What will your life have been, in the end, but the sum total of everything you spent it focusing on? OLIVER BURKEMAN
Information is no longer scarce. But attention is. In fact, in a world where information is freely available, focus becomes one of the most valuable commodities in the workplace. But for most of us, work is the hardest place to find it.
Productivity should ultimately give you back more time, not require more of you.
Everybody ends up somewhere in life. A few people end up somewhere on purpose. ANDY STANLEY
Here’s the problem with the Distraction Zone: your passion can mask your lack of proficiency—but only to yourself. Our proficiency is best seen by other people. That means we may be the last to know that we’re wasting an enormous amount of time doing subpar work on something we enjoy.
True productivity is about doing more of what is in your Desire Zone and less of everything else.
The more you work beyond a fifty-hour threshold, according to this study, the less productive you become. Nevison calls this the Rule of Fifty.2
Sleep Eat Move Connect Play Reflect Unplug
As we’ve said many times, the goal of productivity should be achieving more by doing less. You won’t get there if you can’t get comfortable doing less. Your best actions and best thinking come when you’re well rested and you’ve given yourself the benefit of free time. It inspires creativity and problem-solving like nothing else.
But as high-achievers, our goals always outstrip our budgets.
Seneca, a Roman philosopher who lived around the time of Jesus, wrote about the challenge we all face. “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it,” he responded. “Life is long if you know how to use it.”
Seneca said. “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”9
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work. STEPHEN KING