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What to Do When You Have Too Many Ideas and Not Enough Time. Why Attention is the Currency of Achievement – The Mission. Deep Work Improves Performance As someone who graduated college with a 2.97 GPA and got fired from almost every job I ever had, I’m not exactly the kind of person anybody would label as focused, disciplined and persistent.

Why Attention is the Currency of Achievement – The Mission

But as an author, I had no choice but to develop these habits, traits, and mindsets. This Googler Explains How To Design Your Time Rather Than Manage It. For many of us, work can feel like a never-ending cycle of long meetings, overflowing inboxes, and urgent demands.

This Googler Explains How To Design Your Time Rather Than Manage It

How to Stop Sabotaging Yourself. Do you ever find yourself rushing so much that you end up forgetting your cell phone charger?

How to Stop Sabotaging Yourself

Then it turns out that you’ve got an important call and you spend the entire time feeling anxious about your phone dying? Or perhaps you’ve decided your romantic partner doesn’t listen to you; so you keep talking more and more trying to hammer home your point. Unfortunately, this leads your partner to tune you out even more, threatening your bond. These are just a couple of ways you may be sabotaging yourself and your relationships, creating unnecessary pain and self-generated stress.

In my new book, The Healthy Mind Toolkit, I help readers self-diagnose the sabotaging thinking and behavioral habits that are holding them back in life and in love, and provide simple, practical tips for overcoming these patterns. To stop sabotaging yourself, you must first recognize when you’re getting in your own way. This Exercise Will Help You To Stop Wasting Your Time. The reason I research productivity is simple.

This Exercise Will Help You To Stop Wasting Your Time

I think that a productive life equals a happy life. Also, if you’re more productive than average people, you’ll advance faster in your career. You learn more. You do more. And eventually are rewarded more. And when I talk about productivity, I talk about being effective. Productivity Tips for People Who Hate Productivity Tips. This Is How To "Work Smarter Not Harder": 3 Secrets From Research. Rethinking Discipline. Why willpower is overrated. People with a lot of self-control — people who, when they happen upon a delicious food they don’t think they should eat, seemingly grin and bear the temptation until it passes — have it easy.

Why willpower is overrated

But why? For a long time, the thinking was that these people are good at inhibiting their impulses. That they have a lot of willpower and they know how to use it. People who are bad at resisting temptation, meanwhile, supposedly have insufficient or underexploited willpower, a view with deep cultural and moral roots. (Think Adam and Eve and the original sin.) But this idea, that people have self-control because they’re good at willpower, is looking more and more like a myth. The idea of willpower has withered as the scientific tests for it have gotten better There are two main ways to measure a person’s level of self-control. One is with the self-control scale first published in 2004. It’s a pretty simple measure, and it does a remarkable job at predicting success in life. The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.

Are People Really More Busy? The Rise of Shadow Work. How to be more productive by working less — Quartz. It took me 18 months to write The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck.

How to be more productive by working less — Quartz

Over that time period, I wrote somewhere in the vicinity of 150,000 words for the book (about 600 pages). Most of that came in the final three months. In fact, I can confidently say I got far more done in the final three months than I did in the first 12 combined. Want to Create Things That Matter? Be Lazy. The late Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, was one the most brilliant minds of twentieth century science.

Want to Create Things That Matter? Be Lazy.

To his colleagues at Cornell, however, he seemed lazy. As Feynman admitted in a 1981 interview: “I’m actively irresponsible; I tell everybody I don’t do anything; if anyone asks me to be on a committee…’no’ I tell them.” The acclaimed post-modern science fiction author Neal Stephenson also comes across as lazy.

Your Body's Best Time for Everything. Could you pack more into each day if you did everything at the optimal time?

