. To separate the harmful from the insightful. There’s no right way or wrong way. The point is just to do it.