The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy

“Rita Emmett, the author of The Procrastinator’s Handbook, summed this up well in what she labeled Emmett’s law: “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.”

“Busyness is no different from laziness when it doesn’t lead you to accomplish anything.”

“When someone says they “don’t have time” for something, what they’re really saying is that a task isn’t as important or attractive as whatever else they have on their plate.”

“an epiphany: every lesson I learned fell into better management of one of three categories: my time, my attention, and my energy.”

“The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.”

“the more you see yourself like a stranger, the more likely you are to give your future self the same workload that you would give a stranger, and the more likely you are to put things off to tomorrow—for your future self to do.”

“To be everywhere is to be nowhere. —SENECA”

“I see drinking alcohol as a way of borrowing energy from tomorrow;”

“Productivity isn’t about doing more things—it’s about doing the right things.”

“Many people forget that their smartphone, computer, and other devices exist for their convenience—not the convenience of everyone who wants to interrupt them throughout the day.”

“the internet is basically the world’s largest candy store for your limbic system.”

“Ideas, tasks, and insights only have value when you capture and then act on them. Keeping notepads everywhere has helped me hold on to a ton of them.”

“Productivity is about how much you accomplish.”

“By seeing what triggers procrastination, and then making a plan to flip those triggers, doing your taxes becomes attractive. If I found myself putting off doing my taxes, I might sit down and make a plan to changes those triggers. For example, if the trigger is:• Boring: I go to my favorite café for an afternoon on Saturday to do my taxes over a fancy drink while doing some people watching.• Frustrating: I bring a book to the same café, and set a timer on my phone to limit myself to working on my taxes for thirty minutes—and only work for longer if I’m on a roll and feel like going on.• Difficult: I research the tax process to see what steps I need to follow, and what paperwork I need to gather. And I visit the café during my Biological Prime Time, when I’ll naturally have more energy.• Unstructured or Ambiguous: I make a detailed plan from my research that has the very next steps I need to take to do them.• Lacking in Personal Meaning: If I expect to get a refund, think about how much money I will get back, and make a list of the meaningful things I’ll spend that money on.• Lacking in Intrinsic Rewards: For every fifteen minutes I spend on my taxes, I set aside $2.50 to treat myself or reward myself in some meaningful way for reaching milestones.”

“It’s how much space exists between the cars. The same is true for the tasks you work on throughout the day. It’s difficult to be productive when you try to cram as much into your day as possible, because you’ll inevitably create a mental logjam as unexpected tasks crop up. By simplifying how much you take on, you create more attentional space around your high-return activities, so you can focus on them much more deeply. Tasks are the cars on the productivity superhighway.*”

“By controlling how much time you spend on a task, you control how much energy and attention you spend on it.”

“ingredients of productivity—time, attention, and energy”

“unlike your most meaningful tasks, your most purposeful tasks may not necessarily contribute a lot of value or meaning to you, but they contribute an incredible amount of value to your productivity.”

“As I began to deliberately and intentionally invest more time, attention, and energy into my highest-return tasks, my productivity shot through the roof. Working smarter instead of just harder is impossible without first stepping back from your work, and that’s what this first section of the book—Laying the Groundwork—is all about.”

“The common-sense rules of the “real world” are a fragile connection of socially reinforced illusions.”

“Negative self-talk is absolutely, completely normal. One psychologist, Shad Helmstetter, has found that “seventy-seven percent of everything we think is negative, counterproductive, and works against us.”

“your brain is simply not built to focus on more than one thing at once. In fact, your brain can’t focus on two things simultaneously—instead it rapidly switches between them, which creates the illusion that you’re doing more than one thing at a time.”

“Landscape architects call these paths “desire paths.”

“Managing your time becomes important only after you define what you want to accomplish and understand how much energy and focus you have throughout the day.”

“Productivity isn’t about how busy or efficient you are—it’s about how much you accomplish”

“According to Duhigg, cues that trigger habits fall into one of five categories: a specific time of day, a place, a feeling, the presence of certain people, or a preceding behavior that you have ritualized.”

“People who have a growth mindset believe that through hard work and persistence, they can accomplish more. They embrace obstacles as challenges to be overcome, instead of seeing them as roadblocks, and they see working hard as the only way of mastering a skill.”

“You don’t have to look far to see evidence that we like to think in threes. According to J.D., “the simplest reason [three accomplishments work so well] is because our brains are trained from early on to think in threes: the beginning, the middle, the end.” For example, “the military uses threes to help people remember survival information: You can go three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food.” When you look around, there are also countless examples of sets of threes embedded everywhere: the three bears, three blind mice, three little pigs, and three musketeers; phrases like “blood, sweat, and tears” and “the good, the bad, and the ugly”; and ideas like gold, silver, and bronze medals, and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Our mind is wired to think in groups of three.”

“meditation and mindfulness both build your attention muscle,”