Your Body's Best Time for Everything

A growing body of research suggests that paying attention to the body clock, and its effects on energy and alertness, can help pinpoint the different times of day when most of us perform our best at specific tasks, from resolving conflicts to thinking creatively. Most people organize their time around everything but the body's natural rhythms. Workday demands, commuting, social events and kids' schedules frequently dominate—inevitably clashing with the body's circadian rhythms of waking and sleeping. As difficult as it may be to align schedules with the body clock, it may be worth it to try, because of significant potential health benefits. Does that matter? — Signal v. Noise. Does that matter?

Does that matter? — Signal v. Noise

Question to ask to help you hone one of your most important instincts. Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime. Every now and then during the workweek—usually around three in the afternoon—a familiar ache begins to saturate my forehead and pool in my temples.

Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime

The glare of my computer screen appears to suddenly intensify. My eyes trace the contour of the same sentence two or three times, yet I fail to extract its meaning. Neuroscience says these five rituals will help your brain stay in peak condition. This piece has been corrected. Thanks to improvements in medicine, more of us are living longer. That makes we have a heightened investment in making sure our brains stay in shape as we age, too. Your work-life balance hangs in these four quadrants.

I find most “work-life balance” conversations challenging. For starters, there’s a distinctly gendered component to them – where women seem to be expected to worry more about balancing it all, and where “life” is code for domestic duties, rather than, you know, LIFE in all its juicy, nourishing, celebratory glory. But I find we also tend to get caught up in finding a single correct answer that works for everyone. (Kinda like we do for most things in life.) And of course, the answer is different for everyone. My man, for example, would be deeply dismayed if someone forced him to work only forty hours a week.

I, on the other hand, enjoy flipping through French decor magazines or browsing Pinterest for fun, but I also find writing blog posts to be a genuinely enjoyable way to while away a couple of hours. The work-life axis just doesn’t work, in my experience. On the other hand, we certainly know it when the balance is out of whack, don’t we? 4 Things You Thought Were True About Time Management - Amy Gallo. By Amy Gallo | 1:00 PM July 22, 2014. How To Get More Done By Having Less To Do. Ask anyone how their life’s going these days, and either he or she will answer: “Busy!” “I think it’s an almost universal experience right now that people feel busy but not productive,” says Greg McKeown, whose new book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, argues for paring back commitments to achieve more.

If you’re feeling stretched, here’s five ways how to pull yourself back together: 1. Time Assets vs. Time Debts: A Different Way of Thinking About Productivity. Late in his career, Steve Jobs famously drove his car without a license plate. There were all sorts of theories about why Jobs decided to drive without tags. Some people said he didn’t want to be tracked. Others believed he was trying to make a game of avoiding parking tickets. Jon Callas, a former computer security expert who worked for Apple, revealed a different reason.

According to Callas, Steve Jobs discovered a loophole in the California vehicle registration laws. Once he realized this, Jobs arranged a special leasing agreement with his Mercedes dealer so that every six months he would drop off his current car and receive a new Mercedes SL55 AMG to replace it. The power of saying no. A Beginners Guide To Parkinson's Law: How To Do More Stuff By Giving Yourself Less Time / Impossible. Stop Wasting Time on Things that Don't Have a Purpose in Your Life. Busyness is Not a Virtue - iDoneThis Blog. The Brain Hacks Top Founders Use To Get The Job Done. Time Management Skills Are Stupid. Here's What Works. How To Motivate Yourself: 3 Steps Backed By Science.

How To Be Motivated: 4 New Insights From Research. The Four Elements of Physical Energy and How To Master Them. Discover A Better Way of Working - The Energy Project. The Productivity Paradox: How Sony Pictures Gets More Out of People by Demanding Less. The Idea in Brief. The Theory of Cumulative Stress: How to Recover When Stress Builds Up. Listening To Your Body Clock Can Make You More Productive And Improve Your Well-Being. From an early age, we're taught that getting up early is good for us. Sayings like The early bird catches the worm and Early to bed and early to rise makes and man healthy, wealthy and wise are part of the culture and have a certain moralizing force. Leading@google: Tony Schwartz.