work life

I know how to handle a day when you feel extremely lazy. Decide that, given that you’re a lazy person, you will work diligently for only 30 entirely focused minutes on the most important thing, and then take the rest of the day off. You will do your best work on these days.

Sasha Chapin • 50 Things I Know

His habit had been to go and meet whatever needed to be met, not to wait idly for what might approach.

Larry McMurtry • Lonesome Dove

“if I have to work, I find it preferable (and less painful) to work intensely for very short hours, then do nothing for the rest of the time assuming doing nothing is really doing nothing), until I recover completely and look forward to a repetition, rather than being subjected to the tedium of Japanese style low-intensity interminable office hours

More and more, I think my issues with conventional productivity advice – indeed, with the very notion of productivity – boil down to this: Spending your days trying to get through a list of things you feel you have to do is a fundamentally joyless and soul-destroying way to live; and most productivity problems, like distraction or procrastination o... See more

Productivity is not drudgery and chores. It’s your ability to take a vision in your head and manifest it in the real world.

Productivity is also not about working harder and longer. It’s about working more efficiently, which means minimizing waste. Think wasted time, effort, energy, or potential.

Productivity is not some random hacks and silver bulle... See more

Superhuman

It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the hea... See more

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mi... See more

Paul Graham • How to Do What You Love

"I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being." — Maria Popova

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